It was a little awkward at first because we didn’t know her, but when she started telling us about her hospital adventures we were all laughing, and before we knew it, we had been there for almost three hours. She told us about the kid in the room next to her who would get up and pull the fire alarm for absolutely no reason. And sure enough, while we were sitting with her, the fire alarm went off. We all laughed when nobody flinched, and the hospital staff just went about their duties like nothing was wrong. She told us how her mom would sneak in Chinese food for her. And how much she missed her animals: a pony, pigs, a ferret, a mouse, a rat, two hamsters, a cat, nine dogs, two chameleons and a snapping turtle. Later, her mom told me that her favorite thing to do was to go to the Humane Society and adopt the most ugly or abused animal. She always managed to take it home and make it beautiful.
Once she was released, we spent a lot of time together. She came over to my house, and we had many sleepovers. She had lost all her hair during her chemotherapy treatments so she was always wearing a hat of some sort to cover her head. For her first school dance, she bought this yellow hat that had blonde braids hanging down from it. She loved it. At the dance, Katrina danced all night long and never stopped. She was having the time of her life. Suddenly, she took off her yellow hat and started twirling it by the braids and throwing it into the air. I don’t think I ever saw her laugh so hard.
She was hopeful that she would eventually be able to play sports again so she went out and bought some running shoes that were two sizes too big for her. She told me she’d be able to fit into them as soon as she was able to run again. Her optimism was contagious.
Soon we got the news we had all been waiting for: Her cancer was gone. The doctors told her she was in remission. She could live her life once again. She began to gain weight, which looked good on her. She had been so tiny when I first met her. Her legs and wrists had always looked so fragile. Now she was looking stronger by the day. She had always told me she hated being short, but even I was surprised when she came to school in four-inch heels one day. She was so proud of those shoes. She kept walking up to people and saying, “Finally! I’m taller than you!”
One night I came home from school to a message from Katrina on our answering machine. She told me to call her right away when I got home. It sounded like she was crying. I knew there was something seriously wrong because she never cried.
She started crying when she heard my voice. “My cancer is back,” she sobbed. They were the most terrifying four words anyone had ever said to me. I didn’t know what to say. My heart felt like it stopped. She told me that her lymph glands had been getting swollen lately, so her mom took her to the doctor. When they tested her, they found out the cancer was back. We were both crying. She told me I was the first person she called because I was her closest friend. That made me cry even more. She was scared, and she didn’t want to die. She told me how much fun she was having lately. I told her I was there to fight with her. There was no way I was going to let her go.
We visited her as much as we could. We gave her cards and this huge wall print that everybody at our school had signed. Her room looked like a gift shop after a while. She told me the cards and gifts really helped her to stay hopeful.
I heard that her family was having financial problems. I thought of ways that we could help them. Our whole eighth-grade class got together and came up with ideas. Our first fundraiser was a dance. At least half the high school came, and we had a donation jar there that was full by the end of the night. People paid to get in, and we found a DJ who put on the music for free. Katrina came to the dance, and she had a blast. We took the leftover baked goods we were selling there and had a bake sale the next day.
We thought of “Hats On for Katrina Day” because she always wore hats. We had the students and staff at our high school pay to wear a hat all day during school. We raised a lot of money because hats are not allowed at our school, and everybody likes to wear them. It was a huge success. We also had a whopper feed, a raffle and a basketball game between the seniors at our school and the staff. We ended up raising over $4,500 for Katrina and her family. When they found out, they were thrilled. It felt good to be able to help them.
Soon enough, Katrina was released from the hospital to her home. She was being cared for under hospice, which meant that a nurse would come out to the house to care for her because there was nothing more the hospital could do. When I heard this, I was really sad and scared. Her parents told us she had anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to live. I was in shock.
On April 5, Katrina woke up and told her mom that it was time for her to go to heaven. It was time for her suffering to finally end. She started coughing and couldn’t breathe very well so her mom took her to the hospital right away. Katrina died at ten-thirty that night. Katrina had told her mom that if she didn’t make it she wanted to be cremated. Her mom had asked her why, and she had said, “Because you move around a lot, and I want to go with you wherever you go.”
The next day at school, my friends and I were talking about Katrina and the good times we had with her. All of a sudden everybody got really quiet. People always say that whenever that happens it means an angel is flying over. I hope it was Katrina. And if it was, she’s going to be real busy. We move around a lot, too.
Kari Fiegen
11
GROWING
UP
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
Deepak Chopra
Somewhere in the Middle
A journey lies ahead
for all teenagers today.
A journey to adulthood,
our youth to kiss away.
But as we go we find ourselves
at a truly awkward stage.
We’re partial, unripe, sketchy and crude
at this tender age.
We’re old enough to make a choice
yet still young in many ways.
Too young to pack our bags and go,
too old to want to stay.
Young enough for fun and games,
too old for carefree lives.
Young enough for hopes and dreams,
yet for reality we strive.
Old enough for heartfelt pain,
too young to find the cure.
Too old for childish ways of past,
too young to be mature.
Old enough to fall in love
and give our hearts away.
But, still too young to understand
just why we feel this way.
We’re trusted, loyal, proud and true
yet scolded, sneered and scorned.
Between the role of adult and child,
we are somewhere torn.
Like an uncompleted work of art,
we’re awkward, unsure, half-baked.
But be patient please
for we’re on our way
to becoming something great.
Liza Ortego
Losing Becky
I didn’t see it coming, the day I lost my best friend. Becky and I were eating our bag lunches at some benches out by the school tennis courts. We were alone; our other friends weren’t with us, which was unusual in those days—we almost always ate lunches in a group, the eight of us—so this should’ve tipped me off. It’s true that Becky had been acting strangely for the past few weeks, alternately ignoring me and snapping at me. When I’d asked her what was wrong, she’d said, “Nothing!”
“Then why are you acting so weird?”
“If I’m so weird, maybe you shouldn’t hang around with me.”
So I was glad today to be hanging out with her, just the two of us, like old times. We’d been best friends for almost two years. We’d met soon after we started the seventh grade and quickly fell into being best friends in that mysterious way friends sometimes do. We’d shared countless phone calls and school lunches and sleepovers. We’d spent many weekends together, laughing gut-strengthening laughs,
playing records and the radio; I played piano while Becky sang in her light, high voice. We shared lots of inside jokes and goofiness, like our hilarious games at the tennis courts. Neither of us were any good at tennis, so as we hit the ball wildly off the mark, we’d yell to each other, “It’s still going!” laughing helplessly and scrambling to retrieve the ball, no matter how many times it had bounced.
But today at the tennis courts, neither of us was laughing or even smiling. And suddenly, I realized that this lunch alone together had been planned. Becky wanted to talk to me.
“You wanted to know what was wrong,” Becky said. Her tone was overly kind and condescending. “For awhile now, we’ve felt you haven’t been having a good time with us.” Why was she saying “we”? I had a sinking feeling. She was right about my not having a good time lately hanging out with our friends. Really, they were Becky’s friends, and I hung around with them for her sake. They were nice enough girls, but I didn’t have much in common with them. They liked Top-40 music, which increasingly bored me. They thought the music I liked was too weird. During lunch, they’d chat on and on about thirteen-year-old boys, gymnastics, TV shows and how stupid the popular girls were. More and more, I’d tune out their chatter, daydreaming about the bands I liked, feeling profoundly bored by Becky’s friends—but not by Becky. I endured my boredom because of her. Besides, there was a certain security in having these girls to sit with at lunch, having them if you wanted them.
Becky went on with her speech: “I want to be . . . popular.” Her voice was quavering and ruthless. “You don’t seem to want to, but we feel it’s important.” I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. They’d gone on and on about what lame idiots the popular girls were. But what Becky had to say next sent my world spinning. “We think maybe you ought to have lunch with some other girls from now on.”
“But who?” I asked, panicking. I couldn’t think of a single person. It suddenly sank in that I no longer had a best friend.
“What about those older girls? You seem to get along with them,” she suggested with a trace of what sounded like jealousy. It was true that I did get along with some of the older girls—like Lisa, who we’d met in an after-school creative-writing workshop, who wrote strange, impassioned poems, and who’d loaned me a tape with some equally strange, impassioned songs on it, songs I listened to over and over again. The older girls were more interesting than Becky’s friends. But at that moment, all I wanted was for Becky to say we were still best friends. I felt like no one could possibly want me around.
The next day at noon, I put my books in my locker, grabbed my lunch, slammed the locker shut, then headed automatically for Becky’s locker as I had every day for what seemed like forever. Just as I saw her—small, thin girl with shoulder-length black hair—I remembered. She saw me, and we both stood frozen for a moment. Then I made myself turn and walk in the opposite direction. It was like a divorce.
At first, I wandered around school close to tears all the time—in class, in PE, everywhere. But I did start getting to know some of the older girls better. I began to eat lunch with them, to sit with them during free period. We talked about the music and the movies we liked, and I found myself having fun. No longer did I have to tune out—I wasn’t bored anymore. I still missed having a best friend. But by the time I got to the ninth grade, I had many friends and several close ones—and a number of them had also been dropped by their previous cliques for being “too weird.” They liked the same music I did, and some of them even went to see live bands. Soon I was going out, too, and my whole world seemed to open up.
Becky and I were never friends again, although I still talked to her from time to time at school. Sometimes I tried to tell her about the fun I was having, but she didn’t seem to understand. She and her friends hadn’t become any more popular than when I was part of their crowd. I didn’t know whether that continued to matter to her.
She apologized to me one day in the school lunchroom for the way she had treated me. “I can’t believe I did that to you!” she said. But I told her I had long since realized that she had done me a favor. I had found my true friends, friends who could really understand me, friends I could be completely myself with, while the pain of Becky’s rejection has become a distant memory.
Gwynne Garfinkle
Something I Couldn’t See
I used to joke that the first person I ever met, after my parents, was Ellie Oswald. Ellie was the daughter of our next-door neighbors, and our mothers introduced us before we were a month old; for most of my life, I couldn’t remember a time when Ellie and I hadn’t been friends.
We went to the same school, and we spent nearly all our free time with each other. We put together jigsaw puzzles, dressed up, played house (one of the reasons I liked Ellie was that she would always agree to be the man), and ran around the golf course that our street dead-ended onto.
We told each other everything, and we knew each other so well that we could communicate without speaking. In fifth grade, her seat was two rows ahead of mine, and sometimes when Mrs. O’Hara wasn’t looking, Ellie would glance back and ask questions or tell me things with her eyes: Doesn’t Brad Bentley look cute today? Why is social studies so boring? Do you want to play four-square at recess? So certain and familiar was my friendship with Ellie that, in an odd way, I never thought of it; it was just my life.
It was around fifth grade that Ellie and I went from being girls who had existed on the periphery of our elementary school’s social scene to being the ones everybody wanted to be friends with. I still can’t entirely account for this. One day, we were just hanging around with each other, watching TV and drinking root beer in her parents’ room; the next day, we were being flooded with invitations to birthday parties and were the ones other girls wanted to be partners with in gym or sit next to on the bus. Our classmates asked about our opinions, laughed at our jokes and confided their problems in us.
But being popular wasn’t easy—honestly. At lunch, girls would cram around the table where we’d chosen to sit, and when we finished our lunch and stood, they’d all stand, too. If two girls got in a fight at a slumber party, I’d be called on to settle the dispute. And I always felt the press of my classmates’ wishes for attention from me. I wanted to be nice to everyone, but sometimes it felt exhausting.
It was around eighth grade that my classmates began rebelling—girls and boys fooling around with each other, shoplifting, smoking cigarettes. Such activity made me distinctly uncomfortable. Ellie and I had both always done well in school, and I valued my teachers’ approval. And I definitely didn’t want to get into trouble with my parents. Plus, it all just seemed unnecessary. Cigarettes smelled bad and made you cough, and why would I hide somewhere, covertly puffing away, when there were so many other things I was interested in?
But I could feel how my lack of interest in misbehaving began to separate me from my friends—including Ellie. If a bunch of us were spending the night at Gina’s house and some boys were going to sneak in after Gina’s parents went to bed, I’d purposely go to sleep early. Then, the next morning, the other girls would have a new, shared point of reference that I was outside of. I couldn’t understand my classmates’ rush to act older; we had the rest of our lives to be old, but so little time left to be young. When I tried to talk about this with Ellie, she would simply say, “Things are changing, Caroline.” I wanted to say that they didn’t have to change—that we didn’t need to be at the center of things, that it would be okay if it was just us again—but I could never force the words out.
One Saturday in October, I was at the grocery store with my mother when I ran into a classmate named Melissa. She pulled me aside and whispered, “Is Ellie okay?”
“What?” I said.
“From last night.”
I swallowed. My heart was pounding. “What happened last night?”
“You don’t know?”
Melissa wasn’t someone I particularly liked, and it embarrassed me to have to ask her for inform
ation about my own best friend. “No,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I guess Gina’s parents are out of town, and she had a party and everyone was drinking, and Ellie fell down the steps and cut her forehead. I heard she had to get stitches.” Melissa squinted at me. “I can’t believe you don’t know this.”
It was difficult to absorb all the information at once—a party? Ellie falling? Stitches? How had I not known about this? Had I not been invited to other parties? Since when had Ellie been a drinker?
When I called Ellie, she sounded subdued and defensive. “It wasn’t a party,” she said. “It was just a few people. And I didn’t have to get stitches. I didn’t even go to the hospital.”
“Do your parents know?”
“No, and don’t tell your mom or she’ll tell mine.”
“But something really bad could have happened,” I said.
“But it didn’t,” she replied. “So chill out.”
That was the moment, those were the words—so chill out—that made me know for certain that things between us had changed dramatically and permanently. And sure enough, Ellie soon made some excuse to get off the phone. I had lost her.
As popularity had once suddenly been bestowed upon me for no apparent reason, it was just as suddenly snatched away. Girls who had hung on my every word barely acknowledged me in the halls; several times, when I passed by a cluster of them, conversation would stop. The truth was, I might even have been relieved by this shift except for the fact that this time I didn’t have Ellie to keep me company. For most of ninth grade, I was alone. I still saw Ellie in class, but whenever the teacher or another student said something that reminded me of her and I glanced over, her gaze was averted, her eyes somehow deadened. I heard that she started smoking pot. She also stopped making honor roll and began going out with an older guy named Dave who’d been kicked out of our school.