My Kaleidoscope

There I sat at that same park I had visited so many times, just wondering where all the magic had went. The trees had grown higher just as I had and the flowers from the summers that had passed had wilted from the chill of winter’s wrath.

Sitting alone at the edge of the pale hill, it’s green hairs poking at my in-style jeans, I overlooked the once painted and lined baseball field now filled with traces of weeds from its unkemptness over the years. I leaned back, forcing myself into a memory the made frosty chills run up my spine.

“1…2…3!” we screamed. Nippy wind burned our eyes as Mary and I accelerated down the snow-covered hill in our giant yellow tube. Fear rushed through my veins for only a moment while I grasped the hard handles of the sled through my scratchy gloves that were slightly wet from sly bits of snow sneaking its way in, forcing my hands to share their warmth.

She had been gone for two years since that moment. Mary’s mother and her new boy friend had decided it was time for a change of scenery so they had taken my three best friends away from me. I never knew why they thought of leaving.

“I’m moving,” she whispered just as the transportation for school arrived in front of her cheerful red and white house. The pavement spun from where I stood and my breaths took an uneasy pattern. I couldn’t believe I was really losing her.

It was too far of a bike ride to Mary’s house now and there wasn’t a reason to get up so early on weekends or holidays anymore. I could not use the tire swing to go to different dimensions, not just because the tire swing was taken apart and replaced by a crippled mistake of a play set, but because now imagination wasn’t considered “cool”. I had forced myself to think that I was growing up. And creativity was meant for paper, not for play.

Megan was never around anymore. She went to a private school that no one even knew existed, which left Emma and I alone on the bus. We still had our adventures and weekly bike rides together, but nothing we did could fill the absence of Mary.

During the summer before my first year of middle school, my mother thought it’d be a good idea to throw me into a Summer Arts camp, hosted at the middle school itself, to get me used to the environment beforehand. Too bad for her, the only benefit I got from that was to learn that the art room was on the second floor, and how not to hold an Exacto knife unless you like to bleed.

It was also an attempt to get me to make new friends. I was good at making friends, but nothing long-time or too intimate. I didn’t do that much anymore after Mary had gone. So when new people came around, I’d brush them off and later hide behind Emma, who was now the closest thing I had to a sister.

One day, I remember sitting silently in the art room watching Mrs. Cutillo explain a project vividly and excitedly, as the rest of the class room fiddled their thumbs and flipped pencils in the air.

I heard the loud door slam behind me where I sat on the awkward and unbalanced stool. A small girl almost a foot shorter than me stood in the threshold, her wavy dark hair covering almost a quarter of her arms. Spread across her chest was a mischievous smiling bunny and in her hand was a hard black case that was probably a third of her length.

“Please don’t sit with me, please don’t sit with me,” I prayed hopefully under my breath. I had already been sitting with an annoying girl diagonal from me, and I didn’t want an addition.

Nonetheless, she scuffled over directly to my table and plopped down across from me, staring down at the paint-stained and glossed wood.

Once Mrs. Cutillo was done with her demonstration, the annoying girl, whose name was Alexis, engaged in conversation immediately.

“What’s your name?”

The small one in front of me suddenly looked terrified.

“I’m Alexis.” Her bubbly attitude reflected off of her body like light bouncing off of a broken mirror; painful and a mess to clean up.

“I’m Noelle,” she answered.

“Noelle! Like the song!” Alexis began to sing the old Christmas carol, as I looked over to Noelle, analyzing her response.

“…Yeah,” she laughed nervously. I smiled, immediately realizing she was my kind of person.

After getting to know her during the time we had in art class each day of the blazing summer, we became closer and closer. I had learned that though she was born in New Jersey, she had also lived in Florida and in the country Lebanon, which was where some of her relatives lived. She was a year younger than me, just like Mary, and I could see myself around her for a lifetime. I had found my replacement.

Before the year started, Emma and I were scared out of our minds. We had no idea what middle school was going to be like, because Megan, being a year ahead of us, wasn’t there to tell us.

“Did you get your report card?” Emma’s voice was muffled through the receiver. I sat in front of my brown and black computer desk, with a small envelope placed in front of me.
“Yup!”

“Ready to open it?”

“No.” I was afraid. It had been six years since Emma and I had been in the same class, and I wasn’t ready to go to junior high without her there next to me.

She paused for a moment, then asked again. “How about now?”

“Yeah,” I sighed. I ripped open the receptacle.

I looked at the line up of classes. Squinting my eyes and raising my eyebrows I saw nothing familiar. What was an “A day”? A “trimester”? “an “Amber?”

“I got Sapphire.” Emma’s voice brought my attention back to the phone. “I think that’s my team.”

“Oh,” I responded. “I got Amber.”

“Oh.”

“Darn.”

“Yeah, Darn.”

School was less of a joy and more of a chore by now. It went from being a place for friends to a place for people with high expectations of you. They saw how you acted, what you wore, how you spoke, what you liked to do, and twisted it into something you weren’t. No one was safe anymore, and the people that thought they were happened to be either completely rejected, or perfect in the majority’s eye.

In the morning Emma and I would walk off the bus in front of a large blue and grey jail. Printed on the front in bulky dark blue letters was “SPARTA MIDDLE SCHOOL”.

I’d hop down the stone pathway lined with sheered green trees, dragging Emma along as we’d do every day. We’d walk all the way into the main lobby, past the large doors that closed hard with a slam behind us, locking us in, before we went our separate ways.

I got lost several times and had anxiety attacks filled with heart pounding races down the halls and loss of breath around every corner in almost every 180 seconds I had between lessons. The only thing I didn’t miss from the year before were the lunchroom choir days and reciting of the Gettysburg Address all assigned by our lunchroom advisor in the Mohawk Avenue School. Mr. D was a crazy lunch aid with numerous of pointless ideas to torture us while we stuffed our faces with four piece sandwiches and hid our “have a nice day!” notes from mom.

Hours of the day dragged by slowly, and the most necessary times for anxious waiting were midday and three forty-five sharp. I dragged my feet across the linoleum halls and parked myself outside of Mr. Massardo’s ancient civilizations class. My hate for this lesson time sprouted like an angry weed.

Sitting in my chair, second row nearest to the door, I’d go the period scarcely speaking and watching the kids have fun around me. Though I did enjoy learning in that time, it was hard for me to see the board. A boy that sat diagonal from me with odd red hair and glasses always tended to get in my line of sight. Leaning this way and that, I’d eventually get the notes, though I strangled my pencil in frustration the entire time.

I attempted to make friends, however the class was low on females. The closest girls that surrounded me were Jess and Katie, and they enjoyed keeping to themselves, as far away from me as possible. They’d gossip and laugh all from behind me as I wrote myself notes in the margins of my notebook. Many times I tried to befriend them, but after a while, it became useless and just embarrassing.

Being alone was never easy for me. Although I was used to living by myself without siblings, I always had someone to be with around the neighborhood. This was something I wasn’t used to. Now it seemed like even this nerdy-looking redheaded kid was more popular than me.

Then one day, it happened. Partner projects. Katie had run off with someone else and Jess was all alone. Like a rejected version of superman, I tried swooping in to save the day. She agreed, then I watched her roll her eyes when she looked away.

After that point, we adapted a love/hate relationship of sorts. I had to watch what I’d say around her or else she’d roll her eyes and turn away. And I really didn’t want any more rejection.
The closer we got to the end of the year, the closer Jess and I became. We had gone to a movie or two together, and now I was invited to her birthday party.

We went out on her boat for the holiday in the mucky water of Lake Mohawk. All was well until I accidentally crashed head to head into her while swimming. The eye-roll was back, and I almost felt ashamed.

Summer was coming and that left me with nothing to do. Luckily, I had Emma and Noelle to keep me occupied while Mary was off with new friends in her new town with her new life. By the end of summer I had become better friends with a kid named Spencer who was a boy I mistook for a seventh grader all of my sixth grade year because I had never seen him before. He was Canadian and had recently moved to Sparta just that past year. My relationship with an old friend Mike bloomed again, seeing he was close with Spencer, and Jess had come back into the picture.

As seventh grade started, I managed to gain more friends than I needed to get along, which could only be good news, right?