Not All Butterflies and Flowers

To say sixth grade was not a good year would be the understatement of the decade. When I found out that pilot season - when all the auditions for TV shows happen in Los Angeles - overlapped with the beginning of school that September, I spent a good hour on the floor of my room bawling. That meant I'd have to start school in Nashville a couple of weeks late. At the time, the idea of missing any school seemed awful.
We'd just come back from a year in Canada, near Toronto, where my dad was starring in the TV series Doc. He and my mum has been commuting back and forth for a few years, but the summer before I went into fifth grade we all missed him so much that my mum moved us up there.
She homeschooled me that year, so now I was coming back to my old school after a year's absence. Not only that, I knew perfectly well that the first few weeks of school are when everything gets sorted out - you meet your teachers, you find your friends, you figure out if the new school clothes you bought are acceptable - or completely unacceptable. The cool people find each other. The smart people find each other. Me and all the other in-between artsy people realize we'd better join forces and make the best of it. If you miss all that fun, you risk being an outcast. A loser. If you've been through middle school, then you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't yet, well then...hang in there. It gets better, I promise. Either way, you can imagine, missing school was from from ideal. But if I wanted to be a performer - and I did - then there really wasn't a choice.
I wasn't exactly expecting to just show up back at school and be one of the cool girls. The farm in Tennessee where we lives when we weren't in Toronto was kind of isolated, so there weren't any neighbourhood kids for me to practise being friends with. I grew up playing with my brothers and sisters, but I was just as comfortable hanging out with my parents and their friends.
It didn't help that I always had too much energy. There was no way I could sit still and focus for hours on end. People didn't exactly know how to handle me. It's not that I was trying to be direspectful, but I. Could. Not. Be quiet. On my first day of school one year, my teacher told me I'd get detention if I said one more word. I turned to my friend and whispered, "One more word." Boom! Detention. For whispering. On the first day at school. I'm lucky the teacher didn't hear exactly what I said, or who knows what would have happened to me.
At school I always wanted to be my own person and wasn't shy about it. I had a lot to say. I stood out in drama and music. I made good grades. I had huge dreams. Not exactly the formula for 'cool.' Most kids worry about not fitting in; I worried about not standing out. I wanted to feel unique, quirky, different. But standing out by missing the crucial beginning of school wasn't exactly what I had in mind.Anyway, when I got back to Nashville for sixth grade - two weeks after school had started - my old friends seemed happy to see me and life felt back to normal. I started to think I'd dodged a bullet and that I had worried for nothing. But slowly realized that wasn't the case. One of my closer friends, let's call her Rachel, and I started drifting toward a group of girls in our class. They weren't the 'cool' girls or the 'mean' girls. I didn't really know what their deal was then and I can't stereotype them now. But for some reason, they were the group I wanted to fit in with.
The first sign of trouble was the teeniest, tiniest thing you could possibly imagine. We were standing near our lockers after math. I made a joke and the leader - she'll be MG, for Mean Girl - rolled her eyes. That was it: a tiny gesture - it went by in a second. But this was sixth grade. Everything means something in sixth grade. What did I do in response? Nothing of course. I mean, if you've been through sixth grade, you know how it goes. If I had said something straightforward like "What's up with the nasty eye-roll?" MG would have just said something patronizing like "I have no idea what you're talking about," and I'd be humiliated. A feeling I loathe more than anything. So I acted like I hadn't seen it. I put it out of my head.But the signs kept coming. A few days later, I put my tray down at lunch and thought I heard a snarl. A snarl? The next week, I came in wearing a new jean jacket. I said, "I love my outfit today." One of them sneered, "You do?" and gave me a look that shriveled me up into a puny dried pea on the floor. From yesterday's dinner.
Now I knew I wasn't just being paranoid. I was an outcast. Why were my 'friends' turning on me? I had no idea. But there you have it. Welcome to sixth-grade social hell.