A Girl's Life Online Read Free Page A

getting. Who had private lessons? Who had a fitness coach?
    I always felt like my self-worth was determined by how well I placed. And I think the parents felt the same way—their status among the team parents depended on how well their child placed.
    As I improved, I became one of the swimmers that the coaches depended on for winning times. Where once it was enough to be in the top ten, gradually I was pressured to be in the top five, four, three. All the emphasis on winning made swimming less and less enjoyable. During those moments when I had doubts about staying with the team, all the work put into swimming convinced me to continue. I shoved my doubts away and thought, If I don’t swim, what will I do? I’ll have no life.

    When you consider the demands of swimming, choir, and school, it’s obvious I didn’t have a whole lot of time for friends. In fact, I had just one close friend, a girl named Karen. As far as I could tell, Karen had a perfect life. She was tall and thin. She had dirty blonde hair and blue eyes. She was a soccer player, and her team had won a regional championship. She was also very intelligent.
    Karen lived in a two-million-dollar house. It wasn’t as gorgeous as the house next to it, which was on the front of Unique Homes , but I would have traded it for our house in a second. It had so many bedrooms that her older sister was allowed to have two. The whole place was decorated like a shrine to a happy family. The walls were covered with pictures of vacations, soccer games, and holidays. I always wanted my mom to put up pictures of our family, but she said she didn’t have time.
    Karen’s family was sort of like the Kennedys, without the politics. They were all smart, all excellent athletes. Her brother Rob attended Williams College. Her father was in the real estate development field, and her mother was a full-time homemaker. Every time I went to Karen’s house, her mother was cooking something like chicken or pasta. And she would do anything for us, even run out and get a last-minute video. And I will never forget the hot fudge she made for special occasions like Karen’s birthday.
    It’s funny; I didn’t like Karen in elementary school. She was a tomboy back then. She even admitted to me that she wore boxers in fifth grade. But by middle school she was in most of my classes and it didn’t take long for me to see that she was no longer a tomboy. In fact, Karen had a way with guys, and all I could think was that she had somehow learned it during her tomboy phase.

    I couldn’t approach guys the way Karen did. I didn’t have her confidence. I knew I was not beautiful the way she was, but I also couldn’t see what she saw in guys our age. The cliché about girls being more mature than boys is true. Just listen to boys talk. It’s always about skateboarding or something they saw on TV. Girls talk about relationships and the future. Serious things.
    I also didn’t understand the idea of dating at our age. I mean, I thought a date was where a guy picks a girl up at her house and takes her out. How can that happen in middle school? No one has a driver’s license or the money for going out to eat or to a movie.
    Nevertheless, girls my age put a great deal of effort into somehow connecting with boys in a romantic and sexual way. I almost fell out of my chair in social studies class one day when I heard that a girl named Jenny had given a blow job to a boy named Adam at a local park. At first I refused to believe it. But I heard it from a reliable source, and Jenny was one of the short-skirt girls in our class. A month later she was reportedly actually having sex with another boy. I heard her talking about how she had used an orange-colored condom and how it felt to lose her virginity. I was so grossed out.
    It wasn’t just Jenny who was running the bases sexually. Rumors flew around school about who fingered who, and what guy