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  Before we moved, Dad took a trip to Washington to pick out our house in Onalaska. Mom decided to settle there so we could be close to Shari and Lori. All that summer, I lay out in the sun to get as tan as I could. By the time we were finally ready to move, I was as brown as I had ever been.

  Mom and Dad drove to Washington in a U-Haul truck and Brian and I followed them in his van. The van had seats in the front and shag carpet in the back. I spent the trip either sleeping or annoying Brian, asking him a thousand questions. Brian influenced the way I thought about almost everything, but especially music. Whatever albums I had as a young girl—The Beatles, The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Rascals—came as gifts from Brian.

  I also liked to talk to him about his girlfriends. He was good-looking and a surfer, so he never had a hard time finding dates. I got attached to some of them, especially one girl named Meg. She was the perfect California girl—freckled, tan, and blonde. I felt like she was my sister. When things ended between Meg and Brian, I was much more heartbroken than he was. I spent much of the trip harassing him about why he broke up with her. I’m sure he appreciated advice on his love life from his baby sister.

  Brian and I were always close, and I thought we always would be. Instead, that trip was one of the last times I ever spent much time with him, and that left a hole in my life.

  Even though we had planned to move to Onalaska, Dad hadn’t been able to find anything he liked there in our price range. So instead of moving there, where I had already made friends at Lori’s school, we were moving to another tiny town a few miles away called Mossyrock. Onalaska, Mossyrock…were there any towns with normal names in Washington?

  When Brian and I turned off Highway 12 onto Damron Road, the first thing I noticed was how different it felt from home. The houses were a lot more spread out, with big gardens in most of the yards. A lot of the houses weren’t houses at all, but single- and double-wide trailers. When we pulled into the driveway of a dilapidated red house with overgrown grass and a garage that looked like it would fall over in the next windstorm, Mom was standing in the front yard with her arms folded. She did not look happy. “This is the last time I ever send you ahead to pick out our house,” she said to Dad. It was too late to do anything about it though. The papers had been signed and it was all ours, such as it was.

  The house had three bedrooms and one bathroom. It was kind of rundown, but it sat on a big lot. That meant there would be lots of room for my two Dobermans, Peter and Chastity. Mom also promised me that we would have rabbits, and there might be room for a horse. I thought that was only fair. I figured that if I was going to live in the middle of nowhere, I should at least have a horse.

  While I was exploring the house, Mom and Dad went outside to stand in the front yard. I had no idea what they were doing, but they had only been out there for a minute when I heard them talking to someone. I went out the front door and saw that Mom and Dad were talking to a stranger. He was old, or at least he looked old to my eleven-year-old eyes. He had dark hair, but there was a white streak in the middle, giving his hair the look of a skunk. He was smiling and friendly, listening to my mom. Behind him, a few feet away, I saw a tall, skinny teenager with a wrench working on a ten-speed bike. He had curly brown hair and black glasses. He seemed to be going out of his way to ignore everyone.

  I had missed the beginning of what Mom was saying, but I saw her waving up at the sky, telling a story with broad gestures. This was so embarrassing I thought I might die, so I went back in the house without bothering to find out anything else about our new neighbors.

  Moving from Carson, California to Mossyrock, Washington was a huge adjustment. In California, there were hundreds of kids in my sixth-grade class. Starting seventh grade in Mossyrock, there were twenty-eight kids in my class. Twenty-eight! School had already started by the time we moved, so in addition to being the new girl, I got to be the new girl who arrived after everyone else had formed their groups.

  Brian took me to school and helped me get registered that first day. I thought it would be a lot cooler if my surfer-dude brother took me to school instead of my Mom, who could usually be counted on to do something embarrassing. After we got all the paperwork filled out, Brian left and Mr. Alban, the principal, escorted me to meet the rest of my class.

  The girls were in the high school gym doing P.E. because the boys were using the junior high gym. When we walked in, everyone stopped doing calisthenics and started playing ‘check out the new girl.’ They started talking, and one of them even pointed at me and laughed. I wished I was anywhere else but there. I regretted spending so much time working on my tan, because now I knew it just made me stand out that much more.

  By the time I got there, P.E. was almost over, so I didn’t have to dress down. Instead, I sat in the bleachers and tried to make myself small. When the bell rang, everyone changed back into their street clothes and walked in a group back to the junior high. I followed a few feet behind. One girl separated from the rest and started walking beside me.

  “Hi. I’m Sheri. Where are you from?”

  I guessed that she must be the leader of the pack. She was a cute girl with shortish blonde hair. She was dressed nice and looked friendly.

  “Carson, California.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Southern California, kind of by Los Angeles.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dawn.”

  She nodded. None of the rest of the girls were obvious about looking at me, but I still felt like a bug under a microscope.

  “Really, there’s just one thing you need to know. We don’t like girls that steal our boyfriends.”

  I’d never had a boyfriend. I was so innocent I didn’t really know what a boyfriend was.

  I shrugged, nodded and mumbled something. I hadn’t even met any of the boys in the junior high yet, and I sure didn’t have any plans for a boyfriend.

  “OK,” Sheri said. “See ya ‘round!”

  I rode the #9 bus home that day, pretty happy with myself. I had met the popular girls and survived the experience. Most days when I got off the bus, my only chore was to do the dishes after dinner. So I watched whatever came on TV—The Carol Burnett Show, Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch—until Dad got home and switched over to watch the news. Then I would go in my room and watch my own little black and white TV, or listen to records and read my Archie comics. I always pulled for Betty to win Archie’s heart, but he always seemed to go back to Veronica.

  I fit in pretty well at my new school for the first week or so. One day, Mrs. Rhodes asked me to take a message over to the high school office. As soon as I walked through the double doors of the high school, I saw a group of high school boys gathered around their lockers. They were only freshmen, but I was a seventh-grader and they looked pretty old to me. I kept my head down and tried to walk by them, but a boy named Beau Pries stepped in front of me.

  “Hey. You want to go to the Homecoming Dance with me?”

  I froze a little inside, but managed to get out “Yeah, sure.” The whole conversation lasted five seconds, but it seemed like I had a date to Homecoming.

  I guess it’s normal for older boys to always ask younger girls for dates, but in Mossyrock it was like the local pastime. I think the upperclassmen had asked out all the eligible freshmen girls, so the freshmen boys were reduced to looking for girls in the junior high. I was a little embarrassed, but also kind of excited. Beau was cute and popular, and a lot of the other girls liked him.

  I dropped off the note at the office and hurried back to the junior high. I felt a little more excited with every step I took. I didn’t think about needing a dress, or anything other than the fact that I was going to get to go to a high school dance.

  When I got back to the junior high, it was between classes. I saw Sheri standing with a group of the other girls I had become friends with. I couldn’t wait to tell her my news. “Guess what? Beau Pries asked me to Homecoming!”

  I thought she’d be ha
ppy for me. Instead, her face clouded over and she burst into tears. She covered her mouth and ran down the hall away from me.

  Uh-oh.

  Brenda Whatley, who was also friends with Sheri, said, “Way to go. Beau and Sheri just broke up last week. She’s been hoping they will get back together and go to Homecoming.”

  My brief time of peer acceptance in the halls of Mossyrock Junior High had just come to an end. I had broken the only rule I had been given: Don’t steal our boyfriends.

  Wouldn’t It Be Nice

  I felt like I’d been run over by a bus filled with crying teenage girls. One moment I was fitting in, making new friends, and loving my new school. The next, I had a date for Homecoming, but I was a social outcast. For the next week, I moved through school like I was invisible. My old friends disappeared, but no one new popped up to take their place. I knew we were in Washington to stay but I really missed California.

  One day at lunch, another freshman boy, Chip Lutz, came down to the junior high and found me just as I stepped outside. Chip was tall, with dark hair and a great smile. Every time I saw him it seemed like he was joking around. Not today, though. Today he looked serious.

  “Hey,” Chip said.

  “Hey.”

  “Listen. Things got kind of messed up with Beau asking you to Homecoming. He asked you out because he thought you were really cute and nice, but now he’s getting crap from everyone.”

  “Is he? Gosh, I feel really terrible for him. That must be awful.” Chip probably didn’t get my sarcasm, but I had a hard time feeling sorry for Beau. He hadn’t spoken a word to me since he asked me out, and now he was sending his friend to talk to me instead of having the guts to come himself.

  “Yeah, well…” Chip seemed a little unsure how to continue. “Anyway, he thinks it would probably be better if you guys didn’t go to Homecoming together.”

  “You know what? That works for me too. I think he’s right.”

  I turned and walked to the multi-purpose room for lunch. I was surprised that I didn’t feel that bad. I had been looking forward to the dance, but that was before I knew I had agreed to go with the wrong boy. It would have been so much easier if all the boys that were off-limits had to wear a sign around their neck. Then I would have known.

  That afternoon when I got home from school, I was laying in my room listening to music when I heard a strange sound coming from outside. It sounded like a whoosh and a small explosion. When I pulled my curtains back a little bit, I saw the older boy from next door out in his yard. He was swinging a long bullwhip around his head again and again, cracking it very loudly. I thought about it for a minute, but I couldn’t come up with any reason why he would do that. He was so tall and thin that he looked a little bit like a whip himself, so he looked kind of funny.

  I slipped out our back door and wandered around outside where I knew he could see me. I thought he might be embarrassed, and might even stop cracking that silly whip. We both lived on half-acre lots, so he didn’t have any cattle to herd or anything. He didn’t seem embarrassed though. In fact, he ignored me completely, as older kids usually did with younger kids.

  After about ten minutes of me trying to look like I was doing something, he spoke without looking at me.

  “I can show you how to do this, you know.”

  “Not real sure I want to know how to do that, you know.”

  He shrugged, turned his back to me, and kept whirling the whip around his head, occasionally bringing it down to whip the head off a dandelion or weed poking through the ground. I was starting to think that was the end of our conversation and getting ready to go back inside, when he curled the whip up into small loops and sat down cross-legged on the grass. Now, he was looking at me.

  “I’m Shawn.”

  “I know. I’m Dawn.”

  “Yeah, I know. So, we rhyme. Glad to get that out of the way. What do you like to do?”

  “Nothin’. I mean, I don’t know. Why? What do you like to do?”

  He shrugged again. “I like to do lots of stuff. I like to read. Science fiction, mostly, and comic books. I like music. I like The Carpenters. I just got their album. Do you like them?”

  “Um, no. I definitely do not like The Carpenters. They sound like the kind of music my parents listen to.” I didn’t tell him that I had kind of liked them when they were on The Muppet Show, because I thought that would be too uncool.

  He nodded. He had this crazy, curly hair that went everywhere and seemed to live a life of its own. When he nodded, it bounced all over the place. We were sitting pretty close and I could see he had nice blue eyes, but they were kind of hidden behind his thick glasses.

  “That’s probably why. Because you’re a kid. Maybe when you’re a little older you’ll like them.”

  I hated it when anyone talked down to me. “Nope. Don’t think so. Crappy music is crappy music, no matter how old I am.” I stood up, brushed the grass off my jeans and walked away. By the time I got to the front door, I could hear the whip cracking again.

  I saw Shawn doing the strangest things out in the yard over the next few weeks. Sometimes he would be doing relatively normal things, like throwing a baseball or a football up in the air and catching it, but he also spent time using a badminton racquet to chase invisible things around the yard. Other times, he would stand in his driveway with a tiny little baseball bat and hit little rocks into the empty field across the street. Of all the boys in Mossyrock, I wondered why I got dropped down next to him.

  In time, we started drifting together in the middle of the yard more and more often. Our conversations often started with him insulting me because I wasn’t very tall, or because I was still young enough to go to the junior high. It wasn’t unusual for them to end with him insulting me again, and me hitting him in the arm as hard as I could before I stormed away.

  In between the insults and the fact that he couldn’t ever seem to keep an opinion to himself, we became friends. Even though he was a teenage boy, he was kind and gentle. More importantly, he never seemed to judge me about anything, even though he teased me without mercy. I don’t suppose that being kind and non-judgmental made a guy popular boyfriend bait in high school, but it made him perfectly qualified to be my friend. Ever since we had moved away from my brother Brian, I felt like something was missing in my life. Shawn stepped into that role naturally.

  Eventually, the weather got colder and neither of us spent much time outside. That meant that we hung out a lot less, but he still came over to my house fairly often. He, Mom and I would sit around our living room and talk. Mostly, he and Mom would talk, and I would watch TV. When it was just Shawn and me hanging out, we talked about other kids and music and what shows were on that night. When Mom got added to the mix, they talked about his schoolwork or the presidential election, or other topics I never absorbed because I quit listening.

  Shawn and Mom got to be friends too. I think she liked him because he was smart, but sometimes she didn’t like him because he was a little too smart-alecky. One day in January, he dropped by the house and said he had something to ask us.

  “So, I’m turning sixteen in a few weeks and my parents are throwing me a birthday party in town. I was wondering if you guys would like to come.”

  “Is this a teenager birthday party, or will there be adults there too,” Mom asked.

  “Mostly teenagers,” Shawn said, “but my mom will be there too.”

  Shawn’s mom being there was probably not a big selling point to my mom. She liked Shawn’s dad, Robert, but she thought his mom, Ruth, was judgmental about everything and everyone. Once, Ruth sent Shawn over to borrow a can opener and Mom told him that I would run it over to her in a few minutes. She spent half an hour in the kitchen scrubbing that can opener so that it shined, because she didn’t want his mom to think our house was dirty.

  Still, she looked at me. I was silently pleading to go.

  “OK, we’ll be there, then.”

  When the day of the party arrived, I put
on my best black slacks, white top and black jacket. It was as close to formal as it got in my closet. Right on time, Mom and Dad and I piled into the van and drove into town. The party was held in what passed for a community hall in Mossyrock. It wasn’t fancy. In fact, it was just one big room with grey concrete floors and painted cinderblock walls.

  I immediately regretted that we had gotten there on time, because hardly anyone else did. Mom and Dad sat down at a round table in the corner. It was just a little folding table, but Shawn’s mom had covered it with a paper tablecloth and it looked nice. I went and got them some punch, then sat there nervously, waiting to see if anyone else I knew was going to show up.

  Lots of kids soon started showing up, but they were all Shawn’s age or a bit younger. I hardly knew anybody else there.

  Shawn’s mom made a show of unboxing the cake. The local cake lady had made it look just like the album cover for the new Wild Cherry album, the one with the lips and the cherry.

  Once the music started, people started to dance. I sat at the table with Mom and Dad. It was pretty easy to notice that no one else had brought their parents to the party. I felt like I was five years old and too young to be allowed to cross the street on my own.

  Soon, Shawn came over and asked me to dance. It was a fast song and as soon as the song faded out, I hurried and sat back down at the table again with Mom and Dad again. The idea of the party was kind of fun, but actually being there and not knowing anyone made me feel like I was what I’d been ever since I moved to Mossyrock—the new kid who doesn’t know how to fit in.

  The next few hours passed mercifully quickly. Shawn asked me to dance a few more times, but I knew why. He felt sorry for me because no one else was dancing with me. He was just being nice to the kid next door. Mom and Dad had been great to bring me to the party, and through the whole thing they sat there and watched without saying a word. I saw that they were fidgeting around a little bit, though, and I knew the party was almost over for me.