An Understanding - 2. Moving Right Along

I was in love. No, John and I weren't talking. No, I hadn't made any friends. The love I had for the outdoors disappeared quickly, owing entirely to the constant 95º weather and humidity that made walking a block feel more like swimming. Except swimming in your own sweat really isn't appealing. I read a lot of books and drowned my pre-teen angst in food, weight that I would gain and not lose for another decade.

 

Summer got even more muggy and I started to my new school. I found I shared a class with a boy across the street from me, whose parents were deaf. I learned to sign the alphabet. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.

 

But then I signed up for orchestra. Something about music and I just clicked. I learned to play the flute and promptly fell in love, rising to the top of the chairs and practicing religiously, mostly I'm sure to take my mind off how horrible everything was. The downside to this new fixation was the precipitous drop of grades in every single class not orchestra. This being a well-to-do district, something had to give and I was unceremoniously dropped from learning music and forced into taking remedial math class instead.

 

I was furious. I was right back where I started at the beginning of summer: out of love, fat, hot and miserable. I loathed the remedial math and started picking fights with teachers. My ass landed in detention, which was such a shock to both mom and I she forewent extra punishment. So I decided to keep my anger outside of school, which quickly escalated to throwing pinecones at cars (truly the pinnacle of pre-teen rebellion, let me tell you). Of course my inability to do anything even slightly churlish landed me in the hospital with a broken arm after a direct windshield hit and an angry driver. I am not shitting you when I say that in my panic of trying to get away I ran straight into a mailbox. Broke my goddamn arm right down the middle.

 

We had moved to Atlanta under the pretense of helping my aging grandparents, who turned out to be a sprightly 70 instead of on the edge of inability as we had been told. My only saving grace during that time was not knowing just how badly my extended family disliked us. Apparently having a child out of wedlock was an insult most grievous, and one that that would never, even to this day, be completely forgiven. We were the blackest of sheep to our family, and here we were stuck, having uprooted ourselves out of a willingness to help and to love and to mend damaged bridges.

 

Fifteen months into our -- there really is no other word -- exile, we'd reached a breaking point. We packed up the house, bought a new house on a beautiful half-acre of land in a college town in Alabama and tried not to flip off my uncles as we got the literal fuck out of dodge.

 

I've never cried harder than when we crossed the state line. I was back where I belonged. I was back home.