Growing Up As A Girl Child In America 2

I was forbidden from playing with my best friend - she ran away at age 14 and never came back

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Girl with skates by Yakobchuk Olena, licensed from Adobe Stock

Between third grade and seventh grade, my best friend was a slim, super-smart blonde girl named Cheryl. 

Cheryl was always more “grown up” than me. 

But we did kid things together. We played with Barbies. We rode our bikes up and down the dirt road behind my house. 

Cheryl lived about five miles from me, much closer to the mountains. There were maybe 20 kids in our age group who rode the school bus together. We lived in rural houses stretched out for about ten miles along Highway 38. This road was the “back way” to the San Bernardino mountains in Southern California.

Some kids had horses. Others had dads who worked on cars. Cheryl’s dad owned a garage. Her mom worked as a playground supervisor at our school. Her mom was pretty strict. 

I don’t think she was on duty the day I was swinging upside-down using my legs on the monkey bars, showing off.

Screen shot from FiveThirtyEight article about playground concussions on the rise

I made it across three swinging hoops and slipped on the fourth. 

I fell directly on the top of my head and bit through my lower lip. In a lifetime of dental care, only one dentist or hygienist has commented on my facial scar.

They took a crying, bloody-faced me to the school office and Bampy picked me up and took me to the doctor. I had some stitches. A year later I was whittling with Bampy’s pen knife and cut through my right pinky at the first joint. It was hanging by a strip of skin.

Fortunately, the same doctor was able to reattach my finger. It’s just smaller, weirder, and stiffer than the other one.

Cheryl wasn’t around for either of these incidents.

In all the time I was best friends with her, I never once played at her house even though I saw her mom at school almost every day.

I didn’t understand why we never played at her house for a long time.

Even though Cheryl didn’t like to climb trees (like me) and didn’t have a big dog to take out on long hikes by the Santa Ana River (like me) and didn’t have a Bampy to take her hunting or fishing (like me), we were still best friends.

We were in the same class at school. One day a week, we also rode the big bus to the special gifted program at another school. Cheryl, me, and Rhoda Floy.

Rhoda Floy’s dad was totally deaf and an engineer. Her mom was a housewife and a volunteer at the library who was super smart, but who also smelled pretty bad. Rhoda Floy did not know how to play with other kids, but she was considered to be gifted. Today, we would know that she was far along the autism spectrum.

My grandmother Nana and my teachers at school as well as my Principal Mr. Nease told me I needed to be nice to Rhoda Floy and play with her. I did, even though it was almost impossible.

Cheryl got that same message too, but she declined. To our credit, I don’t remember either she or I teasing Rhoda Floy as much as other kids did. I remember standing up for this silent, almost hostile-seeming kid who, like her mom, sometimes smelled bad.

And I remember standing up for my friend Cheryl. Cheryl got teased because she grew up too fast. She started bleaching her long hair blonde at a very young age. She wore bright nail polish whereas I could barely keep my nails clean. She wore lipgloss and even lipstick when I was forbidden even clear lipgloss.

She wore mascara and bright blue eyeshadow.

I remember putting red powdered Jell-O on to simulate some form of lip color.

Cheryl could shave her legs at age 10.

I remember hiding my hairy legs in shame and discomfort.

Cheryl got teased because her father and mother were Atheists and had told her to leave the class in the morning when we all stood and said the Pledge of Allegiance.

Cheryl and I rollerskated together. I often misspelled her name as Cherly, including when I made a woodburned block for her. I also later woodburned a block for my friend-boyfriend: I love you B-R-A-I-N.

Charles was the boy we both liked and I think Charles might have liked me a bit better, but there’s no way to know for sure since I was in 5th and 6th grade and “liking” on my part consisted of not letting him pull my hair and running away a little slower than the others when we played dodge ball.

Cheryl and I spent hours on the phone together. Doing what? 

Talking girl talk, and reading the Little House on the Prairie books to each other.

Cheryl’s mom made her lunches out of every conceivable junk food and sandwiches made with bologna and mayo on squishy white bread. She always had a package of those bright orange “cheeze” crackers or sandwich cookies, Hawaiian Punch for a drink and the squishy white bread sandwich.

Every once in a while she’d let me trade my hearty whole wheat peanut butter sandwich for half of her squishy Wonder Bread delight.

Few to no kids, Cheryl included, would ever trade any of their junk food for my celery and carrot sticks, apple or orange, and 2% milk.

My grandmother Nana was far ahead of her time in terms of nutrition. I knew who Dick Gregory was, not because of his career as one of the pioneering Black comedians, but because of his guidance on nutrition.

On or about the time that Cheryl started wearing dark black mascara and bright blue eyeshadow, the older kids were scaring us younger kids at the bus stop by yelling “Zodiac’s gonna get ya!” We were too old and sophisticated to believe their threats about the Greenspot Monster, but we could scare the littler kids with this creature. The Zodiac Killer was in the real world; the Greenspot Monster, part of childhood fantasy.

One day I was on the phone with Cheryl, reading something out of Little House on the Prairie when my grandmother stormed in, grabbed the phone out of my hands, and hung it up. She pulled it out of the wall.

“You can’t be friends with her any more,” Nana said.

Cheryl had been playing at my house after school almost every day.

That came to a stop. Because I’d never played at Cheryl’s house before and it was a hard five-mile uphill walk, I didn’t play at her house after that, either. The only time I saw Cheryl outside of school after that day was playing at one of our other friends’ houses — and that was seldom as our other friend didn’t have a lot in common with Cheryl and was even more tomboyish and unsophisticated than me. 

I remember Cheryl’s mom stopping by and talking with Nana at the side porch. 

She left in tears.

Cheryl’s father was distant and weird, almost as strange as our autistic friend Rhoda Floy’s deaf engineer dad.

One day, Cheryl came to me at school and said, “I’m going to run away.”

I was beside myself. “Where will you go?” I asked her.

“My cousins live in Idaho. I’m going to go there.”

“Why?” I asked her, thinking it was because we couldn’t play together any more.

“My dad,” she said.

Then our other friend Melody, who lived across the street by the green house that Bampy had warned me about, told me that her stepdad was touching her late at night and she hated him.

“Cheryl’s dad does it too,” she said.

Melody showed me a big stack of Playboys and Penthouses that her stepdad had. She was already drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.

The next week, Cheryl didn’t come to school. 

I don’t think any of the other kids except me and Melody knew why Cheryl ran away. A lot of kids thought she ran away because the teasing had gotten so bad. She was wearing adult clothes, adult makeup, and had bleached hair. Even teachers commented.

I broke up a huge flagpole fight where Chicano girls I’d grown up with were calling Cheryl a “slut” and beating on her.

None of these girls who hated my best friend so much wanted to take me on, even though I was maybe 5'2" and weighed a whopping 90 pounds. 

I did not know that within just a few weeks, my beloved grandfather would go into the hospital for a routine same day surgery and never come home again.

Even then, I wasn’t sure what her father had done to her, although I knew it was awful. I also didn’t know that after exchanging a few letters, I wouldn’t see or speak to Cheryl again for another 35 years. 

That was when I attended her 6th wedding and she let me try on her mink coat, a gift from a prior husband.

In a way, she hadn’t changed at all. I had.

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I’m writing the steps of my life in order to try to understand how a little blonde girl could have such value to some in her family, yet so little value to others in the world.

I think understanding that every child has value is what needs to happen for every person to have true value for themselves — and what we need to do to move forward … together.