SUGARCUBES ANDLEMONJUICE
By Aanya Datta
PART 1
Third grade. One word: nightmare. Memories of a wonderful kindergarten life came back to me. Back in good old Kindergarten, there was pretty much no conflict! I should explain. It is the first week of summer break and I'm feeling excited, but also a little bit curious about next year. Why am I curious? Good question. It’s not because of how challenging Science or Language Arts might be and it’s DEFINITELY not because I’m excited for Spanish. It's because of the awkward emotions I had this school year. The school felt like a roller coaster, or in other words, whenever I thought I had sugar cubes I had lemon juice. Sometimes, the blacktop felt like my mortal enemy.
Since kindergarten, I have been best friends with Molly (and I still am). In first grade Molly and I befriended a girl named Phoebe. Now we are all best friends. Let’s now go into third grade. The first quarter of third grade was fine. Molly, Phoebe, some of Molly's other friends, and I played together.
I then did something I regretted. Jessica invited me to do a "dance show" with her and Katie (one of her friends) because she liked my sense of humor.
This is how it went:
My hair was tucked into my shirt. It was uncomfortable. As I stood on the burning hot blacktop, she rambled on and on about her dance show. My eyes wandered. I noticed a sock on the ground. Maybe that hot pink sock belongs to that snooty ol’ second grader I saw on the playground. She probably got it from Louis Vuitton. In my head, I crack up at my own joke.
“That’s the stage, Chloe,” Jessica said, pointing to the corner of the basketball court.
“Where?” I asked.
“Right in front of you,” she replied, sounding a bit irritated.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I said under my breath.
“I was wondering if you could make jokes at the beginning, intermission, and end,” she asked, sounding nice again.
I thought intermissions were when you get out of your seat and get water and stuff. But instead of being rude, I just shrugged and said, “Sure.”
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Classrooms overlooked the stage. It seemed like first and second-graders were constantly staring at you, even though they weren’t. I felt that “stage” was too fancy of a name for such a small place. Maybe this would work out fine (spoiler: it didn’t.) So I didn’t say no. It seemed like an opportunity to make a new friend. What she meant by a dance show was just a lead dancer with one or more of her BFFs doing a choreographed dance together. The lead dancer (who in this case was Jessica) did almost all the choreography and if she was nice (as far as nice goes for these people. Which in this case she was) she would let the other dancers choreograph a bit. But of course, I only learned this after I agreed to do this. So bad luck!
After I agreed to do this, we started working on the dance. We worked and edited and worked some more for a month. Left hand, right hand, pirouette, jazz square, cartwheel, the list went on and on! I was sweating. What I found out was that she used the white and yellow lines on the outdoor basketball court a lot to show us where to stand and move.
The blacktop was full of screaming people. Rubber soles were squeaking like spoiled rats that have a lifetime’s supply of cheese. This was plain annoying. “Ok you guys, for this part, sashay with a finger pointing at the audience,” she would say, sounding like a valley girl. Inside my head, I was like “OMG girlfriend! Take a chill pill with that kind of talk!!!”
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Finally, the day came. I was chewing my nails instead of squealing and jumping up and down. You are probably wondering why I was not excited. You would not be asking this question if you were in my school. It is called Yo-yo Elementary (weird name, don’t you think?). IMHO (in my humble opinion) I feel it should be called Dance Show Wreck Elementary. But hey! That’s just me. Anyway, it’s because while we were performing some people came and completely trashed our show. (This is a typical thing at my school. It happens at every single show.)
They threw tanbark at us like it was their full-time job. Even though Jessica told them to stop, they kept saying things like “Nu-uh!” and “You wish!” When the tanbark hit Jessica and she fell, it was all over. Believe it or not, they took complete advantage of that. I mean, how can you be so mean!!!!????
When they left, Jessica rolled her eyes, sighed loudly, and mumbled something that sounded like “How humiliating can these people get?!”. This was so humiliating and annoying that hearing those squeaky rubber soles felt like heaven.
PART 2
The next day I learned that Jessica was BFF (best friend forever, NOT best furry friend) with Katie and Hailey. Hailey excluded about 84 kids (including me) last year. Only two kids were “good enough” to hang out with her. It was so traumatizing that last year I thought the name “Devil” suited her quite well.
At that point, I knew that there was no turning back. If there was a way to turn back I didn't know how to frame it in words, thoughts, pictures, or ideas. So I played along. Then we started to "play" together. By play, I mean just talking about random stuff (like the weird dance move Katie made up) and occasionally goofing off. I started getting hints that Jessica wasn’t the nicest person in the world. Some of her conversations were a mixture of awkward and annoying.
During PE—fourth period—right before lunch, we had free time in the gym. That was another place Jessica got her not-so-nice work done. She took advantage of the fact that the teacher was busy dealing with a kid who had tackled another dude and fallen flat on his face on the hard gym floor. The gym was just an indoor basketball court. Our school's team played there for practice and home games.
Jessica didn’t care where she was, she was always saying things like… “Why is your hair tucked into your shirt? It looks like a platypus.”
“Sorry,” I mutter. I would have said something like “Geez Jessica, get a life!” But she was Jessica—Miss Perfect—so I didn't. “You don’t need to be sorry. It’s none of my business you look hideous,” said Jessica, “I’m honestly not sure why I even cared. It’s not like I’m the fashion police.”
That bugged me.
After a while, Jessica became a lot more mean to me. Once I wasn’t talking much because I was reflecting on a few mean things she had said earlier that day. She smugly remarked, “I told Katie you were feeling kind of glum today.” And you wouldn’t believe it!!!!!! Katie backed her up and said “You know, you do look pretty sad. Are you giving someone the silent treatment?” After that, I said “no.”
I felt like I was going to vomit out my vocal cords. WHO IS SHE TO DO THAT!?
Sometimes after Jessica’s bully work was done, I would find Phoebe and we would go to the library. It had comfortable chairs and even bean bag chairs. The fast fiction books were near the bean bag chairs and graphic novels. The non-fiction books were near the chairs. The fiction and fantasy novels were the closest to the entrance. We would almost always go to the fiction and fantasy novels first so the entrance was our first stop. The next day, we would go to the graphic novel section and read a few of those. Neither of us liked fast fiction or nonfiction, so we didn’t read any of them. The books helped us dive into the amazing journeys of witches, crime-busters, pixies, dogs, cats, and even worms!
These books made me feel like I was in a flawless universe. But unfortunately, sometimes I felt so depressed that the flawlessness of that universe wasn’t enough. That’s where Phoebe came in. Phoebe also tried to comfort me. Sometimes it didn’t help; most of the time it did. To comfort me she said things like…
“You’re fine. It’s not your fault they’re such a group of ravens.” At first, I was confused, but then I realized that a group of ravens is called “an unkindness”. That made me laugh and I immediately felt better. We did that until the bell rang. Recess was becoming better.
Jessica started rumors about Allie and told Katie and me a few that she made up. At one point I felt like I would much rather squirt lemon juice into my eyes than go to recess. The best days of school were the days Jessica was absent. I felt bad when Jessica started picking on Allie because Allie thought that was just how friends work and didn’t realize that she was being bullied. What was worse was that she encouraged Katie and me to help abuse her.
I was infuriated by her encouragement to do hurtful things. Of course, Katie excitedly joined. I didn’t. I said that I’ll be a spectator and they fell for it! Yay me! Boo them! But just me not picking on her did not reverse the fact that she was a bully target. Yet I felt that it was the most I could do. I would not be able to change her thinking that Katie and Jessica were just being good friends. That’s something only Jessica and Katie would be able to do. And how would they do that? By apologizing. So it’s really sad that they didn’t.
Over a few days, Phoebe and I began hanging out together. This meant I didn’t have to deal with Jessica until she asked me to join her group and that didn’t happen very often. Until it did…
Every night I would feel terrible because of her. I seriously thought this would deprive me of the joy of recess. But it only partially did that because of Phoebe. She would help me. Every night when I felt terrible this is what I would tell myself, “Try to think about what Phoebe (my best friend) and I talked about, like the fact that people like you for who you are, and that we’re so privileged to go to a great school.” Sometimes (like in this case) she would sound like an 86-year-old philosopher. But I didn’t mind. To be fair it was her philosopher side who told me this and made me feel a little bit better about this stuff.
On top of all this drama, I had to get ready for our third-grade annual talent show that was organized by the third-grade teachers. I was in an act towards the end with Phoebe, and Jessica was in the opening act with Katie.
PART 3
I had a hunch that Jessica was mistreating me and a few others, yet I had no evidence. I thought my jokes at the beginning and during the intermission of her shows were more interesting than the dances she choreographed. So, I got about the same attention she got as the director and choreographer. Maybe she wanted to get more attention than I did. However, I am still puzzled over why she was mean to her other friends who were participating in this dance show.
Anyways going back to the talent show, backstage, while the audience was filing in we had a conversation that changed things for good.
After I brushed my hair for TEN MINUTES and picked out my clothes very carefully, Jessica strode to me while scrutinizing her close-to-perfect purple nails that I saw her painting in math—our last period.
“Oh my god, did you even brush your hair? And your skirt and t-shirt are just weird,” said Jessica. “Your T-shirt is weirder. I think my brother has the same one.” She continued snarkily pointing at my T-shirt that had a grinning dog on it
”Uh, yeah, got a problem with that? Grinning dogs are kinda cool,” I replied, feeling like my anger was about to get the better of me.
“It just looks so disgusting that wearing it makes trolls look beautiful.” That made me livid, so livid that I added “I don’t care what you think about my skirt and shirt. I spent a while brushing my hair and besides, why do you even care?” Most of the time someone saying something along the lines of what I had said would not be furious. But since I normally couldn’t have talked to her, this was me being EXTREMELY mad.
Unplanned, but helpfully, our conversation was loud enough so that some kids turned their heads around and saw us (one of them got tangled in their cringy Rapunzel dress) but it was also out of the teachers’ earshot. At least the cranky lunch lady and the grumpy recess duty person weren’t there because they have super sharp ears. Phoebe had an incident with the cranky lunch lady last year but we don’t talk about that anymore. She took four oranges from the snack bar and the lunch person was like, “I think you took too much,” So she tried to put a few of them back.
But then that cranky woman was like, “No, no, no! Don’t put them back, they're contaminated, give some to your friend!” And she did. Then a second grader came along and took six and was about to leave. But then Miss Cranky said, “Take more honey, take more.”
Phoebe told me that she was thinking of telling the lady “I’m a third grader. He's a second grader. I need food too!”
I noticed that most of the kids that had turned around started talking about us to their friends who had or had not witnessed us. One of the conversations was between Molly and Allie.
“OMG, Chloe spoke up!? I thought she would never in a million years do that!” whisper-squealed Molly.
“Yeah, there was no way I could do that either,” replied Allie.
“Uh-huh, I can’t imagine you doing that either,” joked Molly. Katie, Phoebe, and Hailey also turned their heads around. Katie muttered something that sounded like “I’m not sure I want to interact with Jessica. Now that I think about it, Jess wasn’t the nicest person.” Phoebe, who had that YES look on her face, whispered, “Go Chloe!”. Hailey just giggled.
And believe it or not, Katie became a pretty good friend again. I was honestly not sure why Katie suddenly decided to support a mean girl for some time. It could have been that she wasn’t getting a lot of attention at home since she just became a big sister. Or it could have been that she wanted to impress people by making me feel small. Or it could be neither. We’ll never know.
After all that, towards the end of second grade, Jessica barely ever talked to me but whenever she saw me she put a smile on her face (maybe fake) and she waved. After a while, we were by no means best friends again, but we weren’t in a terrible relationship either.
After our interaction backstage, Jessica stopped bullying Allie as well as me. For once I didn’t feel bad about calmly blowing up at someone. I felt great.
Anyway, that’s friendship for you. They ebb and flow. And although most of these friendships had fizzled out, I realized that Phoebe was still my friend. That was the first sign of a true friendship. One that would maybe last me a lifetime. Indeed, it might not. But there is also a chance it might. Sugar cube level: 100. Lemon juice level: 0.
