Member-only story
When Death and Divorce Collide
A middle-school perspective
I met some of my oldest and dearest friends in middle school, when the four elementary schools that educated my town’s youth merged into one modern, unwelcoming monolithic structure. The school I had attended up until that point was in an old, rambling brick building, with hidden nooks and colorful gardens and a basement we believed to house a dungeon from ancient times. This new building was hard and angular, sprawling over a slab of concrete with a few sad, forlorn trees. This was clearly a holding pen, a two-year pitstop between our innocent childhoods replete with May fairs and hopscotch boards and the next stop, our full-on teenage years which were sure to come accessorized with fast cars, unadulterated beauty, and burgeoning sexuality.
Reeling from the sudden end of our coddled, carefree days, we girls eyed each other warily. We had our lifeboats, the friends with whom we had arrived on these shores, but some of them suddenly looked too much like remnants of the past, donning puffy-sleeved rainbow sweatshirts when it was time to graduate to deep v-necks and a dusting of metallic eyeshadow. I loved my old friends, with whom I had whittled away countless afternoons playing rounds of Big Boggle and spreading towels on the lawn by the edge of the town pool, but I saw something in these new girls that drew me to them…
