Boring Girls(3)

Some of the pictures in the art books were pretty frightening to me when I was little. She’d skip by sections of the book to avoid them, but I’d see quick flashes: Christ being crucified, his haunted eyes and bloody hands. I didn’t like that.

One afternoon when I was about twelve, I was looking through one of her books by myself and I flipped to a page and froze.

The painting was of two women. One wore a blue dress and one wore a red dress. They had pinned a very large man down on a mattress and were obviously struggling with him, and winning. The woman in blue was cutting the man’s neck with a sword, and blood was spilling onto the bed.

I was transfixed. The women looked so calm, so focused. They were working together on this. The title of the painting was Judith Slaying Holofernes. I called my mother into the room.

“Mom, what’s this painting about?”

She looked at it thoughtfully. “I believe Holofernes was a cruel war captain, and Judith is the woman who was sent to kill him to save her village. You know, the artist of this painting is a woman. She’s remembered as sort of a feminist artist who did some very important things for women in her time.”

“Who’s the other girl?”

“Judith’s maid, I think.” My mother turned the page, and there was another painting, where Judith and her maid carried a suspiciously shaped bag. “Yes, it says here, Judith and her Maidservant.”

“They have his head in that bag,” I said.

“You know, Rachel, I don’t really like these paintings,” my mother said. “Don’t you think that they’re very violent?”

“But the girls are friends. And they killed him for a good reason.”

“Yes, they did,” my mother said. “But I think it would be nice for you to look at some other paintings in this book. That picture is very sad, and I think it’s nice to look at good things to make ourselves happier. It’s more inspiring.”

In bed that night, I kept thinking about Judith and her friend killing the war captain, against all odds. I didn’t see how my mother couldn’t find that inspiring. I wanted a friend like that. I wanted an ally, someone to have a secret with, someone I knew I could rely on, someone I could trust with my very life if I needed to.

xXx

So with our father praising our intellect and my mother encouraging creativity, Melissa and I really did grow up happily. I got good marks in school, especially in art and writing classes, and I had a few good friends.

I was not overtly social. I preferred to read or draw or write in my free time, but I went to the birthday parties and was in the school play in some minor role. I enjoyed all those things, but what I really wanted to do was be creative on my own. And my parents always supported that.

Once I reached high school, like pretty much every human being on the face of the earth, I stopped caring so much about what my family thought of me. My dad’s cute word games became annoying, but Melissa still played with him, so I was luckily exempt. I didn’t care so much for my mother’s paintings, seeing as how I can only get so excited over a watercolour sparrow. And then I discovered metal.





TWO


I had never been popular, and right around the time I turned thirteen, I started realizing that most of my “peers” were annoying as hell. I watched good friends reprioritize their whole lives: instead of wanting to make up stories or read, they wanted to wear lip gloss and have all the expensive name-brand clothes and giggle whenever a boy said anything. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted a boyfriend too, but for some reason I wasn’t willing to laugh at bad jokes or present myself as some sort of airhead to impress someone. And my unwillingness to do these things ostracized me when I began high school.

But I was fine being a loner. I didn’t mind that there were no party invitations. I preferred going home, shutting myself in my room, and working on stories or my journal or my (in retrospect embarrassing) poetry. I didn’t want to hang out with my parents and Melissa; I enjoyed being by myself.

What I wasn’t fine with was the abuse that came with it. It wasn’t enough that I had no friends. I had to be mocked as well, apparently. I didn’t have it as bad as some kids, because I wasn’t chubby or pimply or smelly or poor. But I was “weird.”

Some kids who got picked on desperately tried to fit in with those *s. Which I found pathetic. They’d make fun of a kid for having stupid hair and the kid would show up the next day with a new haircut and a hopeful look on their face, which always resulted in more ridicule. They’d tease a kid for having cheap shoes, and the kid would show up with a rip-off of the expensive brand, and they’d just get destroyed for it. But they’d always scramble around, trying to please. Whether it was to actually fit in and be accepted or whether it was just to make the bullshit stop, I have no idea. But I couldn’t respect it. Which made me hate the outcast group too.