When I was six, my parents sat me down to break the news to me. There was no Santa Claus.

It was all a hoax. A big lie.

I sat on my dad’s lap crying dramatically while he tried to console me.

It wasn’t that I was so attached to the idea of the jolly gift-bearer that his sudden non-existence crushed me. My parents’ deception was alarming, but mainly, I felt humiliated and foolish having fallen for such an outlandish lie. I was really crying because my pride had been deeply wounded. I felt like a complete fool. (I had even argued with them for awhile, saying I was sure they were mistaken because I had absolutely seen him on Christmas Eve once, while I peeked through the vent on the floor from the upstairs hallway. He had been bent over, rustling around in the dark living room under the tree. But pretty quickly I understood it had just been mom wearing a red nightgown.)

After this, nothing hurt my feelings more than being lied to. I could handle just about any truth no matter how grizzly, as long as it wasn’t kept from me, for this was the ultimate betrayal. Truth and honesty have been paramount to my personality, pretty much from infancy.

Moving on.

At age ten I realized that I was smarter than my fourth grade teacher. This realization did not cultivate pride however, but a sense of being unsafe. We were studying long and short vowels and she was writing a word on the blackboard and then calling on children to tell whether the vowel within the word was long or short. She wrote the word wagon on the blackboard.

Mrs. Beauregard: Missy, long or short?

Me: Short.

Mrs. Beauregard: Incorrect. The A is looonngg. Waaayyyygon.

My face went hot and my back immediately began to sweat. What? She hadn’t even consulted a dictionary for the correct answer, she was relying completely on her Northern-Minnesota accent that made Wagons into Waygons and Pillows into Pellows and all sorts of other atrocious excuses for English. I nursed my resentment for at least the rest of the day, planning a letter I might write but not yet sure whom it would be to.

She wore way too much rouge on her cheeks also and too much perfume that made my sinuses ache which further confirmed my suspicions. I felt it was very irresponsible of the school system not to screen these people better.

Moving along.

At age twelve I had my first real crush on a boy. There was a cabin across the dirt road from our farm that was owned by a man who lived in the city. He came up on summer weekends, to my delight bringing with him his grandsons Brian and Davin. I immediately fell ill to the first acute symptoms of lust when Davin was nearby. He was gangly and goofy, but most of all he was funny, the funniest person I had ever met. This was irresistible to me.

We spent those weekends all together: my little brother, Bridger, Brian, Davin, and I, running wild in the woods, riding four wheelers, building forts, swimming in the pond, swinging on the rope in the hay loft, driving the tractor around and nursing enormous bon fires made with Daddy’s hay bales and tractor fuel.

One Friday night right after they had arrived my mother invited them all over for a BBQ, parents and grandparents included. I was very excited because I had not seen Davin in weeks. I was not a primper really. I was wild and free, like the land I was raised on. My hair was big and wavy and untamed, I wore ripped jeans and went barefooted most places. I never touched make-up. I was thin and knobby, though freakishly strong for my size, and had no verbal filter.

After dinner the boys retreated to Bridger’s bedroom and shut the door, claiming they needed boy time. I snuck up to the door and listened through it to see what they were doing in there. They were goofing around, laughing, and then I heard my brother ask: “Hey, what do you think of my sister?”

I froze. Bridge was always overprotective of me. He watched boys closely and quizzed them often trying to determine the level of risk of one of them advancing on me.

“Man! Your sister’s butt-ugly!” came the response. It was Davin.

I wilted into my next-door bedroom and proceeded to feel like someone had stabbed me. The feeling was only interrupted when I heard my brother throw up over the side of his top bunk and the boys run from the room shouting, “Bridger blew chunks!”

Years later, when I was eighteen, I dated Brian briefly and while falling asleep on their living room floor I heard Brian say to his brother on the couch next to me, “Isn’t she beautiful?” And I can’t be sure, but I think I fell asleep to the sound of Davin saying, “F@#*ing gorgeous.”

 

 

 

 

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