Weird Kids

Last night out of nowhere I had this sudden memory of my two best friends from second grade.

One was a girl, I'll call her D, who I was in Girl Scouts with. She was extremely tomboyish, and for a couple years in elementary school she asked everyone to call her a very boyish name because she said she was supposed to be born a boy. We used to play at each other's houses all the time and she taught me how to do cool stuff like climb trees and build forts and pee in the woods. She was also kinda mean and would tell me lies just because she knew I was too trusting and would believe them, or would make me do stuff "or I'm not your friend anymore". At the time I was too naive to realize it, but when I look back at things that happened at her house I'm pretty sure her stepfamily was abusing her in some way. She moved away in middle school, and I've never been able to track her down again.

The other was a boy, we'll call him B, who was older than everyone else because he'd repeated a grade. B was very shy and bad at sports, and only seemed to make friends with girls. He was an adorable, sweet boy who D and I both always had a crush on and would fight over sometimes. I caught up with him at my favorite gay bar a few years ago and gave him a hug. He's still sweet, but his life doesn't seem to have gotten much easier since second grade.

I think about childhood and childhood friends a lot, but what struck me was how all us kids who were so queer (or at least got treated like queers) found each other and stuck together. And I started thinking about my other friends in elementary school. There was my best friend S who was so hyperactive most people couldn't stand her (I thought she was fun). Then there was my fourth grade posse: MM, who had an extremely odd sense of humor; her best friend R, who was a boy who took gymnastics and, like B, had only female friends; and J, whose dad was in prison. There was MH, who was as poor as I was and whose mom I later found out was schizophrenic like my mom. (Her mom, at one point, was my mom's only friend.) Also in my life were the class "fat kid" J who once begged me to be his friend because nobody else would; and RM, who once threw a desk at a teacher and eventually got put in classes for the "severely emotionally disturbed". I was never close friends with either of them but I always thought they were nice, sweet boys who didn't deserve to be treated like they were. Later, my best friends were SB and SG; the former was the only Jew in our whole town, the latter had a delicate family situation and was being controlled to within an inch of her life all the way to adulthood. Both were "goth kids" who couldn't fit into the extremely Christian culture in our school.

My whole life my friends have been the people who weren't hanging out with anybody else. I just naturally do that; I go past the big crowd and find the people sitting on the edge with no one to talk to. I don't do it out of pity, and I didn't as a kid. Those are just the people I most want to be around. As a kid I absorbed a lot of cultural messages that said this is just proof that I was only good enough to make friends with people who are desperate for friends. But maybe that's my gift. Maybe going directly to the people who are invisible (or visible for the wrong reasons) to everyone else and finding something good in them is what I'm good for, what I've always been good for. I feel like this is coming across as "oh look what a do-gooder I am, being nice to the weird kids" and that's not what I'm trying to say at all. I'm saying I love the weird kids *for* being weird, not in spite of it. What I'm trying to do is remind myself that I matter. I'm trying to look at the little child that I once was and see what's really special about her the same way I would do with a child in my life now. And I think maybe that's it. That little kid I used to be was always going around loving people who thought nobody would love them. And she never had any idea how important that was.