1. You have purple leggings with little pills on the inner thighs where your legs rub together and they are your absolute favorite thing. You know someday soon they will get a hole and you will have to throw them out or else Lauren Butkis will make fun of you and poke her finger through the hole while chanting “Marshmallow, marshmallow, soft and white, Margaret King has fatty thighs!”
2. Your father left your mother and you have no memory of him. Any description of what caused him to leave is wildly incomplete and you can tell that everyone is lying to you, but you don’t yet know about which part.
3. The best thing in the world when you get home, having walked the whole way in the burning sun with your little thighs rubbing together, is to curl up on the couch and watch Golden Girls while eating a piece of Wonder Bread with butter and sugar on it that you roll up into a tight doughy burrito.
4. Your mother tries to talk in a British accent that slowly turns into an Australian accent the later you get for school. You have to eat your Lucky Charms in the car and you spill milk on your skirt.
5. You have never spent any significant portion of time around adult men and so when you have a male math teacher in sixth grade, he terrifies you. Even the smell of his cologne is scary.
6. When you watch re-runs of Gilligan’s Island, you cannot picture yourself as either Ginger or Mary Ann. You realize you are somewhere in between Gilligan and the Skipper, and you wonder if you will ever have a boyfriend.
7. You are confused about the difference between Anne Frank and Lisa Frank.
8. Your best friend is a Japanese girl who hardly speaks any English. Her intense need for you is vitally reassuring. You help her with all her homework, and in return she gives you odd flavored gummy candies and shares her anime comics, which she translates for you as you lay out in a patch of dirt and grass by the handball courts.
9. You beg your mother to begin attending church because you want desperately to believe in something.
10. When your pet rabbit dies, you are secretly relieved because the pressure of trying to have an emotional attachment to an animal that had no personality was simply too great for you to bear.