Lauren Holmes - Barbara the Slut and Other People

The next day we got lost on the way because my dad had written the directions in German, to practice. When we finally got there a pretty girl who spoke perfect English opened the door, and I felt like things were going to be okay. But she turned out to be Brigitta’s older sister, and Brigitta herself did not speak, in English or in German. Brigitta was my same height and she had thick brown hair that hung over her face. Her mom came out and introduced us, but Brigitta just smiled a big smile full of braces. I was a little bit worried about having a mute guide, but I figured that it didn’t really matter since we didn’t speak the same language anyway. Brigitta’s mom had made us a fruit tart, and she invited my dad to stay and eat. We sat at a table outside and Brigitta’s sister asked me a million questions in English about America, and then she told me all about our school. She said the school was six hundred years old but I wouldn’t notice because the buildings were very modern. She said she had the same teacher as us when she was in the sixth grade, and he was really nice. Brigitta sat and smiled. When we were done eating, the grown-ups went inside and we stayed out on the swings, and Brigitta’s sister talked and Brigitta still just smiled.

On the first day of school I went in with Brigitta, and everyone crowded around us and asked me questions in English. They wanted to know where I was from and why I moved to Germany, and they wanted to know which language I was going to take and which religion class I was going to be in. For religion there were only two choices, katholisch and evangelisch . I wondered why there were no other choices. Almost all the kids in my old school were Jewish, except for one kid who was Zoroastrian. I didn’t know what that meant and we didn’t study either of those things. I tried to tell the kids I wasn’t religious at all but they said I had to pick one. I picked evangelisch because I was sure I wasn’t katholisch . Half of the class cheered, and I didn’t know whether it was the katholisch half or the evangelisch half.

For language there were also two choices, Englisch and Latein . My mom and dad had a fight about which one I would take. My dad wanted me to take Latin, but my mom said it would be sadistic to make me take Latin when I didn’t even speak German. I told the class I was going to take English, and again half the class cheered.

I ended up loving English because it was the only class where I understood anything. The English teacher didn’t love me back, though, because she didn’t like it when I helped her. Like when she told the class there was no English word for Geschwister , I raised my hand to say actually there was, and it was “siblings.” I had learned the word Geschwister because that was one of the getting-to-know-you questions. What’s your name, how old are you, where do you live, do you have any Geschwister ?

Krystal

It turned out there was a boy in my class who spent summers in the States and spoke English fluently, and who happened to look just like Jonathan Taylor Thomas, my favorite actor. His name was Benjamin. I started hanging around him as much as I could so that I didn’t have to speak German, and soon he was my boyfriend.

I hadn’t had a boyfriend in a long time. In kindergarten I had a boyfriend named Joseph, who I was going to marry and have ten children with. But after kindergarten I went to a different school and everything went downhill. The boys ignored me and the girls made fun of me. It was a small private school and it was hard to stay out of the other kids’ way. In first grade, the second-grade girls kicked me off the swings on the playground, meaning they kicked me until I got off the swings. In second grade one of the girls caught me singing songs from The Little Mermaid by myself, and they all made fun of me for that for the rest of the year. In third grade those girls said I could play hairdresser with them, and they cut off my ponytail with scissors. Fourth grade wasn’t so bad because I stayed away from them at recess, and I was safe in my classroom because I was in a special class of kids who had it as bad as I did. I thought fifth grade would be even better because the mean girls were going to middle school, but I somehow made enemies with a new girl in my class, Krystal, who told me that I didn’t wash my hair or clean the dirt out from under my nails. I didn’t know what she was talking about because I did wash my hair and my nails were too short to have dirt under them. I spent all of fifth grade begging my mom to send me to public school, so that I could at least start over. My mom said no again and again, and then when she knew about moving to Germany she started saying, “Let’s see what happens. You never know what might happen.” So now I got to go to public school, except in another country and in a language I didn’t speak.

Veronika and Viktoria

I was very happy about Benjamin being my boyfriend, until I started to understand that one of the two most popular girls in the class had had a crush on him for her whole life, and that was why the girls in the class weren’t inviting me to go out to lunch with them. I thought it was just because I was unlikable, but they were actually mad at me.

The two most popular girls were twins named Veronika and Viktoria. They were half a year older and half a head taller than the rest of the class. They were kind of chubby but that didn’t seem to matter. Everyone thought they were really cool because they smoked cigarettes and drank beer.

The twins had a sidekick named Ilona, and the three of them were the three most popular bad girls. Then there were three popular good girls, who were really smart and were in charge of stuff in the classroom. One was the other girl my dad tried to call, the one who lived in my town. I wondered if things would have been different if my dad had been able to reach her and she had been my first friend. Another one of those girls was some kind of tennis champion, and the third one was very small and the best in the class at every single subject.

Then there were three not popular but not unpopular girls. Nothing was wrong with them but they didn’t seem to be special in any way. Then there was Brigitta, who the twins were protective of, because she lived in their neighborhood and had gone to their elementary school. And there was Monika Biermann, who loosened her retainer with her tongue and spit it onto her desk every time she was about to say something in class.

I wasn’t exactly sure where I fit in, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t good. I was okay with that when I thought girls in Germany just didn’t like me, same as girls in America. But when it turned out that I had done something wrong and was being punished, I felt like I had ruined a perfectly good chance to be popular.

On the day we had afternoon classes, everyone went to one of four places. Almost no one went to the IBM cafeteria across the street. The food was actually pretty good but the cafeteria was full of adults. Then there was the Ikea down the street, and a McDonald’s a couple of bus stops away, on my bus line. But most of the kids went to a mall called Breuningerland. I didn’t know where it was or how they got there, so I couldn’t tell my parents about it to get permission to go. Usually I went to the IBM cafeteria and read, and sometimes if Benjamin wasn’t going to lunch with the boys or Brigitta wasn’t going with the girls, one of them would go to the Ikea or the McDonald’s with me. Benjamin especially liked to go to the Ikea to push each other around in the carts, which wasn’t really what I imagined when I thought about going out to lunch with my boyfriend.

I was grateful to Brigitta for being the only girl who was nice to me, but I was starting to get tired of trying to talk to her. She technically could speak, but she didn’t like to do it, and when she did it was hard for me to understand her because she was so quiet and because I still didn’t really understand German.