Aimee, 31; English professor; New York
When I was twelve, I lived on the grounds of a mental asylum. My Filipino mother was a psychiatrist, so that meant we lived in the doctor’s quarters—in one of the three big brick houses that edged the institute. My younger sister and I practiced Herkies—our favorite cheerleading jumps— off the patients’ bleachers near the softball field. When I was twelve, I was good in science class; they let me skip a whole grade and get right to The Dissections. We sold gift wrap and crystals for a junior high fundraiser and my mom still asks where are all the crystals she bought and why don’t I display them in my house. When I was twelve, I worried about the darkening hair on my legs. My mother bought me my first training bra—no cup, just little triangle pieces stitched together—and then a slice of NY-style cheesecake to bring home. Home. To the mental asylum. My school had to make a whole new bus stop just for my sister and me, and everyone stared when we stepped onto the bus each morning. Just who are these girls?
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Laraine, 37; writer/teacher; Arizona
When I was twelve, we moved from Charlotte, NC to Phoenix, AZ. My father had had a massive heart attack a few years earlier and was not expected to live much longer. Doctors thought the dry climate of AZ would be better suited to his condition. We arrived in Phoenix in July. 115 degrees. Dirt. Rocks. Concrete. There was no more water. No more squirrels. No more frogs. No more trees to sit under and read, and no more woods to wander through on the way home from school. I was exposed, under the scathing desert sun, my grief unable to shed its tears in the blinding heat. When I stepped out of our beige Buick LeBaron onto the hot concrete of our new driveway, I knew I had crossed a threshold into a very different, frightening place. And quite frankly, it took me until just a few years ago to get past whatever it was inside me that stopped growing on that summer afternoon in 1981, when I was only twelve.
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Kristen, 37; Marketing Specialist; Wisconsin
When I was twelve, I had no friends. My military family had just moved from a small town in Connecticut to a suburb of Washington DC. All the rules I learned in Connecticut (wear your pink comb handle-side-out in the left back pocket of your baby blue Levi corduroys) no longer applied. Worse still, I couldn’t figure out the new rules. DC had diversity, sophistication and a complicated clique of girls that I simply couldn’t join, no matter how hard I tried.
Just when I thought life-as-I-knew-it was over, I was befriended by my next door neighbor, who happened to be a four year old boy. John didn’t care that I had the wrong clothes, the wrong hairstyle and the wrong shoes. He wanted to play games and read picture books and create forts out of sheets and pillows. While the other girls spent their weekends at sleep-overs and roller rinks, I started a babysitting gig that would change my life forever.
When I was twelve, John was diagnosed with cancer. He died a few years later. I have absolutely no concept of what his family went through in those years. My twelve year old’s memory has blotted out the horror and tragedy. All I can remember is the joy in his laughter and the sparkle in his eyes.
I’m thirty-seven now and I have a little boy of my own. He’s almost four and his middle name is “John.” Sometimes, he’ll glance at me with that same exact sparkle and I get shivers up my spine. Suddenly, I’m twelve again and basking in the pure joy radiating from my young friend.
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IcyJuly, 35; Editor/writer; California
When I was twelve, I had an imaginary friend named “Dear.” Dear was a unicorn. Dear would answer questions for me -- questions that I usually wrote in my diary (which I refused to call a “diary” -- it was a “journal”) or in letters I put in a box that had a unicorn on the lid. The answers arrived via a voice in my head that I had to be very quiet and still to hear. Sometimes the answers arrived in a dream. I also channeled Dear for select friends, if they needed questions answered. None of this seemed strange to me until my friends started telling other people. One day at recess a boy came up to me and said that what I was doing was “sinful.” I immediately thought that he was right. “You should ask Jesus for forgiveness,” he said soberly. That night I went home, scratched out all references to Dear in my diary, and wrote “DEAR IS DEAD.” I sobbed, and I missed Dear for a long time afterward. I’ve often thought of the age of 12 as the last time I really felt unselfconscious about my gender, or as the last time that being female seemed unlinked to some kind of shame.
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Gayle Brandeis, 37; writer/teacher/activist; California
When I was twelve, I wanted to freeze time. I wanted to stay a kid forever. I knew twelve was right on the cusp between childhood and teenagedom, and I didn’t want to teeter into that next phase of life. Being a teenager seemed way too confusing and scary. My sister was eight, and my best friend; I wanted to be able to stay in the imaginary world we had created together, choreographing dances and concocting elaborate games in the park down the street from our apartment. I listened to my friends complain about their nipples hurting, their periods starting, and I was so relieved that my body remained flat and hairless and familiar. When a boy in my class told me I had a “cardboard bootie,” I was glad -- it meant I wasn’t in danger of billowing into a woman any time soon. I held my breath and hoped that if I couldn’t make time stand still, I could at least try to make it slow it down a little. I willed my body to stay small. I was in no hurry to turn into something alien, someone I wouldn’t recognize as myself. I was in no hurry to launch out into the unknown while I watched my sister wave from the coastline we had once shared.
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Victoria, 13; Student (7th grade); California
When I was twelve, [it was] a rollercoast[er] because many things happened. I changed schools, things happened to me, and I [was] not allowed to do things that I was able to do [before]. For instance I can't go Trick or Treating with my aunt, I have to go with my best friend. I became taller, my shoe sizes changed so much. Classes and classwork became much harder and I had less time to relax. Instead I [had] homework on the weekends and many reports to do. I also have many emotions. I always fight with my mother over almost anything. When I was younger I didn't but now it is daily. See, [being] twelve changed my relationship with her. Twelve will be very remembering. Another reason 12 will be remembering is because in elementary I got my first bf (boyfriend) and my first kiss. We broke up a couple of months ago but I still remember him. What I mean is that I couldn't really remember the small stuff and things because I can barely remember the big things.
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Lisa, 36; Architect; Missouri
When I was twelve, I didn’t expect to live to see thirty. I expected the planet to be vaporized, and my future with it. We used to theorize about it late nights at sleepovers and in the girls restroom -- “When do you think the War will start?” -- the general consensus was when we were 15, 17 at the most. “Do you think they’ll bomb Little Rock?” -- the general consensus was that between the Air Base 20 miles northeast and the missile silos 40 miles northwest, we were certainly doomed. We calculated the times for the first waves to hit us and considered the likelihood of escape. We wondered aloud what would happen if we survived and our parents didn’t. We studied the descriptions of Reagan’s SDI program in the newspaper, hoping to see our rescue there. We argued the possibilities, some reflecting the President’s optimism, some taking the position that it was too provoking to the Soviets to risk. None of us thought it would happen in time to save us from an inevitable fiery end.
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Gretchen, 35; Full-time mom, part-time teacher of English as a Foreign Language; Maine (now living in France)
When I was twelve, I was in Mr. Bowers’ homeroom. There were posters of the solar system, fossils, and the evolution of ape to man on one long wall. The opposite wall was mostly wide windows overlooking the lake. In the spring, it was hard to concentrate on anything in that classroom but the light dancing on the lake and summer just ahead, calling us to plunge into its northern coolness.
The morning Jim Lowell died, I wasn’t looking at the lake but giggling with friends. I was wearing the new outfit my mom bought me for all-state band, cropped white pants with multi-colored pinstripes and a white bolero jacket. I felt very pretty in that new outfit. It was the first time I’d worn it to school. A teacher from another class came in the room; I can’t remember which teacher it was although I’m sure it was a woman. She looked around, found me. “Gretchen,” she said, “Jim Lowell died this morning.” I guess they wanted to tell me first since Jim and I were good friends, see how I’d take the news so they could whisk me away from the other seventh-graders if I got hysterical, which I didn’t. I felt so numb I didn’t even cry.
In fourth grade, Jim and Kristy and Will and I [had] shared a table and we were always laughing. We shook and cried and peed our pants with laughter. The only thing I remember about that year aside from laughing so hard my stomach hurt was that one day Jim left school early to go to the doctor. He’d cut his finger and it wasn’t healing. His little plastic chair stayed empty the rest of that year while he lay in a bed in the children’s hospital in Boston, throwing up and losing his hair. Kristy and Will and I didn’t laugh so much with Jim gone.
Over the next three years, Jim went into remission a few times and came home to Maine and school, looking thin and tired but happy to be back with us. He made me laugh again for a short time until his white blood cell count went up again and he had to leave to fight his tireless internal enemy.
When we were just barely twelve, Jim came home again and we met to walk by the lake one afternoon. His thinness made his doe eyes look even bigger and browner, and we talked easily. He wanted to know about school, what we’d been learning. I started to tell him, and he kissed me on the lips. It was a whisper of a kiss, knowing, ethereal. A few days later he had to go back to the hospital.
The next remission some months later was probably the longest. Jim was in Mr. Bowers’ homeroom too. His hair grew back dark brown, thick and curly, and he regained some of the baby fat he used to have. Maybe I was afraid of what had happened, or what might happen, but we weren’t as close as we used to be. Maybe I’d listened to my dad warning me, and tried to protect myself as he wanted to protect me. I spent most of my time with my clique of mean, vain, average twelve-year-old girlfriends. After school we’d go to each other’s houses and tape our favorite songs off the radio and try to write down all the words. My mom helped us with “I know that I must do what’s right sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.” Eventually, Jim left again for Boston, and this time he didn’t come back.
Jim’s funeral was held in the Protestant church in town. During the service, one of my friends whispered, “Remember how he used to pick his nose?” In the middle of the horror, I did remember him picking his nose in Mr. Bowers’ science class, and I had to hold my hand over my face and bite my lip so no one would see me stifling a laugh. When I came home from the service I asked my mom what all the people were saying together and she was horrified, yet unsurprised, to discover I didn’t know the Lord’s Prayer. My mother was raised reluctant Catholic and later became a devout Atheist, but she was still was ashamed that I’d never heard that prayer. She taught it to me, the Roman Catholic version, that very night, every word.
Jim’s parents and sister moved away after he died, and I didn’t see them again until our high school graduation. His mom hugged me. I felt my chest tighten, tears spring to my eyes, and I knew there was something I wanted to say but I couldn’t get it out.
I’m thirty-five now, and if I saw Jim’s family today I’d be able to tell them that I remember what a funny, intelligent, attractive son they had. I haven’t forgotten our kiss, and I’ve often wondered over the years what might have happened if he’d lived. I think we probably would have dated, maybe even married and had children. I remember preparing a science project in his warm family kitchen, twelve years old, blindfolded and smelling all kinds of delicious and aromatic things, stretching my brain trying to link words to the scents, Jim’s laughter singing in the background. When I was in my early twenties, dating all the wrong people, one failed relationship after the other, I used to think about Jim and wish he’d grown up with me, stayed with me, because everything felt right and easy with him and I couldn’t find that anywhere else.
I’ve got two young sons of my own now, four and six, and sometimes when they are testing me to my limits I think about Jim and he gives me the little extra patience that I need. I think of his parents and the hell they went through, that they’ll always be going through, and I hope to God they didn’t see me trying to stifle a laugh at his funeral. Forgive me, please. I was only twelve.
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Beth, 24; Preschool teacher; Ohio
When I was twelve, I started going to school at a new school. A new school in a rich part of town when I was just a somewhat middle class Navy brat. My mom thought it was a big deal so before I started she told me I could both shave my legs for the first time and get my ears pierced. These were both things that I had been wanting to do for a long time. Unfortunately, this sent a big message to me, and not a very good one. By letting me do this in preparation for the new school she was unknowingly telling me that how I looked was going to affect my reception at this new school. That message worked its way into my head, and from then on, every time I was going to do something new, I always tried to look my best. Yes, I know you should try to make a good impression. I obsess over it. Gradually I'm learning how to make a good impression yet still be myself.
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Rochelle Jewel Shapiro, 59; Phone psychic/writer; New York
When I was twelve, because my sisters were eight and five years older than me, I never really got to be a girl in of twelve, or rather, I hid my twelve-ness in a desperate attempt to be like them. (My mother worked at my father's grocery store ten hours a day, so we were on our own.) My sisters would send me to the candy store to buy their packs of Marlboro for them. (Back in 1959, cigarettes were a quarter a pack and the law hadn't yet forbade minors from buying them.) In the mornings, after my big sister left for college and my middle one left for high school, I'd raid their closets and try on their clothes. One day I showed up to school in stiletto heels, a slinky skirt, and a gold lame blouse, and my bra stuffed with toilet paper. My mother was called up to school to take me home.
My mother saw that I was becoming a problem, but she had no time to do anything about it. That summer, she sent me to stay with my elderly grandparents' upstate to separate me from my sisters. But, Sandra, the seventeen-year-old girl across the street believed I was as sophisticated as I pretended to be and let me hang out with her and her friends. They had fake proof and got a false ID for me as well. One night, I told my grandparents I was going across the street to watch TV at Sandra’s. Instead, Sandra and I and two of her friends went to a local bar frequented by college guys.
With my big sister in college, I knew just what to say to a college boy.
"I'm majoring in soc," I told a guy. I had no idea that “soc” meant sociology, but it convinced the guy that I was much older.
He told me he went to Colgate and that he was pre-law. Dan was cute, clean-cut. We talked for awhile about his hometown, Troy, and his kid brother who lisped and built towers out of bottle caps and his parents who taught in the local elementary school. I told him that my parents owned a dance studio and that I was an only child.
“You know what I love to do?” he asked. “I love to drive over to the cemetery to read the headstones in moonlight. Want to head over there?” he asked.
I had just finished Spoon River Anthology, a book of poems that were written from the voices of two hundred forty-four dead townsmen all lying beside each other in a graveyard.
“Love to,” I said and slipped out with him before my seventeen-year-old friends could horn in on it.
On the ride over, he turned on the radio. The Crests were singing “Sixteen Candles,” and I thought that of how no one would ever believe that, at only twelve, I had landed such a dream as Dan.
At the cemetery, he didn’t look at any tombstones. He only looked at me, his eyes so intense that I was suddenly more scared than if a ghost had risen up from a grave.
“Do you want to go?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. Instead of leaving, he put his arms around me, kissed me so hard that it hurt. Pressing his body against mine, he lowered me onto a grave and started lifting my skirt.
“Stop! Stop!” I shouted. He was still kissing me so it sounded like “Shtop, shtop!” His hands were everywhere. He began fumbling with my bra. And then I said the magic words. “I’m only twelve years old.”
He sprang right up, his hand full of crumpled toilet paper wrested from my stuffing. In cold silence, he drove me back to the bar.
Sandra rushed up to me. “I was going crazy looking for you,” she said, her face pale. And then, to insult me, she added, “I’m never babysitting for you again.”
I wasn’t insulted. I needed a babysitter. I had no idea until Sandra told me later that “Do you want to go?” was short for “Do you want to go all the way?”
For the rest of the summer, I stayed on my grandparents’ porch, drawing covered bridges and boats with my John Gnagy Art Kit. When I got home, I joined a Girl Scout Troop.
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Terra, 21; college student; Ohio
When I was twelve, I discovered the Internet. It came as a form of relief to me, rather than a tool for information or communication. As a junior high student, I was experiencing the same emotional rollercoaster that every early adolescent girl suffers, but I had the added bonus of being an outcast from the beginning. My hometown was booming, and new students were flooding into our school system every day; it was easy to get lost amongst the shuffle and, more often than not, my aptitude and maturity fell victim to this.
I had a group of friends in junior high, but as girls grow older, they grow different and they grow apart. They turn vicious and unforgiving, and the number of emotional scars I bear to this day only offers evidence to this fact. Being an introverted person, already, I would have retreated fully into myself and abandoned the effort of making healthy relationships, if it hadn't been for the Internet.
When I logged on for the first time, it was in the mid-90's, when people were at the height of paranoia about chatrooms and online relationships. I wasn't stupid, and I didn't give out my full name or my phone number or my address to anyone I spoke to via the Web. But I would spend hours -- on weekends, until two in the morning -- talking to the same people, connecting with a group of girls who aged 10 to 15.
All of these girls shared similar interests with me, but the overarching interest that truly bonded us was the fact that we were disenchanted with real-life social interactions and desperate for something more solid, more mature, and more meaningful. Over time, we shared our full names, and pictures when we could manage it -- this was the time before digital cameras and when scanners were the size of encyclopedias -- but we never heard one another's voice, never stood next to one another to compare heights or eye color, never had sleepovers, and never passed notes in class. We were an enigma to our families; I distinctly remember my brother referring to these girls as my "imaginary friends."
But if it had not been for the laughter, the joy, and the true empathy that I shared with this group of girls, I would not have survived adolescence as relatively unscathed as I am. True, I carry any number of scars from real-life experiences, but I did not have to carry them on my own. My "sisters," as we called each other, understood. We saw each other to the other side.
We've grown apart, the group of us, since then. This past Christmas, I had the opportunity to meet my friend "Jammer" in real life, for the first time. We spent only a few hours together, but the awkward silences one shares with strangers, the ones that make everyone fidget and worry, were already comfortable between us. We could smile and know exactly what the other was thinking. We could finish one another's sentences. We could hug when we parted, and know that we were each only a modem connection away.
I still can't do those things with the girls I knew in middle school.
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Jeanne, “sixtysomething”; Student/legal secretary; New York
When I was 12 my whole life changed. My beautiful baby sister was born and I found myself, thankfully, no longer an only child. I had wished and hoped for as long as I could remember for someone to share my dreams and hopes, etc. (and also take the heat off of me with my parents). Well, my life changed, but not always for the better.... I adored [her], we all adored her, especially my father...and she could do no wrong.... so now I found myself placed in the not always advantageous position of [being her] personal slave... My parents also used her as a mini-chaperone for me through my teenage years.... and so from the time she started walking, she was as attached to me as if I had an invisible umbilical cord hanging outside my body....on dates, girlfriend shopping, etc. But, being the adorable baby that she was, all my boyfriends took a liking to her and she became a sort of mascot (at times, much to my dismay). I received both joy from her being in my life and also often ugly confrontations with my parents, if God forbid she even let out a whimper....so yes my life changed completely and forever when I was 12. Today, we share more of a mother/daughter-type relationship than a sister to sister. We're not very close...sometimes 12 years is too much of a gap. Plus, not only are we from two different generations, but we're totally different in mind/body/spirit. Still, I love her dearly.
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Shannon, 36; Writer; Illinois
When I was twelve, all of my friends and I arranged our 6th grade homeroom desks in a circle facing inward. About six of us sat together this way all day. One morning, everyone but me came to school early and moved the desks. When I arrived, the circle was one desk smaller and mine was on the outside, its back to the group. During that whole year, my friends kept arranging and rearranging their loyalties. I never knew from week to week if I'd be in or out. When it was someone else who was "out" I pounced with as much meanness as the rest of them. Anything was worth it to keep yourself "in."
I don't even remember what our disputes were about and it's impossible now for me to imagine anything in the lives of 12 year-old girls that could have created such drama. The first of us to discover boys didn't do it until age 13. We were all smart and made good grades. None of us were competitive about sports; some played, some didn't.
All I remember is that the homeroom teacher was as bad as the other girls. She would align herself as fiercely with the "in" group as did the kids and she would taunt and tease the "outsiders" as cruelly. She mocked me in front of the class once for failing to get a piece of busy work in on time. When I burst into quiet tears and tried to hide them, she took me into the hall.
"You seem to be having a tough time lately, Shannon" she said as though we were bosom confidants, "Is there a problem at home; anything you need to talk to me about?"
I screamed inside "my problem is not at home, it's HERE! YOU are my problem!" I was furious with her two-faced treatment.
But I just said, "No, I just got behind, it's fine."
The year I was twelve was the worst year of my life until the year of my divorce, 16 years later.
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Heidi, 15; high-school student; Washington
When I was twelve I thought I was big. I thought I was big, and yet I still brought my teddy bear camping with me. Looking back now I realize how small I really was, but at the time I felt as though I could accomplish anything in the world. When I was twelve I was still a child. I ran around screaming in the woods, I played imaginative games, I smiled when I thought of home. The weight of the world had not yet settled on my shoulders. I had yet to become a woman. When I was twelve I was lonely. I was homeschooled and had very few friends. I was involved in a program called Wilderness Awareness School. It was the best part of my week. We learned how to live in harmony with the world, while having fun, playing games, and being in the woods. I had the opportunity of a lifetime. When I was twelve I trained my dog. Every Tuesday Charlie and I went to 4-H. It was Charlie’s favorite afternoon. I never fit in. I was the one kid who didn’t go to [traditional] school. My parents could never come to the activities, and my dog didn’t listen. I loved my dog. When I was twelve I wished for more. I wished for more friends, I wished for more hope, I wished for more fun. But despite all this, twelve was a good year. I read lots of good books, had lots of adventures, and learned a lot about myself. Being twelve prepared me for my leap into public school the next year. I am glad I was twelve.
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