Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume Read Online Free Page B

can’t sleep, I lie awake in the darkness and listen to sounds (which certainly doesn’t help my efforts to fall asleep). In my mind, the creaks and rappings and rattlings begin to sound like doors opening, the wires of our alarm system being snipped with scissors, and windows sliding up their tracks until the opening is just wide enough for a body to slip through. The body is always clad in black. And it’s big.
    Do I get out of bed and investigate? No way. Instead, I construct my own elaborate story—the one in which I save my husband and two children from the perilous hands of that large stranger hiding in the bushes outside our family room. Much like Sally J. Freedman envisioned herself standing up to Adolph Hitler and, as a ten-year-old girl, single-
handedly ending World War II, I will rescue my family from danger. And knowing that I have a story, that I’ve already worked out all the details to the plan in my head, helps me feel a little better as I close my eyes and fall asleep listening for footsteps.
    Apparently a Judy Blume moment can occur at 3 A.M. and involves the use a retractable fire escape ladder as pictured on page 87 of SkyMall.
    Caitlin held her at arm’s length for a minute. “God, Vix…” she said, “you look so…grownup!” They both laughed, then Caitlin hugged her. She smelled of seawater, suntan lotion, and something else. Vix closed her eyes, breathing in the familiar scent, and it was as if they’d never been apart.
    â€”Summer Sisters
    We rented a house on Martha’s Vineyard for a week in August. Vicki and Vangie, my two best friends from college, and our families. Our families! We had husbands! And children! Somebody was entrusting their home to us for seven days (although their trust was backed up by a healthy $1,000 security deposit). The fact that we were staying in a four-bedroom house instead of the nylon Target-purchased tent Vicki and I shacked up in during a postcollege cross-country trip made it very clear: we were grown-ups.
    We lit the barbecue at night, drank beers, and laughed. During the day, we hit the sand and surf. And when I ran out of magazines, I explored the bookshelf in the living room, desperate for some beach reading.
    The first book I picked out had a familiar name on the cover and a photo of an Adirondack chair. It was a story about childhood friends who reunite every summer on Martha’s Vineyard. (I was on Martha’s Vineyard!) The novel followed the girls through high school, college, and adulthood. (I was with my best girlfriends from college and now we were adults!) It chronicled their changing lives, and more importantly, their changing friendship as they grew up and grew apart.
    I remember reading that book surrounded by two friends who’d known me since I was an eighteen-year-old girl, a college freshman for all of four hours. And I remember looking around me, watching our young children and husbands, and wondering if our friendship would change as our lives continued to be separated by miles and marriage and careers and the noise of everyday life. And I remember being wistful and sad and nostalgic, but most of all I remember being hopeful. And now, so many years later, our children have grown, our marriages have changed and in some cases dissolved, but we’re still hopeful. And this year we’ll be on Martha’s Vineyard in August, and we’ll light the barbecue, drink some beers, and laugh.
    A Judy Blume moment is realizing that even as we get older, even as our lives and the people around us are changing—even as we’re changing—we’ll always be the girls who play in the waves and giggle with our friends.
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    There are the experiences we know we’re supposed to commit to memory, the days we’re taught to believe are pivotal—our first kiss, our sweet sixteen, the first time we thought we were in love, and the inevitable first time our heart breaks in