Free Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott Page B

downcast eyes, say something, at which everybody laughed. Then they looked over her head at each other, like amused royalty, and Elizabeth was filled with distress at the sight of Rosie’s transparency.
    Hallie invited her back for lunch the next day. But after that it was on and off and on again, and Rosie never knew what to expect. Then she called and invited Rosie to come over after school and play on the trampoline. Elizabeth wanted to forbid this but did not see how she could. Her own mother had had a fear of trampolines that bordered on the pathological. The family across the street from the house in which Elizabeth grew up had owned the town’s first trampoline, andthis was the most popular house in the neighborhood. All the kids played there, waiting their turn to jump—all except Elizabeth, whose drunken mother never let her go. She had read an article in
Life
about a valiant young girl who was learning to live a full life in a wheelchair, after having broken her neck while doing a back flip on a trampoline, and from then on Elizabeth’s mother viewed the apparatus as a springboard to paraplegia. Her father was not around enough to stand up and fight for Elizabeth’s rights. And when Elizabeth, who had one long black eyebrow spanning both eyes and was lonely as a manatee, begged to join in, the mother looked at her with scorn, as if, at eight, Elizabeth wanted to borrow the car.
    S O Elizabeth gave Rosie permission to play at Hallie’s, and then found herself holding her breath off and on until Rosie came home again, whole and mobile.
    So it went all year, with Rosie praying for inclusion with the popular girls. Sometimes she was invited, sometimes they just waved gaily and passed her by. Then one day in February Hallie had brought Rosie to the table for lunch, and conversation stopped.
    The girls looked worriedly at one another until Hallie began to chatter about how awful their gym teacher was, who had a huge mole under one of her arms that made them all sick to their stomachs.
    “But there’s something happening, I just know it,” Rosie had confided miserably to her mother that day after school.
    “What do you think was going on?” Elizabeth asked, who remembered the same girls—the exact same batch but with slightly different hairstyles—from twenty-five years before.
    Rosie looked around jerkily, as if the answer were flitting about the room like a moth. Her nostrils flared. She shrugged.
    “It’s probably nothing,” said Elizabeth. “You’ll see.”
    But it turned out to be something big. One of the girls was throwing a Valentine’s Day party at her house, catered by her mother, a sit-down dinner for the six girls and their boyfriends or dates. Hallie explained apologetically that the only reason Rosie was not being invited was because it was for couples. Rosie came home and went to her room, slamming the door. Elizabeth went upstairs to investigate. Rosie wouldn’t let her in, but two hours later, when Elizabeth encounteredher in the hallway, her eyes were nearly swollen shut with crying. Rosie let her mother hug her, hold her, in the hallway, but wouldn’t explain the source of her grief. Finally she told Elizabeth and James at dinner.
    “Oh, that’s hateful,” said Elizabeth.
    “They’re despicable,” said James.
    “Hallie’s really nice,” said Rosie.
    “Fuck Hallie,” said James. “I wouldn’t even watch her commit suicide.”
    Rosie hung her head. She felt like she might be about to black out. The pain inside her mind had a sound to it, but it was so sharp you could hardly discern it, like a dog whistle, pitched that high.
    S O she ended up back with Simone. They practiced together almost every day after school, spent countless hours in each other’s rooms, speaking in a private language somewhere between pig Latin and the “Name Game” about boys, their weight, their mothers, the dogs they would have one day. Elizabeth rarely came to pick Rosie up at Simone’s