Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume by Jennifer OConnell

Shoshona, disgusted, stomped home, not even apologizing for making me sick…or, as my parents later discovered, for breaking the chair).
    You might think an afternoon that ended in vomit would have dampened my enthusiasm about pursuing a friendship with a person who disdained the pursuits I enjoyed yet could think of no alternative activities, save those that caused me to lose my lunch and ruined my parents’ furniture.
    But that was the power Shoshona held over me—the same power Wendy, in Blubber, holds over Jill. I was shy. Shoshona was not. I was willing to let others have their way in an effort to get them to like me. Shoshona was not. I, along with the rest of the girls in my class, worshipped Shoshona the way Jill, in Blubber, worships Wendy—the way any ten-year-
old worships a natural leader—even though it turned out her T-shirt had lied: Shoshona had no discernible talents. She couldn’t sing, for instance, like my friend Becky, or do backflips, like my friend Erika, or do fractions in her head, like Barbara. In fact, Shoshona was almost No Talent and All Talk.
    The desk chair incident was devastating to me. Shoshona had come to my house, and she had a bad time! How would I ever live it down? How would I get back in her good graces?
    I felt even worse when my attempt to redeem myself in Shoshona’s eyes by having a “cool” birthday party with a Freaky Friday theme—everyone was to come dressed as their mother—fell flat. My friends Becky, Erika, and Barbara arrived dressed like me, in long trailing gowns with white gloves, loaded down with rhinestone jewelry, giggling like mad. Shoshona, however, didn’t dress in her mother’s clothes. She wore an exact replica of her mother’s clothes—but in her own size: business attire for the busy ten-year-old executive. She narrowed her eyes at the rest of us in our floppy hats and too-big high heels and told us we looked like a “bunch of babies.”
    We were only too ready to agree with her. Being Canadian, Shoshona seemed hopelessly cosmopolitan. She had some very fancy ways compared to us Hoosiers. It was Shoshona who introduced our class to the titillating concept of “going together.” She and Jeff Niehardt were going together by the end of Shoshona’s first day at Elm Heights. It didn’t take much longer than that for most of the rest of the class to pair up.
    Everyone except for me and my friends. Like Becky, Erika, and Barbara, I didn’t want to “go with” anyone.
    Still, most of the talking Shoshona did was about boys. Though I had no particular interest in boys at the time, it was clear from the way Shoshona carried on that the interests I did have—Barbies and The Boxcar Children —were babyish and that I needed to “grow up.”
    This was news to me. Things had seemed to be going swimmingly for me in Mrs. Hunter’s fourth-grade class until Shoshona came along and pointed out that in actual truth they were not. My friends—particularly sensitive Erika, who cried when her science experiment involving glucose didn’t turn out, and beanpole brain Barbara, whose main offense, according to Shoshona, was that she was good in math, a trait that would certainly never win her any dates—were as babyish as I was. If I ever wanted to grow up, I needed to be more like Shoshona.
    And I needed to get a boyfriend, pronto.
    It was my reluctance to go with anybody that really horrified Shoshona. She suggested I go with Joey Meadows, a fifth grader, and even got him to ask me to go with him. Nice as I found Joey, I wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment. So I gently turned down his kind (read: terrified. He was as scared of Shoshona as the rest of us were) offer.
    Little did I know how this simple act would enrage Shoshona. The very next day when I arrived at school, I was no longer Meggin Cabot. According to Shoshona, I was now Maggot Cabbage and