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

would remain so until I changed my mind, stopped being so babyish, and accepted Joey Meadows’s request to go with him.
    Suddenly I had gone from being Shoshona’s “friend” to being the object of her scorn and antipathy. I was mortified.
    I didn’t cry in front of her. I had more pride than that. But I spent plenty of hours in my bedroom closet weeping as if my heart would break. I didn’t want to be called Maggot Cabbage for the rest of my life. But then, I didn’t want to go with anybody, either.
    It didn’t take long for my parents to catch on that something was wrong, primarily because most nights I wouldn’t come out of the closet. Finally, one evening my father crawled in there with me and asked what was the matter. I explained about Maggot Cabbage and Shoshona. I listed the myriad ways Shoshona had taken over the class—swinging classmates Muffy and Monique (the only names that have been changed in this essay are those of the innocent) to her side; making faces at me and rude remarks, if when the class split into groups, I tried to join my old friends Becky, Barbara, and Erika, who liked and accepted me just the way I was; calling me a baby when I wouldn’t play “chase the boys” on the playground at recess; making fun of my homemade clothes and nondesigner jeans; laughing at the fact that I was forbidden from watching Starsky and Hutch.
    My father, a computer science professor who was the first in his family to go to college—on a basketball scholarship, no less—was not particularly versed in psychology, let alone child psychology. And he seemed to know next to nothing about women, having dated exactly one in his entire life—my mother.
    His desire to help with my situation, however, was heartfelt. He showed me—right there in the closet—how to make a fist (never tuck the thumb on the inside. You might break it) and always to aim for the nose (if you aim for the mouth, you might cut your knuckles on your opponent’s teeth).
    Yes. My father advised that the next time Shoshona called me a baby or Maggot Cabbage, I should punch her in the face.
    I was horrified. I had never punched anyone before in my life (not counting my brothers. But I had never hit them in the face, preferring the more sisterly practices of “Indian rubs” and pinching).
    The situation had clearly progressed to a point where something needed to be done. But what, to my father, indicated a need for fisticuffs, to my mother showed a need for something else entirely. Always a woman of action, Mom placed a single phone call and purchased a single book. The phone call was to my teacher (though I begged Mom not to tell Mrs. Hunter what was going on, certain that word would get out that Maggot Cabbage was such a baby, she couldn’t handle her own affairs), and the book was for me. The book was called Blubber.
    I don’t remember if I recognized myself in its pages. Certainly I, a timid child, had never been so bold as to egg anyone’s house (whether or not they deserved it) as Jill, the narrator, does. Nor had I ever participated as actively in tormenting another student as Jill does at one point in the novel.
    But there had been a certain girl—I’ll call her R.—at a school I’d attended previous to attending Elm Heights, whom I, along with everyone else in the class, had found insufferable.
    And though I myself had never joined in on teasing her, I had certainly never done anything to stop it, somewhat relishing R.’s comeuppance (she was incredibly bright, and like many bright children, came off to those of us who were of more average intelligence as a horrible know-it-all).
    What I took away from Blubber during that first reading, at the age of ten, was that doing nothing to stop the tormenting of a classmate was, in its own way, every bit as bad as if I had been one of the ringleaders. Certainly Linda was as obnoxious and deserving of