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

mocking as R. had been, but that didn’t make what had been done to her or to R. right…
    â€¦any more than what Shoshona was doing to me was right.
    I knew that I, like Jill in Blubber, was going to have to learn not to punch Shoshona but to laugh off her taunts. At the very least, I was going to have to stop letting them bother me.
    And that wasn’t going to be as hard as it sounded. I had gotten to a point where I no longer wanted Shoshona as a friend. I no longer cared if she liked me. I found her, in fact, boring. What fun is spinning around in a chair when you could mutilate Ken (who had already permanently lost an arm in a tragic war accident) or read a book?
    So the very next day during art, while Mrs. Hunter’s fourth-grade class was gathered around the clay table and I said something to Erika that cracked her up—but caused Shoshona to raise her eyebrows and go, “God, Maggot, could you be more of a baby?”—I did it.
    Oh, I didn’t punch her in the face (though, thanks to my father, I knew how). Instead, I said the phrase I’d been rehearsing since finishing Blubber.
    â€œLook, Shoshona,” I said. “You be you, and I’ll be me. If you think what I like and what I do is babyish, that’s fine. You don’t have to like them or do them. But don’t expect me to stop liking them just because you don’t. Because I’m not you.”
    Shoshona, blinking in astonishment at this mild statement—which was, given that it had come from me, one of the shyest girls in the class, quite an outburst—said, “God. Okay. You didn’t have to yell.”
    It’s no coincidence that Mrs. Hunter dropped the bomb later that day that she understood there were children in her class who were going together. Never, Mrs. Hunter said, had she heard of anything more ridiculous. Fourth graders, she said, do not “go together.” She added that if she heard any more reports of children going together, she would send the offenders to Mrs. Harrigan, the principal, a fate—needless to say—worse than death. When Shoshona raised a hand to protest, Mrs. Hunter looked her dead in the eye and said simply, “Shoshona. Don’t.”
    Shoshona made a face to show how unfair she thought Mrs. Hunter was being, and I watched as Jeff Niehardt sadly erased his beloved’s name from the inside of his pencil box. Shoshona swore at recess that when she and Jeff turned eighteen, no one, not even Mrs. Harrigan, would stop them from going together.
    I’m not sure if that actually happened, because Shoshona moved back to Canada at the end of the school year, and I personally never saw her again. All I know was, after that day, no one—not even Shoshona—called me Maggot Cabbage again.
    But I’ve thought of Shoshona—and Blubber —often over the past thirty years. Not even one year later, a girl named—ironically—Judy became the target of some of Shoshona’s bullies-in-training, Muffy and Monique, for wearing blue eyeshadow and sleeping during social studies. When Judy didn’t bother to come to her own defense, I did, making sure Judy had someone to sit with at lunch and someone to swing with at recess. Muffy and Monique, not being anywhere near as vicious as Shoshona, soon lost interest.
    Middle school followed, with a whole new batch of social misfits who were targeted by a whole new batch of bullies. The tears in the girls’ room flowed freely and copiously—sometimes from Muffy and Monique, who in turn became victims themselves and eventually my friends.
    But I myself was never again a victim. Blubber had taught me how to stand up for myself and even—amazingly—how to defuse situations for others. Soon I found myself coming to the defense of R.—the girl from my previous elementary school—when we met again in high school. R. had lost none of her insufferable know-itallness in the years