Things Were Better Before We Moved.

This is my back yard in Westminister. That window in back of me is my window, from the room I share with my sister Linda. We have a bunk bed, and I sleep in the bottom bunk because I'm the bigger one. Linda sleeps in the top bunk, with rails on her bed like it's a crib. One time I have this cake by my bed. It's a Little Debbie cake, that came in a plastic bag, and it has white frosting on top and white cream in the middle. I don't eat it in time and ants come into my room and get it. I tell Mama and Daddy that I know there are ants in my room because I can smell them (they smell like how blue cheese tastes). They don't believe me, but then they look, and they find them. Mama and Daddy are very impressed at me because I can smell ants.

When I am going on six, we move to Oxnard. We go before we have a house to move into, so we have to stay in a hotel. We stay on the second floor at the Colonial House Motel. It is very bad trying to live in a motel. Mama has this bag with boxes of cereal in it. She has these plastic cereal bowls, and she gets us milk so we can have cereal in the morning. At night we go to restaurants. They're always grown-up restaurants, that serve weird-tasting grown-up food that's not like the food Mama used to cook us when we were at home. Linda and I don't like it, but we have to eat it or we'll get spanked. Usually at least one of us gets spanked every night when we have supper.

A bus stops at the motel and takes me to school every day. This isn't the school I used to go to back in Westminister, where everyone liked me, and it was so little that all the grades except Kindergarten met in one room. This is a big school, called Camarillo Christian School. It has different rooms for every grade, and a bunch of girls I don't know that I have to make friends with. I'm new, but I play school with the other girls at recess time. I'm always the student and they're always the teachers. I let them put tape on my mouth like the teachers do to bad kids, and that's why they let me play.

It's a really bad-smelling bus that takes me to school. It smells like car exhaust smells when you stand back by the tailpipe, only worse. Practically every day, I throw up, either on the way to school or on the way home. Sometimes I throw up going both ways. I have this beautiful Little Kiddle flower power van that I just got for Christmas, and I want to take it to school for Show and Tell, but when I'm on my way to school, I throw up all over it. Mama washes it when I get home, but it still smells like barf.

Linda and I have a new baby sister named Karen. She barfs, and she poops her pants, and she smells bad, but Mama gets mad if you point any of that out. She and Daddy always say “you have to be quiet because the baby's asleep,” and “you have to be nice to the baby,” and they take a million pictures of her doing nothing except sleeping or sitting in her baby chair. Linda and I don't like her.

Then we move into a house. We move even before there is furniture in there. It's right before Linda's birthday, so we sit on the ground when we have her birthday dinner. We all sit around in a circle, and her cake with the four candles is in the middle. I give her a doll's baby bottle that I bought. It looks like it's got real milk in it, and then when you turn it upside down, it looks like the doll's drinking the milk. Robin and I have a bedroom that we share, in our new house. The baby, Karen, gets her own room all to herself. Mama decorates it with pretty, new-looking furniture. Linda and I don't get any new furniture.

My birthday comes, and I have a birthday party, and all my friends from Camarillo Christian School are invited. I get a stuffed toy skunk who's got a red beret that looks French, and big, pretty eyes. I get a Skipper doll (that loses all her hair, but I still think she's beautiful). Then school is over, and I go to summer school, and then I start at a new school in the fall. Mama says Camarillo Christian School is too far away.

I go to Harrington Elementary School. The Principal is Mr. Guyere, and he's very nice. My teacher is Mrs. Gardiner, and she's even nicer. She wears her hair in a bun like a secretary on TV, and she takes us on a field trip to a dairy, where we all get free cartons of milk. Then she tells Mama and Daddy that she doesn't think I'm ready for Second Grade yet, and just like that, I am back in First. There's no room in any of the First Grades at Harrington, so I go to a different school where I don't know anybody.

I only make one friend the whole year. Her name is Faith, and she says her “r”s like “w”s, like Elmer Fudd. What we do together is we go down to the far end of the playground where none of the other kids are. We find pieces of broken records that big kids have dropped, and we use them to scrape the bark off twigs and make them pretty and smooth-looking. We collect feathers, which Faith calls “fedders”. I have the sniffles practically the whole time I am there. I wear a pale blue sweater that I got as a hand-me-down, and I wipe my nose on the sleeve because I don't have any Kleenex. I get chapped lips and I lick them because I don't have Chap-Stick, and a big red ring of hurty sores grows all around my mouth.

At home, I have to do chores. I wipe the table after meals, and I help do the dishes. I don't mind doing the dishes, because I play games while I do it. I make up stories about the silverware: The forks are Kings, because it looks like they have crowns on. The spoons are Princesses. And the knives are the soldiers that guard them, because they look like spears. Sometimes it takes me a very long time to do the dishes. I don't like wiping the table, though. The sponge always smells stinky, and there's all this dried food that sticks to Robin's and my placemats (and especially to Karen's high chair tray). I try to get it off with the sponge, but it just stays there.

Sometimes I pretend that we still live in Westminister. I lie in bed and I tell myself that we didn't move after all, it was all just a dream. I pretend that I will open my eyes and get up, and, and when I walk out my bedroom door, I will find my old house and everything back the way it used to be. When I first do this, I really believe that it might turn out that way. Then time goes by, and stuff happens. I keep moving schools, and every time I move, I have less and less friends, and more and more kids make fun of me. By the time I get to the Sixth Grade, I have moved schools seven times. I know there is no way I could have dreamed everything that has happened since I left Westminister, but I still go to sleep at night pretending it's true.