Homesick by Sela Ward Read Free Book Online Page A

“lead-out.” Girls dressed in long gowns to be formally announced; sporting black tie, their dates would escort them to the front of a stage to have their photograph taken, then we’d go home and change into pants for the dance.
    These clubs were the center of our high school social life, and if you didn’t belong to one, you were relegated to the margins. The pressure to conform, and the fear of not belonging, was so great that most kids were willing to put up with sadistic hazing during the pledge period, which not for nothing was called Hell Week. For the girls the ordeal was purely emotional, but the boys had to suffer physical abuse, too. It was pretty cruel, actually.
    If you were a girl suffering through Hell Week, you weren’t allowed to shave your legs. You weren’t allowed to drive—you had to ride your bicycle everywhere. You couldn’t see a guy. (I got “caught” once when a boy I was friendly with stopped by, for a completely innocent visit; I leapt into bed to pretend sickness, and narrowly escaped censure.) You’d have to deliver small gifts, called “happies,” to older members of the club. If you’d run into a member during that week, you’d have to perform a charming little move called an “air raid,” which involved falling immediately to the ground and reciting something you’d been told to memorize. I remember having to commit to memory, among other things, the lyrics to “Sweet Baby James” by James Taylor. And during Hell Night, the culmination of it all, the older girls would scream at you, crack eggs over your head, make you write essays on toilet paper—anything to force their will upon you.
    But for me those humiliations were just a start. Two of the girls, Cheri and Sally, decided they would make me wear a sign everywhere that said I’M BEAUTIFUL AND I KNOW IT . I was an extremely self-conscious fourteen-year-old, and have never felt more vulnerable. I’d never given too much thought to how I looked, and I was far too shy and insecure to be conceited. But that’s not how the other girls saw me. They didn’t even know me, but they were determined to take me down a peg.
    Walking around with that poster board sign hanging around my neck for a week was perhaps the most scarring experience of my young life. I allowed these girls, whose adolescent envy, self-doubt, and insecurity were at high tide, to humiliate me in order to bolster their own fragile self-image. Worse yet, I allowed them to do it because I so wanted to belong to their club. I let them make me wear a sign that made me seem haughty and arrogant, knowing it was intended to publicly cancel out whatever physical beauty I possessed. They believed that everything came easy to me, and by God, they were going to rob me of that.
    At the age of fourteen, it truly felt as if they were murdering my soul. Even now, all these years later, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I remember feeling so confused, convinced I must have deserved that kind of treatment—that I was so worthless it only made sense for the other girls to treat me that way. These girls were troubled, I now see, and they had to cut me down to size to alleviate their own feelings of inadequacy. With the passage of time, of course, we find ways to explain such things away, and even forgive them. But the mark they make on us is indelible.
    It took me years to get over the pain and doubt inflicted upon me in that solitary week of humiliation. Every time I would accomplish something that had anything to do with my physical appearance—becoming a cheerleader, being elected Homecoming Queen in college, becoming a model—I would be racked by self-doubt, haunted by the worry that I was a hollow person with nothing to offer but an attractive façade. All because of a culture—a culture especially prized in the South, I realize—that made a contest, and a currency, of adolescent beauty, and in the process turned generations of young women against one another.