The Little Friend

“Hay Hun! Didn’t you forget something?” said Nursie Vance brightly, putting an arm around Harriet (who stiffened immediately) and giving her a chummy little squeeze.

“No.”

“I didn’t get a Covenant Card from you.”

Harriet said nothing.

Nursie gave her another intrusive little hug. “You know, hun, God don’t give us but two choices! Either something’s right or it’s wrong! Either you’re a champion for Christ or you’re not!” From her pocket, she produced a blank Covenant Card.

“Now, I want you to pray over this, Harriet. And do what the Lord guides you to do.”

Harriet stared at Nursie’s puffy white tennis shoes.

Nursie clasped Harriet’s hand. “Would you like me to pray with you, hun?” she asked, confidentially, as if offering some great treat.

“No.”

“Oh, I know the Lord will lead you to the right decision on this,” said Nursie, with a twinkly enthusiasm. “Oh, I just know it!”

The girls in Harriet’s wigwam had already paired up before Harriet arrived; mostly they ignored her, and though she woke one night to find her hand in a basin of warm water, and the other girls standing around in the dark whispering and giggling at the bottom of her bunk (it was a trick, the sleeper’s hand in warm water, thought to make the sleeper wet the bed) they didn’t seem to have it in for Harriet particularly; though, of course, there had been Saran Wrap, too, stretched under the seat of the latrine. From outside, muffled laughter. “Hey, what’s taking you so long in there!” A dozen girls, doubled over laughing when she came out stony faced, with wet shorts—but surely that trick hadn’t been directed specifically at her, surely it had been just her bad luck? Still, everybody else seemed to be in on the joke: Beth and Stephanie, Beverley and Michelle, Marcy and Darci and Sara Lynn, Kristle and Jada and Lee Ann and Devon and Dawn. They were mostly from Tupelo and Columbus (the girls from Alexandria, not that she liked them any better, were in Oriole and Goldfinch wigwams); they were all taller than Harriet, and older-looking; girls who wore flavored lip gloss and cut-off jeans and rubbed themselves with coconut oil on the water-ski dock. Their conversation (the Bay City Rollers; the Osmonds; some boy named Jay Jackson who went to their school) bored and irritated her.

And Harriet had expected this. She had expected the “covenant” cards. She had expected the bleakness of life without library books; she had expected the team sports (which she loathed) and the skit nights, and the hectoring Bible classes; she had expected the discomfort and tedium of sitting in a canoe in the broiling windless afternoons and listening to stupid conversations about whether Dave was a good Christian, whether Wayne had been to second base with Lee Ann or whether Jay Jackson drank.

And all this was bad enough. But Harriet was going to be in the eighth grade next year; and what she had not expected was the horrifying new indignity of being classed—for the first time ever—a “Teen Girl”: a creature without mind, wholly protuberance and excretion, to judge from the literature she was given. She had not expected the chipper, humiliating filmstrips filled with demeaning medical information; she had not expected mandatory “rap sessions” where the girls were not only urged to ask personal questions—some of them, to Harriet’s mind, frankly pornographic—but to answer them as well.

During these discussions, Harriet burned radiant with hatred and shame. She felt degraded by Nursie’s blithe assumption that she—Harriet—was no different from these stupid Tupelo girls: preoccupied with under-arm odor, the reproductive system, and dating. The haze of deodorant and “hygiene” sprays in the changing rooms; the stubbly leg hair, the greasy lip gloss: everything was tainted with a slick oil of “puberty,” of obscenity, right down to the sweat on the hot dogs. Worse: Harriet felt as though one of the gruesome transparencies of “Your Developing Body”—all womb, and tubes, and mammaries—had been projected over her poor dumb body; as if all anybody saw when they looked at her—even with her clothes on—were organs and genitalia and hair in unseemly places. Knowing that it was inevitable (“just a natural part of growing up!”) was no better than knowing that someday she would die. Death, at least, was dignified: an end to dishonor and sorrow.

True: some of the girls in her cabin, Kristle and Marcy in particular, had good senses of humor. But the more womanly of her cabin-mates (Lee Ann, Darci, Jada, Dawn) were coarse, and frightening; and Harriet was revolted by their eagerness to be identified in crude biological terms, like who had “tits” and who didn’t. They talked about “necking” and being “on the rag”; they used poor English. And they had absolutely filthy minds. Here, Harriet had said, when Lee Ann was trying to fix her life jacket, you sort of screw it in, like this—