The Stranger

I was new to the neighborhood and didn’t really know any children yet. To make matters worse, I attended a school in a different area to my own, making it even harder to get to know children in the area.

We had recently moved in to this new neighborhood, built on the very top of the hill that was our suburb. I have been told that now, more than 20 years later, locals still refer to these houses as Nybygget, ‘the new houses’. These houses were built despite local protests, as many of the inhabitants of this quiet suburban neighborhood felt that a large amount of houses looking exactly alike would uglify the neighborhood. This was during the times when houses that came in completed parts were still a rare sight.

As these houses were all exactly the same, they were in comparison quite a bargain. Thus, they were mainly populated by new families, young professionals with toddlers. As far as I knew, there were no children my age on my street. I was therefore a very lonely seven year old girl during the weekends.

I have always been much more of a reader and thinker than a doer. When I did set out to do things, I was usually up to no good, being a very curious young girl. Thus, on weekend afternoons, I would mostly sit up in my room, reading the latest acquirement from the mobile library, a bus that would come to the neighborhood a few times a week.

My mother would, every now and again stick her head in to suggest that I should go out and get some fresh air (but to stay close where she could see me).

One such afternoon I found myself on the porch of my house, accompanied by a tennis ball that I was bouncing towards the ground. I was so deep into my own thoughts that I did not notice that I was being watched. As I looked up, I found a few children, led by a girl, roughly my own age. It was a very skinny girl, much like myself, with cream colored skin and large brown eyes. She was staring at me, shamelessly curious, with an open mouth, the way nine year old children do.

Imagine me now. I had longed so for a playmate, a companion and a best friend in this new unfriendly toddler-infested neighborhood. Just as I had become quite convinced that the neighborhood was only inhabited by these toddlers and their parents, a girl my own age shows up at my doorstep. I was filled with all sorts of emotions that were too great for me to handle. “What should I do? What shall I say?”
I desperately wanted these children to like me.

Now, there are a number of things you can say at a time like this (the most obvious one being “hello”). However, I wanted to seem cool, to leave these children in awe, so that they would realize that they simply had to become my friends.
WHAT SHOULD I DO, WHAT SHOULD I SAY?!

Eventually, I opened my mouth and uttered this very intelligent phrase:
-“What the hell are you staring at? Did you have staring soup for dinner?”

Any hint of a smile that the stranger had on her face vanished in a flash. Instead, she looked at me with outrage and turned right around, sticking her tongue out at me. Then, followed by her little friends (well, they were actually her cousins, but I didn’t know that at the time) she proudly marched away, leaving me alone with my tennis ball yet again.

This was my first and very harsh lesson in the art of social skills.
As for the girl, you needn’t worry too much. She got over it. Next time I saw her, in a severe state of what only can be construed as a pure guilt trip (and part desperation), I followed her around, shamelessly sucking up to her. I think she thought I was a complete loon. In fact, I think she still thinks I am a complete loon.

That is why I am to be a bridesmaid at her wedding this summer.