Virginia: Pony Tails

Grace Anne is probably the most ridiculous person I know. I have always thought so, and I now I pretty much know that it is absolutely true. I have never heard of another kid in all of Tennessee or even all of America who has ever done anything as ridiculous as the thing Grace Anne did yesterday. 

Our group was just sitting in my yard, eating sandwiches after school (except for Suzanne whose mother is on the Atkins diet. She was eating tuna salad rolled up in lettuce) when Grace Anne came outside and asked if any of us would come in and play My Little Ponies with her. Samantha had just given her a whole great box of My Little Ponies that she said she had outgrown and thought some little kid like Grace Anne might like better. Grace Anne is all about toys and will even make toys out of things that aren’t like grapes and crayons and nail polish, but you should see her when she’s got real toys. She can really do some wacky stuff then. 

Caroline said we were too old to play with dumb old ponies, which Malorie thought wasn’t ver nice but Malorie only said that because she got two My Little Ponies for her birthday and I know she still plays with them. Samantha said thanks, but she didn’t care to ever look at them again and Margo and Suzanne were too busy trying to french braid each other’s hair to bother answering. Charlotte asked whatever was a My Little Pony and was it absolutely necessary to call it a My Little Pony every time we mentioned it or could we just call them ponies? 

Juliet and I just said no thanks. Juliet has a younger sister too and we know how ridiculous kids can be. But Grace Anne crossed her arms and said that when our cousin got here to babysit for the weekend that she would play My Little Ponies with her and that all of us had gotten boring and now that she thought about it she didn’t want to play with us anyway and she had pencil erasers that were more fun than we were. She went back inside then and Caroline asked if our cousin really was coming to babysit for the weekend and I said yes. Katie is our cousin from North Carolina and since my parents are away for the weekend she is coming to stay with me and Grace Anne. She’s 17 and can drive and stuff so my parents ask her to come stay with us when they’re going to be gone for a couple of days. 

Katie got there a few minutes later and all my friends were very curious about her since she is a teenager and has a boyfriend and a purse and only Malorie ever carries a purse and we all know that she only keeps Skittles and a mirror in it so it isn’t all that interesting. But Katie’s purse is fascinating (that was a spelling word last week and it is probably one of the hardest ones I’ve had but I practiced it a bunch and got it right on the test). She has pictures of her boyfriend and her other friends in this little plastic picture book, about seven different types of lipstick, Big Red and Juicy Fruit gum (she wouldn’t give us any because she said she wouldn’t have enough for everyone and she is like most babysitters and grown ups who only do what is extremely fair when there are a lot of kids around), and a wallet with money and her drivers license in it, and Tic Tacs. It was very fascinating. 

While Katie was sitting in the yard showing us what was in her purse, Grace Anne came back out and said “Come on Katie, let’s play My Little Ponies! I’m going to be the pink and purple and yellow ones, but I saved some for you to be!” Katie said she would come  in a few minutes after we had dumped everything out of her purse and put it all back, and Grace Anne acted like that was about the worst thing she had ever heard and went back inside and slammed the door, which my mom would have punished her for doing if she had been there. Then she opened the door again and said that it would be a lot of fun and it was ok if Katie didn’t remember how to play My Little Ponies because Grace Anne would teach her. Katie said to give her just a few more minutes and then she would come inside but Grace Anne just slammed the door again.  

Anyway, Katie ended up staying outside a long time. We asked her questions about high school and drivers licenses and how anyone ever decides they want a boyfriend, and we all completely forgot about Grace Anne. Samantha asked if Katie was looking at colleges and she told her a few that she recommended which I thought was ridiculous coming from Samantha. Juliet asked if high school lunches gave you an option of regular milk or soy milk and Suzanne asked if anyone ever brought their lunch to high school or if everyone bought from the cafeteria line, which is Suzanne’s dream. Margo didn’t ask anything but just kept redoing french braids in Katie’s hair, and Caroline tried to talk Katie into letting her “borrow” a piece of Big Red gum, which is a joke because everyone knows you don’t borrow gum. Malorie was thrilled because Katie gave her one of her old lipsticks that was mostly gone and Malorie is always thrilled with old make-up. 

After all this had gone on for a pretty long time Katie said she better check on Grace Anne, and the girls thought it was time for them to go home and they all hugged Katie and said how beautiful she was and told her a bunch of dumb secrets about the boys they were thinking of liking and how they all couldn’t wait to get their driver’s license which I agree is a pretty fascinating subject, and Charlotte said in the UK their family had lived in the city and usually taken the bus or walked so she wouldn’t have needed to get her license if she still lived there but now she’s quite interested. Then they all went home and Katie and I went inside with her purse. 

That’s when we saw the really ridiculous thing Grace Anne had done. She was sitting on the couch in the living room watching Arthur on TV, and we saw that she had left the My Little Ponies all over the floor in families, which didn’t surprise me at all. Grace Anne groups everything into families. She didn’t look at us when we came in and even when Katie said she would play My Little Ponies with her now Grace Anne only shrugged and kept watching Arthur on TV. Katie is a pretty nice teenager and she sat down on the floor and started to pick up some of the My Little Ponies when we both noticed none of them had their tails. They all had these little holes in their bottoms where their blue or pink or purple or green tails were supposed to be and Katie and I had no idea what was going on. 

Katie said, “Grace Anne, where are all the tails? Were they like this when you got them?” Grace Anne said that no she had taken them out and hid them and Katie asked her why in the world would she do a thing like that? Grace Anne said it was because she wanted them to grow new ones and I about lost it. Katie didn’t look like she thought it was as funny as I did and asked Grace Anne for the tails and Grace Anne pointed to the box that Samantha had given her the My Little Ponies in. When Katie and I looked in the box there was a pile of rainbow hair and it looked like Grace Anne had given a clown a hair cut. Me and Katie sat down and it took us two more Arthur episodes to stick all of those tails back into the holes in the My LIttle Ponies’ bottoms and I could tell that Katie was not happy about it. I still thought it was funny but Grace Anne didn’t think it was funny at all and asked us why we were putting them back in and that if we left them out we could watch them grow new tails that could be more beautiful than their old ones, which she thought were not the beautiful kind of tails that real My Little Ponies should have. I kind of thought she was right but I told her that the My Little Ponies were just old because Samantha had played with them for a long time before she outgrew them and that the tails had probably been beautiful when they were new. 

Right now Grace Anne is in her bedroom playing My Little Ponies but she said she didn’t want me or Katie to play with her. She says we don’t believe that they’re magical and that she also doesn’t want to play with us because we can never remember which My Little Ponies are families. She can be a pretty ridiculous kid.

Virginia: Charlotte of the Uk

Our newest friend is Charlotte and it’s fortunate for her that she is our friend, considering what she put us all through. She moved into the house down the road from me and it was a big to-do. I had never heard of a to-do before but Charlotte told us all about them. Her family encounters a lot of to-dos, I think. ‘Encounters’ is one of this week’s spelling words and I think it’s great. 

After Charlotte’s family was settled, our group decided to go introduce ourselves, as we had seen that there was a girl about our age moving in and we are usually very curious about girls who are about our age. When we got to her front door, we saw a sign that said: The WINSTONS of The UK. 

Suzanne asked where in the world was Uk (she said it like "uck" which is how we all thought it should be said), and we all agreed we’d never heard of such a place before, and that it really sounded made-up. We could imagine a girl about our age coming up with such a ridiculous sounding place, but the fact that her family had hung a whole sign beside their front door that said “UK” on it made us think that perhaps her parents were a little ridiculous too. Malorie said that maybe people from Uk are eccentric, which I thought was a very show-off thing to say since it hasn’t even been one of our spelling words yet, and Caroline asked if we couldn’t just go play in her treehouse instead of meeting the girl about our age and we all thought that was probably an exceptional idea. 

We didn’t think much about the new girl who was about our age again until Monday when she showed up to our classroom, and none of us could even believe what she had on. It was a navy shirt with white letters on it and it said: I ❤ UK, just like the I ❤ NY shirt I got on vacation last summer. She came right in and sat down at the open desk and we all noticed that her notebook had a big tower with a clock on it and the words BIG BEN. Apparently, people from Uk name their clocks, which I thought was ridiculous at first, but then I remembered that people from Uk might be crazy (I won’t be a show-off and use ‘eccentric’ until we’ve had it for a spelling word) and that to them naming clocks might be normal. 

Our group remembered how curious we were about the new girl who was about our age and after we found out her name was Charlotte and not something ridiculous, we invited her to eat lunch with us. She had a lunchbox with a very strange looking red bus-thing on it, but she told us those were very normal in the city where she used to live. When she opened her lunchbox she had a water bottle with lemon wedges and a sandwich that she told us was called “watercress,” which sounds terribly wet for a sandwich, and an apple. The rest of us all bring things like chocolate milk and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, except for Suzanne whose mother is on the Atkins diet, so she never brings a sandwich but just things like ham and cheese rolled up in lettuce or peanut butter and jelly in a bowl without the bread which I think is unfortunate, and Juliet has to bring chocolate soy milk since she’s lactose intolerant but we’re used to that. 

We decided it was high time (Charlotte told us about "high time" and I like the way it sounds so I’ve started using it in sentences) to find out what kind of unfortunate or crazy place Uk is, so we just came out and asked her. Suzanne, who is usually the bravest of us all said, “So where is Uk anyway?” and Charlotte just looked at her like she wasn’t speaking English. Charlotte herself has an accent that I thought sounded like the narrator on Winnie the Pooh, but I didn’t want to say anything about it. She probably couldn’t help it. 

Charlotte asked Suzanne whatever did she mean by Uk and that she herself had never heard of such a curious place, and that was the first time I’ve ever heard of a place being curious. I was pretty sure that only people could be curious about things, but maybe  in a place like Uk even things can be curious. Then Charlotte said that surely we weren’t all so dull as to think that the letters “UK” were meant to be sounded out, and none of us knew what she meant by people being dull so we just looked at her and waited for her to go on. She laughed at us all behind her handkerchief (which we had no idea that people outside of stories actually use) for a good two minutes before deciding it was high time to explain to all of us jolly dull children that “UK” stands for the United Kingdom, just like US stands for the United States, and “UK” has never before been pronounced as Uk unless it’s by other dull American children in other barbaric places in the country. 

By this point we’d all figured that dull probably meant dumb and none of us were very happy about being called dumb by a girl who sounded like she was from the Hundred Acre Wood and drank water with pieces of lemon floating in it and was happy about eating a water sandwich. Juliet told her she might as well just shut up and stop laughing about us, and Margo mentioned that the UK, wherever it was, was obviously not a very well-known place so she could hardly blame us for not knowing where on earth it was, and I said that a place called the United Kingdom sounded almost as made up as Uk, which I admitted to her did sound kind of silly even to us. 

Well, that all seemed like the wrong things to say because Charlotte just kept laughing at us and nearly spilled her fancy lemon water and and choked on her watercress sandwich and told us that we’d all better jolly well stop talking before she fainted dead away from amusement. I have no idea where all of her jolly-ness comes from, but she “jolly well” wasn’t sharing it with us. Suzanne pulled her hair which got her attention and made her stop laughing and instead she started saying things like she couldn’t believe her father had moved her family to such a primitive place and that why on earth did children here ignore the existence of their mother country and that as soon as she could regain her composure she would give us a all a lesson in manners and geography because it was high time we knew something about life. Then she started to cry very quietly and dab her eyes with her handkerchief and say things like “bother” because she had promised her mother she would be a model of English propriety at school today and here she had gone and jolly well fudged the whole thing. 

I noticed two things from what she said while she was crying: the first was that she said the word English, which I knew had to do with England, and the second was that I had no idea what ‘propriety’ meant and would have to remember to look it up in the dictionary. So I asked her if she was English and said of course she was and that was a jolly dull question to ask considering that she had just gone through the whole ordeal of telling us that she was from the UK, and that naturally England was part of the UK and didn’t all of us know anything about our heritage? Caroline said that we talk about England every year right before the Thanksgiving play at school, and that duh, we all know that the pilgrims came from England and then Malorie asked her why she didn’t just say she was from England in the first place instead of making such a big deal and crying because nobody had ever heard of the UK. Juliet asked her if all people from the UK sound like Charlotte does and Charlotte was about to start laughing and calling us dull again, but then Suzanne pulled her hair which didn’t make her cry this time but did make her shut up about none of us knowing much about England outside of the pilgrims. 

The rest of the day was pretty exceptional after Charlotte just accepted the fact that none of us knew much about our mother country. She said she would teach us all about it if we’d promise not to make such a to-do about what she brings for her lunch, and that if we’d like to broaden our palates she’d be happy to bring us all watercress sandwiches for lunch one day. But we were all jolly happy with our palates as they were, whatever she means by that, and decided we’d stick with our regular lunches, except for Suzanne who said that as long as Charlotte would promise to bring the watercress on bread, she would be very happy to trade her some lettuce roll-ups.

Virginia

My name is Virginia, and that’s fortunate. I live in Tennessee and who’d want to walk around with a name like Tennessee? It’s very fortunate that my name is Virginia. I take piano lessons, which is unfortunate, and read a lot of books out of my grade level, which is something my mother likes to tell other people. 

I’ve lived here all of my life and I usually do some pretty exceptional things with my exceptional friends. ‘Exceptional’ was one of our spelling words last week, and I always use our spelling words in sentences. After I look them up in the dictionary. Ms. Harrison doesn’t always tell us what our spelling words mean. 

I have a younger sister named Grace Anne and she’s alright for a little kid, just usually ridiculous (that was a spelling word two weeks ago, but I already knew what it meant). She talks to her grapes, feels sorry for her broken crayons, and is always grouping her nail polishes into little families. And I’m not talking about color families; I mean actual families with moms and dads and kids and I think there’s even a couple of aunts. She got two of the same color for her birthday last year (she really adores nail polish), and she says they’re twins. 

Anyway, that’s Grace Anne. 

My exceptional friends are more interesting, and none of them talk to their grapes. My best friend is Caroline and I’ve always thought that was a coincidence. I didn’t know I thought it was a coincidence until we had it for a spelling word, but now I definitely do. It’s a coincidence because Caroline is very close to Carolina, as in the states. I pretend we’re both named after states, even though Caroline’s mother insists that she is actually named after a great aunt. 

I have other-but-not-best friends that live near Caroline and me: Suzanne lives next door and her mother is on the Atkins diet. Charlotte just moved here last year from Uk, but we’ve stopped making fun of her. Malorie has beautiful golden curls and charming blue eyes and most old ladies who see her stop and say things that don’t make sense. Juliet is lactose intolerant and we all call dibs on who gets the cheese off her pizza or her helping of ice cream. It’s good to have at least one friend who’s lactose intolerant. Margo takes voice lessons from the church pianist and sings in church a lot. I think that’s odd because I actually take piano lessons from the church pianist but I’ve never played the piano in church. Samantha is head of our class in math and science, but I don’t think she reads many books out of our grade level. She can identify poison ivy though, and I’ve always thought that was a really exceptional talent to have. 

Something else you should know about me is that I hold the record for biggest bubble in the bubble gum contest we had this summer. The only other record I’ve ever held is being the hundredth person to order a milk shake at Brady’s, but mother says it was just luck and that they do that every Tuesday. But I got the biggest bubble fair and square, so I guess I’ll just tell people about that one when they ask me about my accomplishments. That’s one of this week’s spelling words and I have been trying to use it in a lot of really exceptional sentences.