Part 1
Bunched together on one side of a picnic table, four middle school girls talked
amongst themselves in the courtyard of the Wilbraham Public Library. Sunlight
streamed on their perfectly straightened hair as they talked a bit, stared
around and sighed, talked a bit again, then stared around and sighed again.
Ironically enough, Tara and I had met these girls in our quest to track down
some middle school boys—the skater boys, who Tara said frequented the sidewalk
outside the Louis & Clark drug store around 3:45 p.m. on week days. Thinking
they would make for interesting interview subjects, we decided to drive down to
the center of town one day and ask if they were interested in being in our
documentary.
As we rolled over the yellow crosswalk by the Village Store, we saw that along
with the two skater boys were two girls. The girls had migrated over to our
side of the street while Tara and I were unloading camera equipment from the
car. Slinging bags of tapes and wires over our shoulders, we approached them to
pitch the interview idea. The girls agreed and called over to the boys, who
coasted across the pedestrian walk to the Village Store.
On the way over to the courtyard for the interview, however, we lost the skater
boys to another crew of allying Wilbraham hooligans. So here we were, now with
four girls total (two more girls had joined the crew), sitting outside the town
library.
Tara and I were fiddling around with camera angles when the library’s
double-doors swung open. The girls’ heads turned as though synchronized to see
who it was: two older looking girls and a shorter boy passed by. The tallest
girl wore long baby blue gym shorts and a dark blue wife-beater. She was
spunky-looking, and had short, almost white hair with bangs sprawled across her
face. The other girl had long dark, brown hair and wore a green shirt and purple
skinny pants. The shortest was the boy, who wore a black shirt and shorts and
had a round, chubby face. They were a funny group to see together. Sort of
different, I thought.
The three of them rounded the corner but were still in plain view when, all of a
sudden, the girls bowed their heads together in rapid whispering.
“Oh my god, what is she wearing?” said one of the girls, gesturing to the tall
girl with short hair.
“I heard she’s a lesbian.”
“I heard she’s bi…”
“What if you had to be in the locker room with her?”
“Yeah, she’d like walk up to you and be like, ‘Can I watch you undress?’”
“Hahaha…”
“Hey, cutie!” the girls yelled later on to a different boy who was walking out
of the library. The boy did not seem to know the girls and made a beeline for
the sidewalk by the bushes.
The girls seemed different from when we had talked to them maybe a half hour
earlier. They had been very friendly, but now I was a little nervous in front of
them all. Would Tara and I be the new gossip, I wondered, as soon as we turned
to leave?
