The Time: Spring, 1993.
The Place: A Lutheran church for our Brownie Girl Scout meeting.
I’m going to be honest here, I hated this Girl Scout troop. Aside from one really dear friend, the kids and grownups all deserved a badge for being completely unbearable. Occasionally, on a cool day, my mom would sit in the car and read during our meeting instead of driving back home. “You know,” our leader Mrs. Greene told me, “your mother is always welcome to come read inside or join us for our meeting.”
“No!” I almost shouted. “I mean, no. She’s fine.” The idea of my mom watching me struggle to interact with these people was just way too embarrassing. The other girls had even formed a club within our troop called The Manatees, forbidding my friend Kim and me from joining.
“You can’t have any snacks at the meeting today,” The Manatees’ leader Meggie had snapped, blocking a box of Keebler Munch’Ems with her arm. She was originally from Florida, which maybe explained the obsession with marine life. “THIS IS MANATEE FOOD.”
“We don’t WANT your stupid sea cow food,” Kim had retorted. But, as a lover of snacks, I kind of did.
Then there were your other typical shenanigans and mishaps. Putting rocks in our sleeping bags and toothpaste in Kim’s hair at a camp out. That time all the troops in the county had a sleepover at the science museum, and I got lost in the middle of the night trying to find a place to poop. Mrs. Greene’s tiny, evil dog that liked to jump and snap at my long hair. (I asked her daughter, one of The Manatees, if she could put him in another room once. She just stared at me with dead eyes as he snarled and shook my curls like a rope toy. “I wouldn’t lock my dog up. That would be mean.”) And that time Mrs. Greene got irritated when I said I liked bacon, but then didn’t eat the Canadian bacon on the pizza she got us. You know, the good times of childhood.
Anyway, on this particular day, we had a craft project.
“You’re going to make a gift for your teachers,” Mrs. Greene told us. Mrs. Greene was, herself, a substitute teacher. I can only imagine that she had a beef with some other teacher and was praying for one of these horrors to land in their hands. She showed us a collection of clear plastic tubes, several bags of jelly beans, and a crimping iron. Each tube was the diameter of roughly one jelly bean. We were to fill a tube with the beans of our choosing, and then Mrs. Greene would crimp between each one and melt the ends together to make a… Weird belt? Festive necklace? Hula hoop? I wasn’t quite clear on what the end result was supposed to be, but they were HUGE. Maybe the goal was simply for a 35-year-old woman to spend an hour getting high on melting plastic and reevaluating her life choices.
In any case, I assumed that this was something a teacher would want. I was so excited to have a present for my second grade teacher, Mrs. Moore! As a kid you don’t always have a lot of resources for gift-giving, so this seemed like a pretty big deal. I remember carefully selecting the colors of my jelly beans, and then a beautiful butterfly-print wrapping paper from several rolls that Mrs. Greene had also provided. I’m not sure why she thought we should wrap them. Maybe one of her kids had been selling wrapping paper for school, and now she just had way too much. Honestly, one of the rolls of wrapping paper probably would have made a nicer present than whatever the hell it was we’d just created.
But I couldn’t see that yet. I nodded approvingly at my completed project. Our teachers were going to love this!
The next day, I carried the thing gingerly to school, the way some people might treat an egg baby for health class. “It’s a present we made for our teachers in Girl Scouts,” I told some kids proudly. They didn’t really seem to care, but were probably just jealous.
When I got to our classroom, I raced right up to Mrs. Moore, who was talking to the assistant teacher, Mrs. Hill. “Mrs. Moore! Mrs. Moore!” I greeted her merrily. “I have—”
“Amy!” she snapped without looking down. “Can’t you see that adults are talking?! You’re being very rude.”
My face fell down to the wrapping paper, where I noticed a small tear that had begun to form. This had all been a terrible mistake, I decided. It looked like the butterflies were swimming now. Oh God, it was my worst nightmare, but I couldn’t help it! I was crying!
Mrs. Moore realized there was a small child blubbering over a wrapped gift and felt deservedly shitty. She softened. “Oh, is that a present for me?”
I nodded. The other kids had all filed into the classroom and taken their seats.
“Well, why don’t I just go ahead and open it in front of everyone?”
“Okay,” I managed, although this wasn’t what I’d been hoping for at all.
“Class,” Mrs. Moore announced, bringing it up to the chalkboard, “Amy has given me a present and I’d like to open it for you.” She smiled broadly and tore back the paper. Her expression quickly switched to bemused panic as she held up the tube of jelly beans for all to see. “Why, it’s a… It’s a… What do you call this?”
I shrugged. The cauterized ends had separated in transit, so now it was just a very long jelly bean snake. Somehow, I didn’t think explaining that would help any. The realization that this was a truly bad gift washed over me like a wave. My classmates blinked dumbly. This might have been my very first panic attack.
Mrs. Moore wrapped the thing around her neck, then her waist. She held it up and tried rattling it a bit, then switched back to wearing it around her neck. “It’s a really cool jelly bean necklace! Thank you so much! I can’t wait to show it to my family!”
Odds are, “my family” was code for “the trash can.” I was ready to throw up.
I stuck it out for many more years before admitting to my parents that I wanted to quit Girl Scouts. I braced myself for extreme disappointment. But my mom only nodded and my dad smiled. Ever the pragmatist, he exclaimed, “That’ll be one less thing we have to pay for!”
If I had it to do over, would I have left sooner? Yes, oh God, yes. Nobody deserves that. No teacher deserves to receive a melty tube of inedible jelly beans. And no child should be expected to eat Canadian bacon as a pizza topping.
