Gonna Go Spring Breakers
Songs of innocence and xxxperience, c. 1992.
I’m so sorry for the very long delay for this essay! It turned out to be really hard to write! I hope you don’t hate it! I know it’s too long!
Everyone cool went to Destin, so I wanted to go to Destin.
By “everyone cool,” I meant my friends. Who weren’t really my friends, but they were, but they weren’t, but they were. Middle school girl friendship is tricky, the vagaries of who’s in and out fluctuating like the weather. A skilled meteorologist of middle-school girls could have probably read the barometer and told me what was coming. But my smarts were in English, not in science. Not in human nature.
By that spring, I had been trying to befriend this particular group of girls for over two years, since seventh grade, when we all ended up in the same advanced classes and on the same soccer and basketball teams. Most of them had all gone to elementary school together, or they went to the same church or camp or soccer league. They were all friends before. I was not.
When I think of these girls now, it’s mainly as an amorphous blob — “those girls,” “that clique.” In truth, some were nicer than others, and some remain in my life, on the fringes, all these years later. But at the time we moved as a mass, and it’s impossible for me to pinpoint which girl did what. To isolate them, to assign blame to one or two of the meanest girls at the time, would be to ignore the complicity of the entire group, including myself. For we were all complicit, and we were all mean — to each other and to the people we deemed below us in social standing. At the time, it seemed like justifiable cruelty because how else did friendship work in your teens? I mean, Heathers was my favorite movie.1
This isn’t an essay about mean girls, though. It’s about spring break, about the promise of one night on the beach. But to explain that night in Destin and everything that changed, I must first explain the girls.
We were not the “popular” clique, which didn’t exist in our school the way it did in movies. Those were the prettiest girls, who were mostly also the wealthiest (and rumored to be the wildest). We were the average girls, the middlebrow middle-schoolers: bright but not nerdy, athletic but not jocks, some of us cute enough to snag boyfriends in eighth grade, and some of us, like me, entirely ignored by the opposite sex. We cared about good grades and school spirit. We projected an aura of wholesomeness.
Were we wholesome? Maybe. We didn’t party — no one smoked, no one drank, no one used drugs. As hot and heavy as a few couples had gotten, they remained chaste, as far as I knew. No one confided anything in me, but everyone confessed their sins at the bonfire on the last night of summer camp, and I don’t remember anyone admitting to so much as cheating on homework.
That bonfire — it was an open-air confessional and an altar call in one. A chance for some people to get saved and for my friends to tearfully admit their mean behavior in the year prior and promise to change their ways. I always tearfully accepted their apologies (and, I am sure, tearfully confessed to my own shortcomings, although I can remember nothing of what was said). But I never accepted Jesus as my own personal lord and savior. An Episcopalian by birth and baptism, I did not believe in the concept of salvation (or, for that matter, hell). Still, I went to the evangelical bible studies and prayer circles and Presbyterian summer camp because that’s what my friends did, and I wanted to fit in. I wore cross necklaces almost every day — a range of them, from gold and dainty to large statement crosses. I had a cross for every possible occasion, not because I believed but because my friends did.