the most unfair thing ever.

III.

One of the most frustrating things about being a kid is that any situation, no matter how unfair, frustrating, or painful, will be downplayed by well-meaning adults. Sometimes they even throw in a Oh, you don't know real suffering, which is one of the more condescending phrases in human history.

I have since faced a lot of sexism, some racism, plenty of petty meanness, unrequited obsessions and the like, but I was better able to deal with them as they happened. Thus one of the absolute most unfair situations, relatively speaking, is the time I lost the Ponytails summer reading contest when I was about ten years old.

I have to start by explaining that Ponytails was a franchise of the whole Sanrio monolithic empire, specializing in the sort of penguin pencils, sparkly pens, tiny cat-shaped notebooks, miniature stamps and stamp ink pads, scented markers and pencil boxes and adorable but ridiculous little things that are required for ten-year-old school life. I wasn't one of those pink girly-girls who draw pictures of horses in their notebooks, but I was far from immune to the lure of the Ponytails.

So nothing was more exciting than the announcement that the Ponytails in the mall was holding a summer reading contest, where first prize would win:

A 30-second no-limits shopping spree in the store

A reading contest! You have to understand, this was the equivalent to Homer Simpson entering a beef-eating contest. Martha Stewart in a housekeeping contest. Robert Downey Jr. in a drug-snorting contest. I had it in the bag.

They had set up milestones, and gave out small prizes for each one, but obviously it was all about the big prize. As they tacked up the milestone names, mine was out in front, week after week. My mother dutifully drove me to the library once or twice a week, and each time I'd take out the maximum thirty books and read them through diligently. We had to complete little book reports on each one, and I'd write them out thoughtfully.

Two weeks from the end was the first bad thing, and had I been older I might have recognized as foreshadowing, or a bad omen. The store proprietors accused me of copying the backs of the books instead of actually reading them. (Why? Because I was a precocious kid, and was using big words. They didn't believe that I might actually know them.) I brought my mother in, who assured them that I always wrote like that. Listen to her, my mom said, she talks just like that. Crisis averted, temporarily.

Then, the last week: I am ahead by twenty books, which means the win is mine: no one else can read more than twenty books in a week, plus I decide to read at least ten more just to clinch it. On the last day, I bring in my last ten entries, triumphant, wondering if they'll award me the winner right then.

In front of me handing in her entries, is a girl my age. With an enormous stack of book report entries, slightly splayed so I can read them. Curious George. Amelia Bedelia. She must have had forty pages, full of books for 6-year-olds.

There is no happy ending. There was no runner-up prize, and so this poser ten year old who had read a bunch of baby books while I'd been reading junior-high and up, serious chapter books, won. Won the shopping spree, had her name in the paper.

The Ponytails store went out of business about seven or eight years ago. I am still slightly indignant.

Wednesday 23 January, 07:04 PM