A Smart Girl's Guide: Friendship Troubles (Revised). Patti Kelley Criswell

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Friendship File

      Lydia

      Lydia is short, spunky, and creative. She used

      to hang out with four or five other girls at

      school, and while she wasn’t the most popular

      girl, she wasn’t at the bottom of the heap,

      either. Lydia loved to speak her mind (which

      sometimes got her into trouble), but she also

      loved to help people. She figured her friends

      felt the same way, so when tragedy struck,

      she turned to them.

      What happened

      Lydia’s brother, Randy, injured his spine diving into shallow water at

      a lake. He lost the use of his legs and had to learn to use a wheelchair.

      Randy was two years older, and a big brother Lydia loved and admired.

      His accident hit her hard—really hard.

      Lydia felt so sad and scared that she hardly knew what to do. Sometimes

      she shared these feelings with her parents, but she knew that they were

      hurting, too. She didn’t want to add to their worries. So she carried her

      grief to school and talked with her friends. Sometimes they listened,

      but they didn’t say much. Lydia could see that her friends felt awkward.

      It was like they just didn’t get it. After a while, she stopped talking about

      her brother and pretended that everything was fine.

      But it wasn’t fine. Lydia needed to feel close

      to someone. She got clingy. She would try

      to be involved in every conversation that

      took place, be a part of everything that

      was going on. She remembers, “I was totally

      hyper—I was terrified of being left out!”

      But that’s just what happened. Annoyed by

      Lydia’s neediness, the other girls kicked her

      out of the group. They even wrote a long

      list of “annoying things about Lydia” and

      gave it to her. So just when she thought

      the situation couldn’t get any worse, it did.