Читать книгу A Smart Girl's Guide: Friendship Troubles (Revised) - Patti Kelley Criswell - Страница 14

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.