Look how happy all those girls appear. What a fun party, right?

WRONG.

Sometimes a picture lies. What actually happened that night was that all the girls conspired to call their parents in the middle of my birthday slumber party and go home. The only girl who stayed? The neighbor girl who was 2 or 3 years younger than the rest of us. Some friends, huh?

That was the year I lived in Connecticut. We were there for a year and a half, but it felt like forever. It was miserable. Some other gems that happened while we lived there: we got robbed and the robber used my pillowcase to carry away the stash; my grandmother forgot about my brother and me and we had to walk home in the rain all the way through the winding, woodsy roads; my mom almost sliced off her thumb with a new set of knives; there were no fast-food restaurants in our town, as in NONE. It was a horrendous year and a half. I like to pretend that it didn’t really happen. But it did. And when I think of year 9, I can think of nothing I love. Because I lived in Connecticut and I hated everything.

When my parents told us we were moving from Cincinnati to Connecticut, I refused to speak to them for a week and demanded a puppy. When they told us we were moving away from Connecticut, I ran upstairs immediately and began packing. I don’t even think I asked where we were going.

That was the worst time of my life. And only one thing about it makes me smile. Later on in life I met a girl from Connecticut and she told me that all the kids in that town were hardcore druggies (because of a lack of anything else to do). So I can only hope that those rude little smug girls in that picture all have meth acne now and are living in trailers somewhere in the woodsy outskirts of that horrible, miserable town. Because karma, now that’s something I love.