A Fresh Start

By Adina Lynn LeCompte

PROMPT—Never will I forget ...

It was fall of seventh grade, my first year at Orville Wright Jr. High School in Westchester, a middle-class suburb of West LA. One rainy day, during first period PE, instead of dodging seagulls and plugging our ears as the planes flew overhead on their takeoff and landing at Los Angeles International Airport, we were cooped up in the gymnasium with free range to socialize and chatter. Stir-crazy, with nothing better to do, some of the kids made up a rumor about me. Somebody told somebody else, who in turn told somebody else, that I had been caught in the bathroom by our gym teacher with another girl and that I was a lesbian. I hadn’t and I wasn’t. All I remember were the other kids whispering and pointing at me and laughing as they walked by. I started crying. This made it worse. I didn’t even know what they had been saying till several class periods later that day. They laughed harder, the rumors got bigger, and they stuck. I was shunned. I had no friends, except for when a new girl was transferred into our school. She was nice to me until she heard the lies, stopped speaking to me, and began snickering behind my back with all the others. The bullying went on for three long years. My parents and counselors decided a fresh start at a new school might be best.

So just after Christmas, now age fifteen, I got to go with my new performing arts magnet school, Hollywood High, on a week-long trip to New York City. We saw “Cats” on Broadway where Terrance Mann’s Rum Tum Tugger made my teen-girl-heart beat faster than I cared to admit out loud, and I self-consciously wiped away tears as Laurie Beechman belted out “Memories.” In a special meet-the-cast session at Radio City Music Hall, I felt invisible and ordinary in comparison to all those tall, skinny, long-legged Rockettes. We rented dark blue skates and ice skated under the enormous lit-up Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center, scaled the Empire State, and climbed all the way to the crown of the Statue of Liberty. On New Year’s Eve in Times Square, I wore a hat and gloves (a novelty for a Los Angelean) while the ball I had watched my entire brief life on television began its legendary descent. TEN, NINE, EIGHT… I was linked at the elbows with my classmates so we wouldn’t get separated. THREE, TWO, ONE… We were swallowed whole by a massive sea of humanity and confetti as 1985 exploded in lights.

It was my first time away from home; I was nervous and shy; and all those colored glass bottles in a hotel bathtub full of ice shimmered like rare gemstones of maturity and glamour. With my superpower of being able to feel alone in a crowd, and the certainty that my new friends would all be ditching me soon enough, I was wooed by the Bartles and James peach-flavored wine coolers. I woke up the next morning in my long sleeve white nightgown with blue snowflakes on it, my mind a blank slate. My pajamas were soaking wet in the sink where my roommates had washed them out when I apparently threw up on myself. They were popular girls, juniors — all too happy to tell me how I had gotten together with HIM and “gone all the way,” how they changed me out of my clothes, put me to bed, then cleaned me up and changed me again. I was stunned and wanted to disappear. Like literally cease to exist. I searched the black hole in my brain and came up empty handed.

I had been dumped by the time we made it back to California. But he had sure looked cute at that luggage carousel with those big brown eyes making me feel important and beautiful for the first time ever. Back in school, although shame clung to my spirit like static cling, people seemed to like me well enough. I got along. I had friends. I erred on the side of promiscuity. I may even have become popular, although the term “outsider” hung heavy in my heart for many years to come.

I didn’t know how to get a fresh start from myself. And yet, in each yearning unrealized and each dream doused, the survivor in me grew stronger. I channeled idyllic moments of childhood in my grandma’s garden, the one person in whose eyes I could never fail. I began to write, to create. Life would still take me on many twists and turns — bobbing and weaving, ebbing and flowing — learning and forgetting and recreating myself over and over. Each time, my fresh start, like a shapeshifter, would find new form, leaving behind traces of hope, possibilities for a better tomorrow.

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Adina Lynn LeCompte is a sixth-generation Californian. After having lived in varying parts of the US and abroad in Florence, Italy, she has come home to roost, splitting her time between the Central Coast and the Foothills of Yosemite. Adina is a working writer, an award-winning poet, and is currently obsessed with using writing as a tool for healing from trauma, especially abuse and grief. She is also co-author of several compilations of poetry with her husband, John LeCompte, who is also a writer (With These Words, I Thee Wed: Love Poetry was published in 2023). Over the years, she founded several successful local businesses and has worked as an interfaith hospital and hospice chaplain. Adina holds a BA from UCLA (Language & Linguistics) and an MA from Middlebury College School Abroad / Universita’ di Firenze (Language & Literature). She is currently in process of completing her Master's of Divinity at Naropa University and is an MFA candidate in Bay Path University's program in Creative Nonfiction Writing, with an emphasis in Narrative Medicine.