Finding Margaret
Finding Margaret at Dollar Tree
I went to Dollar Tree yesterday. I just needed curl cream and a hair pick. I wasn’t looking for my childhood.
But there she was. On the bottom shelf, spine a little bent, wedged between a Sudoku book and a 2017 calendar: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume. $1.25.
I stopped so fast my cart hit the end cap.
In the 80s and 90s I loved that book. Every young girl needed to read that book. It wasn’t assigned in school. Nobody put it on a summer reading list. You just found it — passed from cousin to cousin, or checked out so many times the library copy smelled like everyone else’s hands. Margaret Simon was the first person who told me the truth: that your body changes and it’s weird, that you pray even when you’re not sure who’s listening, that you can want to belong and also want to run.
It was one summer that I read those books. Plural. Because once you start with Margaret, you go find Blubber, then Deenie, then Forever. You read them under the covers with a flashlight. You read them because Judy Blume didn’t talk down to you. She just talked to you.
Standing in Dollar Tree, holding that paperback, I was 12 again. I could feel the box fan in my bedroom window. I could hear my mom yelling to turn the light off. I could remember how grown up I felt because I was reading about bras and periods and boys, and how scared I felt because I didn’t have any of that yet and what if I never did?
Margaret didn’t have the answers. That’s why we loved her. She was asking God the same questions we were: Am I normal? Do you see me? When is it my turn?
I don’t know who donated it. Some mom cleaning out her daughter’s room. Some girl who grew up and decided she didn’t need it anymore. But I needed to see it. I needed to remember that before Dollar Tree sold it, before it was a movie, before anyone called it “banned,” it was just a book that told the truth to girls who were scared to ask questions out loud.
Every young girl still needs to read that book.
Not because it’s scandalous.
Because it’s honest.
I took it home.
I sat in my bed and read the first page.
“Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret.”
And for a second, I swear, I was there too.
