Hi. My name is Amanda Smith and I live in seventh street, New Orleans. I love our small neighborhood and our un-noisy street. I am in sixth grade at the exclusive Jeffery Middle School. I have two older brothers called Arthur and Aaron. I am really wishing not to be the only girl. But one day, I overheard mom saying that she was having a baby! I was so happy until she said: “If we are having a baby, we will have to move.”

Amanda’s New Life is a thin volume. It’s printed in a terrible swooshy, bubbly cursive and  arranged in wobbly lines of fading charcoal. Each page is a different neon color. It is the handiwork of a nine year old with great literary ambitions and not enough homework. Allegedly a story about a girl adjusting to a new middle school, the booklet reads more like absurdist satire. From its character’s comically WASP names (Amanda Smith, Joy Parks, and Allison Quimby, just to name a few) to its total misrepresentation of very distinct settings (the story begins in a “New Orleans” indistinguishable from an idyllic New England suburb, and continues in a “Chicago” indistinguishable from this “New Orleans”), the pervading atmosphere is somewhat chaotic and decidedly nonspecific. Still, Amanda’s New Life is firmly rooted in what I can only describe as the American schoolgirl genre. In less than ten pages, Amanda Smith is faced with a slew of the genre’s greatest hits: the birth of a sibling, a big move, the first day of middle school, senselessly cruel bullying, food fights in the cafeteria, and cliques with ridiculous self-ascribed names.

As a fourth grader, I was nothing if not well-read—in a certain sense of the word. Apart from books about fairies, snakes, and disaster survival, one of my favorite things to read was these American schoolgirl chapter books. I devoured Barbara Park’s Junie B. Jones, Annie Barrows’s Ivy + Bean, Sara Pennypacker’s Clementine, and Beverly Cleary’s Ramona. With ears pricked and eyes open, I followed my spunky cartoons of friends from kindergarten up to the fourth grade. Planning, preparing for what I would inevitably face. But I might as well have been memorizing all the alien species listed in my unnecessarily large Star Wars Encyclopedia. Any prophecies the books contained would remain unfulfilled: for me, there would be no yellow school bus to ride, no first day of school outfit to pick out, and no class turtle to feed. 

I attended a small elementary school run by an order of Spanish Catholic nuns. As is the norm in Puerto Rico, we had to wear uniforms. For girls, plaid blue jumpsuits over short-sleeved white button-up shirts, both of which would become slick with sweat in the wet September heat. Given that the school did not have air conditioning, the only solution was to crank open a set of rusty Miami windows, which would inevitably invite a swarm of mosquitoes. There was a crucifix in every classroom. We were not allowed to say the word Halloween because of the holiday’s demonic implications, instead covertly probing each other for “H-Day” or “Pumpkin Day” costume ideas. 

I had been in class with roughly the same 26 kids since pre-pre-K. Among them, I was known to be extremely emotional, and it was difficult for me to make friends. A deep dissatisfaction characterized my elementary school years. I found my classes boring, my classmates mean, and San Juan’s horrible heat and car-centric architecture stifling. All the chapter books I read—which spanned a period from the 1950s to the early 2010s—swirled together into a timeless, placeless, suburban Americana. A magical land where a little girl could walk out of her house, stop across the street for her best friend, and go ice skating on some neighborhood lake frozen for the winter. It was as good a fantasy to me. As my teachers droned on, I escaped there, sometimes only in thought, other times on sheets of colored paper. 

Though I had written short, one-off stories and chapters before, Amanda’s New Life was my first attempt at a complete commercial novel. I had recently found the first installment of Nancy Krulick’s How I Survived Middle School series abandoned by my older cousins at my grandmother’s house. Amanda’s New Life owes a great debt to the vast, labyrinthine, halls crawling with larger-than-life teenaged enemies that was eleven-year-old protagonist Jenny’s massive American middle school. Its scale and the absolute seriousness with which this absurd caricature of a middle school experience was narrated presented to me an iteration of the American fantasy that did not seem merely fun—it seemed thrilling. Amanda’s world—built by such an innocent, frivolous god—is even more arbitrary than Jenny’s. Her mother’s pregnancy, and seemingly nothing else, catalyzes a sudden move across the country. Her new school is foreign and its rules incomprehensible: Amanda is shocked to discover that, for example, she is now required to take gym class every day. The popular kids—named “The Fashions,” an obvious riff on “The Pops” from How I Survived Middle School—pick on her relentlessly from the moment she steps through the doors, drawing particular ammunition from the fact that she had a summer job at a hot dog stand back in “New Orleans.” This was not meant to be class commentary. I simply thought it was what American middle school was like. I was blissfully unaware of any nuance or semblance of cruelty in the world I attempted to trace from memory. It is as funny as it is terrifying to realize how malleable one’s mind is between the ages of six and eleven.

Perhaps that is why I now look back at my elementary school experience with particular fondness. Retrospect paints the tight concrete hallways of my youth in stunning colors, making my American fantasy appear dull by comparison. After all, none of my American schoolgirls ever had to doomsday prep whenever a tropical storm loomed across the Atlantic, nor were they threatened by frequent power outages or mosquito-carried tropical diseases. 

One time, my class was held past the 2:30 dismissal because someone had (allegedly) thrown a piece of chalk across the room and almost struck our teacher. We were brought out one-by-one into a little room in some obscure strategic order, where two nuns tried to wheedle confessions from our little grasps: “You are a very good student, Ingrid. We know that. Which is why we would not want you to get caught up in this.” I remember experiencing a dramatic religious arc, starting around age seven with a mission to become a saint whatever it took, which escalated to a vivid crisis of faith by the time I was eleven until I finally transferred to a lay school. 

I wonder what Amanda’s world would have looked like if I had followed the adage and “written what I knew.” If I had taken the care to notice them, I would have found fascinating psychological conflict and dynamic characters all around. But, as a snapshot of my nine-year-old psyche, the actual Amanda’s New Life is much more insightful—and entertaining.