In a junior high English class in 1996, I was the lonely nerd. I had frizzy hair from air-drying my hair naturally, thinking that I would look naturally beautiful with flowing dark locks. Instead, one side of my head was frizzed out; the other side was straight and flipped up at the bottom. Combined with glasses, zits, a big coat to hide my already 34Cs at 13, and my choice of wearing a dress over long striped trousers, and I looked like a cross between an insane bag lady and Velma from Scooby-Doo. No wonder I was the class freak.

With that classic nerd reality, I lived my days in the dark, my hair over my face and drawing on my hands flowers and happy faces and stars and any random symbols I could think of.

It wasn't until my English teacher assigned us to read Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day" that I felt touched and lifted by the words about of a rainy planet and its sallow-faced inhabitants.

The story is only four pages long, but within those words I found solace and comfort. "All Summer in a Day," the 1954 short story by Bradbury, details the lives of schoolchildren who were born on Venus by Earthling parents. The world is dark and rainy and morose because the sun only comes out once every seven years, and the children, now nine, were too young to remember it. One classmate, Margot, who had come from Ohio when she was four, remembers the sun, but nobody believes her. She is a pale frail little outcast, and in the eyes of her classmates, rightly treated as so.

As I read this story, I felt like I was being touched from inside, like a light opened inside my heart. I could feel Margot's frailness and loneliness, and wanted to hug her, for my ostracization was happening at that moment. "She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all, her voice would be a ghost."

Just rereading that again brings me back to that place and time, when my voice was hoarse and small, and my eyes felt worn out from crying myself to sleep over my misery and anger and frustration. I often didn't know why I was the way I was, why I read so much and kept to myself and said the wrong things to be funny and ended up feeling like a total freak compared to the other kids. "If they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and did not follow." I was horrible at sports and would end up standing in the outfield where the ball would never reach me and I would daydream to pass the time. "So after that, dimly, dimly, she sensed it, she was different and they knew her difference and kept away." Wherever I went, I was treated like an outcast. I felt there was some kind of smell or sense about me that kept people away, or being mocked either to my face or behind my back. So I learned to live inside of my imagination.

Unlike Margot, I had never been locked in a closet, but I had been cornered in the hallway, while a bully looked me over like I was a shivering mouse and psyched me out with a fake punch. Or I would be slapped by an intimidating bully, and if I fought back, I ended up being labeled as having "difficulties socializing" or "anger issues," and labeled as retarded by the school authorities. That was the hell of my 13th year, and while I had few pleasures, "All Summer in a Day" was one of my few reclusive spots where I could hide in that world and relate to poor Margot.

Flash forward to college, 2002. I was now 19, and my body was no longer a cage but now an extension of my confidence and language. I had survived high school through intense therapy, daily doses of Paxil, and my subtle transformation from a bespectacled nerd in a winter coat to a mature, steely young woman ready to start over. I had picked up writing and acting as outlets for my imagination, and looked for play auditions on campus. One flyer advertised a five-play showcase, one of them being a play version of "All Summer in a Day." My eyes shined, my heart leapt, and I immediately thought, "I have to be in this."

I auditioned, and got into the show. I really wanted to play Margot, feeling it was my destiny to bring her to the stage. Unfortunately, I was just a nothing freshman compared to the older students, and I had a fully developed chest that did not look childlike at all. So the role was given to an upper classman who had a small frame. I was given a role of a random student who teases Margot along. I did what I could with my small role, and showed up to every rehearsal.

However, the show was plagued due to the lead actors' schedules. The boy who played Margot's main tormentor had dance rehearsals around the same time, and often came late or left early. The girl who played Margot often didn't show up due to other plans, and eventually she dropped out. The show had to be rewritten with the lead character gone (It didn't occur to me to ask for the part at that point), being written as a series of monologues and short scenes talking about the unseen Margot from the students' and teacher's POV. I now played Margot's teacher and got scared and nervous reciting a monologue, because I had to act convincingly with my face instead of exchanging words with a partner. I felt terrified to give a monologue, and angry because of the show being drastically changed and becoming a shell of itself.

The director finally called it off, because we were trying to give life to something that had been dead for pretty much two weeks before the premiere. He thanked us (me and the fellow actors who stayed) for our dedication and patience, and in the next show he did, we all had parts as Greek goddesses in a Greek myths show he put together.I was incredibly frustrated and disappointed that "All Summer in a Day," the story that had been a spark of hope and fresh air in a dark and miserable time for me, wouldn't be presented to a new audience. I had still felt that I would've been a perfect Margot, were it not for my un-childlike figure. I still think it's a beautiful and somber story, and I pay tribute to the great Ray Bradbury for bringing it to my world, a dark and lonely time, sitting in a junior high English class in 1996.



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