Backstory for Little Divas by Philana Marie Boles!

Sitting in Mrs. Johnson's fifth grade class, it had begun to feel like the end of the world. The meanest girl in the universe had announced to everyone on the playground that I was stuck up and that no one should like me because of it. I hadn't the nerve to reply back to her and-because of this-all the kids believed what she'd said. School became a miserable daily routine. For what felt like forever-probably a week-I had not one single friend at school. The truth was, unlike so many of the girls that I admired, I was just too quiet, too deeply afraid to speak up for myself. I was not stuck up.

It didn't help that I was also smart. I had to take an advanced reading class, which wasn't so bad; but then-much to my horror-when I was put into advanced math, what was left of life began to crumble. Reading extra stories was one thing, but not being with my friends in math? No way. I purposely failed every math test so they'd put me back in the regular class, so that the kids wouldn't have yet another reason to think that I was stuck up. It's funny, but I'm thirty-one years old and it is only now that it's absolutely apparent to me that the real real “stuck up” girls were the ones who did the teasing.

Home, however, was safe. I was a whiz at my Rubik’s Cube, collected Strawberry Shortcake scented dolls and stickers, and found joy in watching Alvin & the Chipmunks and Jem after school. I had so many Barbies that my friends and cousins called my parent’s basement “Barbie Land”. We’d throw our hair in ponytails, hop on our bikes with the plastic pink streamers hanging from the handlebars and be careless. I still remember imagining that I—in whatever wacky and stylish hat or clothes I was wearing that day—was the Punky Brewster of Toledo, Ohio...