Kimberly Brodsky
Labyrinth Lake is a semi-autobiographical account targeted at middle school aged girls. This account spans before the author’s life up through her sophomore year of high school. (All of the names have been changed for privacy.) The manuscript is twenty chapters long and written in the form of vignettes. The manuscript contains a fictional beginning and ending. The beginning shares a real life scenario of a daughter and a father’s interaction. Afterwards, it follows the daughter, in her need for independence and self-discovery to where she meets a character of a classic American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird and she is asked a haunting question…
The main character is asked the question what one element of her soul she wants to keep. In real life remembrances she numerates what elements of her life she finds most important to her as an individual. As every person must find for him or herself family and friends are two completely different but essential relationships to be a well rounded person. Through each remembrance, the main character learns a lesson to the contrary of friendship or family closeness presented in the situation.
Each chapter starts with a now memorable quote from influential members of history. These quotes directly link to the vignette. The book begins with a quote by journalist Sy Safransky about his personal realization of loving himself and as the actual text of the book, the quote begins with a dream. Because of the unique structure of vignettes, the book never actually climaxes at any one chapter. These quotes followed by the remembrances act as a fortiori which bring the book together. The final chapter comes with a deep and shocking realization and the quote that introduces it symbolically has an unknown author.
Labyrinth Lake is an autobiography of a twenty-one year old Connecticut suburbanite girl named Kimberly Brodsky. By her interactions with her sister Sara, she knew that she wanted to have friends and enjoy what appeared to her to be the ideal definition of life. Life did not go the way Kimberly planned when she entered elementary school and so very early on, she attached herself to creative writing during morning writing exercises.
After each new experience, she clung to her hobby of writing. Going through the trials and tribulations of attempting to have a genuine peer interaction, she took pride in her diary that she had received one holiday. After experiencing her first crush, she preceded to write poetry about her emotions. After writing short stories in the privacy of her bedroom, she came into the family den and shared with the ones she loved and patiently waited for their usual emotional responses.
In high school, still valuing education, she joined the literary magazine, only to become editor upon her senior year. Now, she attends her father’s Alma Mater CCSU with a major in elementary education with a focus on English with hopes of one day teaching a student with the same passion for writing.
Chapter Six
“For most of us, dreams come true only after they do not matter, Only in childhood do we ever have the chance of making dreams come true when they mean everything.”
-Anonymous
Through the early years of their friendship, my sister and her friend showed me a camaraderie in which I would not become an active part. It makes me so depressed to think of what I could have done to become a companion.
The neighborhood kids always played such fun games, usually right under our noses. Hetal and Sabrina went out to enjoy themselves while I went purely to tag along as a younger sister does. I only now regret not being nice to everyone. My foul mouth would show itself whenever we played and would get me grounded and have me written off in my peer’s eyes before we even started school together.
I do have some fond memories of running through a neighbor’s sprinkler system with our clothes on, playing on backyard swings and forts, sledding down hill two-zees, playing barefoot soccer, and hide-and-go-seek tag or flashlight tag with the highest spirits.
When I was about three years old, too young for school, my sister and her friend decided I was not too young for my first intimate kiss. They knew of my small, secret crush on my next-door neighbor, a boy just my age. We went into his garage and Hetal and Sabrina taught Arden and me what they called ‘the alphabet’. It was an embarrassing trick to get Arden to kiss me, which involved steps to kissing labeled by letters of the alphabet. “A: Arden, open your mouth.”
“B: Come towards Galina.”
They instructed us in three to four word sentences, one by one, until our mouths were touching. I did not think he knew what we were doing until I told everyone in our fourth grade class that we kissed. Everyone remembers the story of their first kiss. It doesn’t matter if it was a good kiss; chances are it wasn’t. But no matter how good or how lousy or who it was with, it will forever be stored in your memory right next to favorite television episodes. My first kiss did not occur in the fifties like all of those innocent teen shows like Happy Days. I was not a teenager or pre-teen, so I had not practiced on my hand like the girls in Grease made fun of Sandra D for doing. It was mushy and wet and disgusting.
When they did not believe me, I wanted to demonstrate, sort of. I chased him around the classroom.
“When we were younger, you liked me too. Admit it Arden; admit it!” I was declaring his feelings as if declaring my own, but the crush was gone for me then.
That fiend made a laughing stock out of me in front of all twenty-two classmates, and after recess gossip, the whole school.
Arden declared, “I was stupid and didn’t know any better.”
Even as humiliating as that was, it was still a victory for me. It meant someone liked me more than someone liked just a friend. At the time, I could not find very many to like me as a friend.
We could have been great friends had I not yelled at them with words not very grown up for me, but so tainted that nobody should use them. I was a poor loser at all games. However, Arden, my next-door neighbor, the first boy I ever kissed and the cutest boy you would ever meet always forgave me.
Maybe I should not have tried to relive the past. I can just think of so many things to change whom I was that I might have made long lasting friends who would not turn on me. When I get started thinking of the things I want to change, at one point, when I am on my last breathe, when I have thought of every possible thing to change about my personality, I start griping about the most trivial things that nobody would remember happened in elementary school except for parents. I remember wearing pants or jeans every day and never changing my hair except putting a headband over it. I was such a tomboy trying to be a girl. I was so different and had I just changed that, I thought, I would have been accepted. Nothing is ever that easily changed. My favorite quote of all time states, “Life obliges us with hardships so the words of wisdom shouldn’t go to waste.”
My first love at that age was short lived. A boy named Marlon and I were the best of friends and ate lunch together almost every day. He was kind to me, something missing in my life. That might have been why I liked him as more than I liked just a friend. I hear one is susceptible to misconstrued feelings of being in love with someone you barely know. I might have been in a relationship for the wrong reason. Marlon had carrot top red hair and the best sense of humor. When we played together after school, our parents, that is our mothers, seemed to get along. I never met his father, but all my dad ever thought was that he was a wild boy that needed Ritalin.
