Welcome to Sweet Apple
If Sweet Apple, Ohio, has a reigning teen princess sort, it would most certainly be Kimberly Anne MacAfee, otherwise known as Kim. Whether we realize it or not, Kim's behavior subconsciously influences ours. We tend to glorify her for reasons we will never truly understand. And don't get me wrong, I like Kim fine, but I've never comprehended why people are put on pedestals, be it locally (in Kim's case), or nationally (in the case of Conrad Birdie). Maybe it's because we don't trust our own judgment, that we feel like we need to be blindly led by someone else, a public figure of sorts. I could be entirely wrong, but if Kim MacAfee was jumping off a cliff I bet you we'd all go flailing after her. And if Conrad Birdie was going off the cliff, well, we'd all be passed out with fright and freefalling after him.
Kim seems to be the one holding us all together. Her very best friend is the previously aforementioned Ursula, good old obsessive Ursula, with know-it-all Deborah Sue a close second. Then there's the rest of us girls, all of us falling somewhere between thirteen and fifteen (naturally Kim's the oldest): Bridget, the richest, snootiest girl in town, and Daisy Doe, who seems to want everything Bridget has and be everything Bridget is; Helen, who's almost too conscious about her looks and very being; there's Charity, who's a darling but a bit prim at times; and honey-sweet Nancy; innocent Alice, the Mayor's daughter; perky, playful Margie; the enigmatically un-fitting in Penelope; and me, smart, sophisticated Suzie, always an alliteration. Without Kim, we would become a senselessly assembled group of acquaintances; Kim unifies us as friends and Conrad Birdie fans. Yippee.
Often when you think of the sort of teen princess that Kim is, you think of some perfect, beautiful, mean girl, loved and hated by all. (That's Bridget.) Actually, Kim's a nice person, and neither perfect nor beautiful. She's certainly cute but not truly beautiful. (Is anybody truly beautiful?) To be quite honest, Kim is a sort of composite of all of us. She has a healthy blend of Alice's naïveté, Margie's playfulness, my "sophistication", that swirls together to create the very image of Sweet Apple teenage perfection. God love Kim, but she's a bit surreal at times. She's very much entranced with the concept of the ideal man and being together forever, but at the same time she's desperate to be grown up and, at times, sultry. And let me tell you, none of the girls know the first thing about being sultry. (To be honest, Real Suzie is actually quite good at being sultry; she does it a lot when she goes to New York and sneaks out. However, New York Suzie and Sweet Apple Suzie have a habit of tying Real Suzie up in the closet whenever she gets her sultry impulses, much to Real Suzie's hormonal frustration.)
It isn't that I don't like the girls – they're sweethearts, you really couldn't ask for better friends. They've just been utterly brainwashed with Conrad Birdie mania. They don't realize that there is life beyond Sweet Apple, Ohio and the pastel perfection that is their lives. Their mothers stay home and do the cooking, their fathers have good stable jobs, they have their sweater sets, their crinolines, their Conrad Birdie records. They live in the white picket-fence idyllic America, never realizing there's another world just miles away. Sweet Apple's a nice place to grow up, I suppose – but I yearn for a freer environment, the kind only the wilds of New York City can offer.
