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plastic place mats for the cookout— cookout! —they were having in a few weeks. The mats were made by weaving rows of plastic strips, each a different color, into a large rectangle. I was invited to siton the floor as part of the Brownies’ circle and join in, my first semi-official act as a troop member. It wasn’t selling cookies or sitting around a campfire. But that would come soon enough. And I’d have this cool placemat…this rainbow of a placemat…this awful, impossible-to-make placemat! Ugh! The plastic strips kept slipping and fell out of order. And when I pulled them tight, they’d break. My mat wasn’t even close to the rectangular beauty on display by the troop leader. It was a lumpy mess! Am I really Girl Scout material after all? I wondered. Next to me, a girl with a pixie haircut and a button nose wove a perfect mat: smooth, not too tight, and flat as a pancake. She’d be ready for the cookout.
    Pixie Girl must’ve felt me watching her because she turned a second later and looked down at the mass of twisted, snapped plastic strips on my lap.
    â€œYou’re doing it all wrong,” she said. It was really more of a whine. And then, “Your mat looks really dumb.”
    Dumb? This from a uniformed Brownie.
    â€œWell….” I mumbled. What should I say? I knew it had to be good. Then, it came to me: “You’re a stupid asshole!”
    The words flew from my mouth. Loud. Bold. Proud! They echoed through the room, and every hand stopped weaving. Plastic hung suspended in the air. Every Brownie froze. After a moment, Pixie Girl broke the silence.
    â€œThat girl called me a bad word. A really bad word!”
    She pointed at me as she hollered, but she could’ve saved her breath. There wasn’t a single person in that room, including the troop leader herself, who had missed the word “asshole” coming from the mouth of the struggling new recruit. I looked down at the green tiles of the floor, my face burning. What would they do to me? I was remindedof a few days earlier, Sunday, when my dad had been out on the lawn behind the house trying to fix the lawnmower. He had been cursing at the top of his lungs, calling the mower “a fucking lump of shit” and “a goddamn son of a bitch”—terms once reserved for the laboring VW bus. Suddenly, a man’s voice, carried by the wind and through the trees near Connie and Doug Bradford’s house: “Watch your stinking mouth, Hendra, or I’ll have you arrested!”
    Arrested? Is that what was going to happen? They’ll haul me away and lock me in jail? Or would they just wash my mouth out with soap like I saw Connie do to Becky’s brother Jeremy when he called her a “Fat Cootie?” Becky and I had peeked through the crack of the bathroom door and watched Connie pry open Jeremy’s mouth and wedge half a bar of Ivory Soap between his jaws. It foamed as he gagged and spat. Connie added a bit of water and scrubbed her hand around his mouth. Finally she let him go and sent him to his room in tears. Which was worse: prison or Ivory Soap?
    The troop leader made her way toward me, her pink face red, her lips trembling. Only her hair, frozen by hairspray, remained calm.
    â€œJessica Hendra, you will stand up and walk from this room immediately!” I did as I was told and abandoned my plastic mat then and there. “Go and wait outside for your mother to pick you up. You are not to come back,” she told me.
    And then, the worst words of all: “You will never be a Brownie!” In that one moment, the dreams of the cookouts, the cookies, and the campfires were over.
    Banished…a punishment worse than soap or jail. A life without the uniform I so desperately wanted. I left the troop meeting disgraced—a Girl Scouts of America juvenile delinquent. Outside, I waited for Mom. The troop leader occasionally peeked out thewindow to make