I didn't ask Luna about the sleepwalking. I did ask her about why her parents wanted to move to the city in the first place, though, and Luna was able to shed some light on that. Apparently before Luna was born Donna and Matt were in a band, and they had to quit the band when they had her. The band wanted to get back together, so that's why they moved. Luna suspects they moved back upstate because it wasn't working out. That sounds like a solid theory to me.
Luna and I met up this afternoon to go get ice cream, in honor of her last day of summer vacation. She seemed kind of down, probably because... well, it's her last day of summer vacation. This evening when I talked to her she seemed anxious about school.
"Everyone treats me like a baby," she said to me.
I asked her what she meant, and she explained that her classmates often treated her like she was younger than them. (I suspect this is because Luna does look younger than her age, and in some ways acts younger than her age — though less so now than when I first met her.)
"It'll be better this year," I told her, trying to cheer her up. "You're older now, and they're all going to see that and treat you differently."
"They'll be older too," Luna pointed out.
The conversation went on in this vein for a little while; I kept trying to look on the bright side, but Luna seemed determined to look at the gloomier side of things.
"Look," I said finally, "I'm the wrong person to be giving advice on this anyway. When people picked on me in middle school, I started being homeschooled. I'm a quitter."
"People picked on you in middle school?" Luna sounded intrigued. "Why?"
"Because I wasn't like them. Middle schoolers will pick on anyone they think is too different."
I didn't really want to elaborate, but eventually she pressed me for it and I ended up telling her the whole story of how I didn't make it through public middle school.
That story is too long to put in this post. I'm going to write it up separately and post it in a bit. I guess I've always sort of wanted to write down that story anyway, so it may as well be now.
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