Only the Lonely

How Roy Orbison helped me make a new friend

- Megan Murphy

IN THE FALL OF 1988, when I was 10 years old, my parents moved us to a bigger house across Peterborough. I was forced to leave the familiarity of St. Paul’s and become “the new kid” at St. Teresa’s: a one hallway school with no gym where the other kids in my Grade 5 class had been together since kindergarten. I struggled to break into the crowd and spent recesses playing hopscotch alone, gazing longingly at the other kids as they traded their Twinkies and Fruit Roll-Ups. I was lonely and desperate to make a friend.