Monowi, Nebraska
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I walked into a tiny library in America’s smallest town and froze.
A cardboard field stacked with books sat close to the doorway of the transformed storage shed. Inside, acquainted faces on pastel covers stared again at me: Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, the fresh-faced twins of Sweet Valley High. Sunlight streamed in from a window, brightening their puffed blonde hair.
In Monowi, a town with just one resident, I’d unexpectedly swung open a door to my previous greater than 8,000 miles away.
As a teen in the Kenyan metropolis of Nakuru, I had devoured the Sweet Valley High books with a flashlight below the covers in the room I shared with my two sisters. The younger grownup novels, standard in the Eighties and Nineties, centered across the lives of the sisters in Sweet Valley, a fictional suburb in Southern California.
I’d immersed myself in the twins’ escapades as they navigated highschool romances, rivalries and different petty dramas, by no means imagining I’d at some point step into their world.
And now, practically three a long time later, right here I stood, the books gazing again at me. Older, wiser and shouldering the load of maturity, I used to be reconnecting with my youthful self by means of these books – and understanding for the primary time how far I’d come.
Those books launched me to a imaginative and prescient of American teenage life and taught me the rhythms and idioms of American English, nuances that may later exchange my Britishisms and form my profession as a journalist.
Finding them final fall in a ghost town in the Midwest felt like getting into a time warp. For a second, I used to be a teenager once more, reliving my relationship with the Wakefield twins — in the unlikeliest of locations.
Only this time, the Wakefield twins hadn’t drawn me into their world. I used to be already residing in it.
Monowi, inhabitants one, is the smallest integrated place in the US. Its solely resident, Elsie Eiler, 92, serves as mayor, sheriff, librarian and the one employee on the town’s sole enterprise, the Monowi Tavern.
Last fall, whereas visiting my cousin in Omaha, she and I selected a whim to make the three-hour journey to the town. I’d been intrigued ever since I examine it in a journey article.
We piled into her household’s white SUV and gazed out the home windows as her husband drove previous huge cornfields, animal pastures, grain elevators and weathered barns. In the backseat, my son, niece and nephew chatted about sports activities and commiserated over their shared dislike of math.
When the roadside signal studying MONOWI 1 (“population 1”) appeared, we slowed down and craned our necks out of the home windows. We pulled up on the tavern, the place Eiler was alone on the bar watching the University of Nebraska soccer workforce play Michigan.
As we munched on fries she made in the again kitchen, she recounted some of the town’s historical past. She began Rudy’s Library in a transformed shed steps from the tavern in honor of her husband, who died of lung most cancers in 2004, leaving her because the town’s solely resident.
The tiny white library constructing is crammed with donated books, most of them by American authors. Anyone can take a e book and return it on their very own time.
Standing inside, it felt like I used to be again in the nook of my native library in Nakuru as a teen. Except for a household tragedy – and my escape into American youth novels – my highschool years in the Nineties have at all times been a blur.
My dad died after I was a freshman in highschool, leaving my mother alone to lift 5 kids. Without my father’s booming presence, our home was surprisingly quiet. I spent most of my free time in my room studying British and American fiction from our native library. My mother struggled with her new function as the only breadwinner and spent many evenings crying alone in her bed room. Sometimes, I heard her gentle sobs behind the locked door.
Feeling helpless, I vanished into the Wakefield twins’ sun-drenched Southern California fantasy. Elizabeth was principled and compassionate whereas Jessica was carefree, outgoing and manipulative, and their clashes and crushes turned a welcome distraction. I plastered the partitions above my mattress with journal cutouts of the Pacific Ocean seashores and comfortable, pastel-colored youngsters’ rooms – the best way I imagined theirs to be.
My bedside desk was stacked with young-adult novels from standard collection equivalent to Secret Seven, Famous Five and Sweet Valley High. Long earlier than streaming companies and social media algorithms, American teen tradition found its method to me, 1000’s of miles away, one paperback at a time.
We didn’t get a lot of American TV exhibits in Nakuru again then – principally Mexican cleaning soap operas – so the books have been my window into life in the US. (To get a style of American TV, we needed to lease VCR tapes of sitcoms like “Martin” and “The Golden Girls.”)
The twins’ carefree, privileged lives felt worlds other than mine. I walked three miles to high school each morning whereas they rode in Jeeps, Porsches and Fiat Spiders. On weekends they twirled at varsity dances whereas I sat in church with a grieving mother who’d turned to religion for consolation. Their solely worries appeared to revolve round romance, recognition and peer stress.
My schoolteachers launched me to a combine of African and Kenyan classics by such authors as Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. But our library’s youth part was stacked with American teen novels and never a lot else.
In the idyllic world of the Wakefield twins, grief barely existed. For a few hours, I may burrow into a e book and distract myself from worrying about my mother.
They gave me small moments of pleasure. My sisters teased me about my muffled giggles below the covers in the center of the evening.
A pair from Texas visiting my mother’s church modified every thing.
I used to be virtually executed with highschool once they stopped by our residence one night after companies. They provided to assist me transfer to the US for faculty to ease my mom’s monetary burden. She smiled extra brightly than I’d seen since my dad died.
I arrived in Louisiana greater than twenty years in the past on a scholar visa to attend Grambling State University and found it was nothing just like the extravagant, lily-White world of Sweet Valley High. In Grambling, virtually all of the residents have been Black and social life appeared slower and extra grounded: church potlucks, crawfish boils and small-town festivals – not seashore events and fancy gatherings.
Teens weren’t cruising round town in flashy vehicles. It was my first lesson on how fiction can bridge worlds and but distort actuality.
After school, I bought a job in the Los Angeles suburb of Riverside. As I watched surfers on the seashore or cruised below swaying palm timber in my crimson Toyota Celica, sunroof open, I believed of the Wakefield twins and smiled.
But as I moved round for my profession – to Baltimore after which to Atlanta — the books largely pale from my thoughts.
Discovering them years later in a tiny town in rural Nebraska felt like a surreal however serendipitous reunion.
Inside a room barely large enough for 4 individuals, I used to be revisiting Sweet Valley High. Not on-line in a match of nostalgic Googling – however by likelihood, in the tiniest town in America. As I held the pale, cracked paperbacks, I spotted how a lot they’d formed my life.
And as I flipped by means of the worn pages in Monowi, the one-resident town felt much less lonely. The Wakefield twins’ sagas had crossed eras, borders and cultures — once more.
But this time, I wasn’t an outsider wanting in. Having lived in a model of the twins’ world, I understood it with out the wide-eyed naivety of a teenage woman. I used to be extra conscious of what these shiny tales neglected.
I now acknowledged that the books mirrored White, privileged experiences and barely addressed challenges going through American excessive schoolers equivalent to race relations, psychological well being issues and financial inequality. For a Black girl elevating a Black son in the US, that disconnect now feels particularly hanging.
Before leaving Monowi, I signed the library’s visitor e book with a easy thanks.
And because the MONOWI 1 signal bought smaller in my rearview mirror, I considered how our tales quietly form us, generally for a lifetime.
Long earlier than I bought a passport, the Sweet Valley High books had provided me an intoxicating glimpse into a larger, shinier life. They made me dream past my hometown. But additionally they taught me that life is rarely as good because it appears.
I glanced at my 8-year-old son. One day, he’ll go to highschool. For him, the world of Sweet Valley High gained’t appear as international. Growing up in an Atlanta suburb, he’s already residing a Southern, much less idealized model of it.
I prefer to suppose that as a teenager, he’ll have extra various choices than Sweet Valley High for escapist leisure.
One day, if his world crumbles in that uniquely teenage manner, I hope he finds one thing that gives him the identical quiet solace these books gave me. I hope it’ll be one thing that retains him up at evening, stifling laughter. Something that transforms his disappointment into curiosity and makes him really feel much less lonely.
The Sweet Valley High books didn’t simply present me one other world. On that day, inside a dusty, battered field in a forgotten little town, they reintroduced me to a youthful model of myself I’d lengthy forgotten.
In that second, each detour, each loss and each lesson of my life appeared to fall into place. I noticed with new readability the lengthy street that had introduced me right here.