Where were you going?

Although I didn't know the term "Third Cultural Kid" as a kid, I remember clearly when I first realized I hadn't kept up with American kids my age while overseas.  I lived in Belgrade, (then) Yugoslavia from 1973-1976, from age 7 to 10.  We moved back to our house in Glen Echo, Maryland in April 1976, and I finished the school year at Brookmont Elementary School.  We moved to a new house in Bethesda, Maryland in October 1976, where I went to a new school, Bradley Elementary.  I was in the 5th grade.  Everything was going fine, especially considering I had gone to three schools in the space of 6 months -- 3, if you take out summer.  One day, probably 5 or 6 weeks after I started Bradley, a girl named Karen and I were chatting at lunch time.  She began telling me about all the boys she had gone with -- Jack, Cliff, Biff -- whatever, and a guy she was currently going with.  I asked, "Where are you going?"

In my defense, no one at Brookmont Elementary had talked about "going" with boys.  Then again, maybe no one in fourth grade, at Brookmont or at Bradley, had any idea what "going" with boys was and it just hit you like a bolt of hormone-filled lightning when you started fifth grade.  You just knew what the phrase meant -- no one had to define it to anyone else because everyone just knew.  Or maybe I had missed it during the transition from Brookmont to Bradley.  Or maybe all the girls at Brookmont were wall flowers. 

But as Karen was explaining to me that she and what's-his-name weren't "going anywhere," that they were "going steady" (which frankly, I still didn't really get), I knew it was being in Yugoslavia for three years that had made me ignorant.  If I had been in the States all along, I would have learned "going steady" because my American classmates would have been on top of all this and I would have heard about it.  The kids at the International School of Belgrade (ISB) were all clueless because most of them weren't American, so they didn't know about America and weren't on top of things the way Americans were, and since I went to school with them, I was as clueless as they were.  I realized in the same flash that by tomorrow it would be all over the school that I didn't know what "going" and "going steady" meant.

Actually, it took less than a day.