Thirteen is a bold, cocksure age, and I am cockier that most. But she makes even me pause, with her black clothes and pale hair, so different from my boy’s jeans and ragged ponytail. There is something about her that sets us apart from the rest of us, standing there on the frozen playground, the wind striking color into our cheeks. She is unmoving, balanced, silent – and I am flashing by, feeling my feet slam into the ground, bouncing me off in unexpected directions –
I am being chased, and she is stiller than stone.
It starts at lunch. I am usually alone, or sitting on the outside of a group, when noontime rolls around; cocky I might be, but “awkward” is at this point my middle name. But today the group I’m sitting on the edge of contains a stranger, this tall blond girl with an unfamiliar accent and a lunch brought from home. She doesn’t say much. She watches, and she crunches through carrot sticks and celery with single-minded intensity before moving on to pita spread with hummus. We are in seventh grade. No one eats food like that in seventh grade. I eat a hamburger and watch her out of the corner of my eye.
She returns the favor.
Eventually, someone thinks to introduce us. Her name is Melissa, and she is almost a year older than me. The accent turns out to be South African, vaguely Dutch, vaguely German, totally foreign. It is hard to reconcile her pale blondness with a country I have always considered to be dark, all blacks and browns. She speaks a little Afrikaans for us; eventually I will learn to understand it, although because I will never learn to roll my rs, speaking it will remain just out of reach.
We are herded outside into the vindictive cold of February, standing in the lee of the squat brick middle school. I stick my hands in my pockets, and touch stiff paper; puzzled, I pull it out, flip it over, and examine the scrawled words.
It is a rough outline for an extremely embarrassing short story. I just wrote it two days ago, and already I understand how unrefined and ridiculous it is. As I study it, Tabby sticks her head over my shoulder.
“Whazzat?” she asks.
I jump, startled, and say exactly the wrong thing. “Nothing! It’s nothing.”
Before I can blink, they are on me; four preteen girls attempting to snatch the note cards out of my cold fingers. My body reacts before my mind, sending me dashing across the frost-hard ground, barely missing crashing into Melissa. She stands unmoving.
But as I run past her a second time, she stretches out a hand behind her back, where the others cannot see. Comprehension dawns, and before the others notice I slip her the notecards and keep running. I see Melissa slide them into an inner pocket of her jacket, unread.
And she stands, stiller than stone, watching me flash by again and again.
I still don’t know why I trusted her, but because I did a friendship took root, the closest and deepest friendship I have. And every story that makes up the book of my life I have told her, all, that is, but one – the one secret that remains between us, and there is a certain irony in it.
For the only thing I’ve never told her is the story on those cards.
