By the third grade, I decided that it was time to start looking for a good woman with whom I could settle down and start a family. First, there was Kelly. We bonded over our mutual admiration for elephants, but my feelings for her dissipated when she pushed me off the monkey bars several times in a month. After Kelly, there was Alicia. Alicia and I were in the same class in second grade. She had short brown hair and rode on my bus. We usually sat across the aisle from one another and shot each other glances through the entire ride without saying anything.
Our relationship progressed in this manner for some months. Just as we were building up the courage to speak to one another, two fifth graders suddenly took an interest in my friend and me. For whatever reason, both of our mothers dressed us every day in a tee shirt and sweatpants. This earned us the nickname “Pajama Brothers” which the two fifth graders quickly spread to the entire bus. As soon as either of us stepped on in the morning, we were greeted with taunts and shouts of “Pajama Brother” and pelted with balls of paper, food, shoes, and small stones. Our bus driver, a retired woman with crippling migraines, did nothing to help. She blamed the two of us for the noise and punished us by making us sit in the front seat. When the taunting moved forward with us and she, like any other bus driver, became fed up with the noise, she punished us again by moving us to the backseat. This infuriated the older children which only ratcheted up the intensity of their attacks. Even the kids who hadn’t taken a side banded against u. The walk to the backseat was a violent gauntlet. Rare was the day either one of us were able to make it to the back without a new bruise, stain on our clothes, or spit in our eye.
Alicia was supportive throughout the ordeal. Through November and early December when the taunting began, she didn’t say anything and occasionally even stood up for us. One Monday on the way home, she got into a shouting match with a fifth grader and sat next to me. She even stroked my hand for a few seconds before we both got embarrassed. On Tuesday, I sat up in my seat and panted nervously when we turned onto her street. I perked up even more when the door opened. My pulse raced. Her father got on the bus and gestured for the bus driver to join him on the driveway, where they spoke for a few seconds in hushed tones. On Wednesday and every day after, the bus drove past her house. She had choked to death the night before.
In fourth grade, there was Theresa. Theresa, like most people in our class, was significantly larger than I was. And like most people in our class, she used this fact to her advantage. She stole my lunch, knocked me out of line, and shoved me off of a variety of playground equipment. Theresa was an epileptic. This sad fact soon became my only form of self-defense. When she would come after me, I would clench my fists and open my palms back and forth in rapid succession, make exaggerated faces, and make beeping and screeching noises. If I could do this for a few seconds without being decked, her mouth would drop open, her eyes would glaze over, and she would tip over and fall flopping on the ground. Each successive hospitalization only intensified her aggression towards me.
I found out later that year that she picked on me because she liked me. This logic seemed, frankly, stupid. I would have trouble understanding this thinking for years and consequently mistakenly believed lots of people had crushes on me throughout my life when they actually despised me. After many mistakes of this kind, I just began assuming everyone I met instantly disliked me and my appraisals of people have become exponentially more accurate since.
But by then I had already found someone else. I met Mary in third grade in recess. She had joined our recess game of Holocaust Tag. Holocaust Tag was a game my friends and I had developed. Two people were chosen to be “it” and one became a Nazi while the other became Death. The Nazi ran around the playground chasing after the rest of the kids (in our game, the Jews) trying to tag them. When tagged by the Nazi, the Jew had to sit inside the giant tire which acted as the gas chamber. If tagged by Death, then the Jew became Emaciated and had to sit wherever they were for the remainder of the round. The Jews in the gas chamber could be rescued however if they became Steve McQueen--a special condition that the Jew could reach if they were able to climb back and forth across the monkey bars three times without being tagged.
One day during Holocaust Tag I was a Jew and my friend Brian was a Nazi. In a spastic fit of in-game enthusiasm, he punched me in the nose rather than tagging me gently. My nose quickly started bleeding and I rushed for the gas chamber. Inside was Mary, a girl I had never met before. She gave me some tissues for my nose and we got to talking about this or that. We moved underneath the lip of the giant tire lying on its side as the gas chamber became more and more crowded and we moved closer to each other until our legs were touching a little bit. When Steve McQueen came and rescued the condemned Jews, we stayed underneath the rim of the tire for the rest of recess.
While my feelings for her quickly grew, our relationship stagnated at friendship. I wasn’t upset by this. I figured that I had until twelfth grade at least to make my move and I was sure that something would happen to shake things up in the ensuing eight years. At her fifth grade birthday party, I heard her say to another of our friends named Sara that she was moving away in July. A few weeks later, she told us that she was going to have a going-away party before she left and she would be sending out the invitations after school was out.
Though my mother never suspected the extent of my feelings, she could see that I was upset I was losing a friend. She suggested that I buy her a card and give it to her on the last day of school at elementary school graduation. We bought some silly little insignificant card and I signed it.
The day of our elementary school graduation, my mother gave her parents the card during the course of the celebrations. When the day came to an end, my mother and I were walking back to the car when we passed Mary with her parents. Mary was holding the card. As she walked past me, she stared straight down at the sidewalk and held her father’s hand a little tighter. We walked away from each other silently.
Every day that summer, I ran out to the mailbox to see if an invitation had come but it never did. I haven’t spoken to Mary since we talked about raincoats on the morning of our fifth grade graduation. I’ll never understand how she was able to guess my intentions from one stupid little card that didn’t even mean anything, but she did. I never had the guts to ask any of my other friends if there was any party at all or if it was just cancelled or what, but it didn’t really matter to me. Her reaction when she passed me with that card in her hand was enough. Sometimes I get mad at her; why couldn’t she have just looked up or smiled? Even if she didn’t want to invite me to her party and even if she did think the card meant something it didn’t, couldn’t she have been civil? Couldn’t she have given me the courtesy of civility? But that’s dumb. We were just stupid fifth graders. Either way, I’ve been much more careful ever since. These days if I become interested in a friend of mine, I stop talking to her to make sure she doesn’t get the wrong idea.
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