She said nothing for a minute — whether evaluating my offer or lost in her misery I couldn’t tell. Eventually she said, “Meet me at the side entrance, by the trash cans.” No one would see us down there, which suggested either that she wanted our encounter to be private and intimate or that she didn’t want to be seen with me.
She was waiting when I arrived. We walked away from the school, down Randall Street, on a grass-lined sidewalk beside a wide, extravagantly cambered road. A commuter suburb at 3:45 on a weekday is a ghost town. We headed for the little playground two blocks down, its jungle gyms and swing sets hardly scuffed. Families here had their own play structures in their backyards.
“So what happened?” I said.
“It wasn’t like this at my old school,” she said. “At my old school, people were… there wasn’t this pressure, you know? Here there’s all this pressure to, to hang out with the right people and stuff. I used to”—she paused and looked down—“I used to be really into My Little Ponies, OK? I mean, I know, it’s dumb, whatever.” I smiled as if to say It’s OK, I know all about embarrassing childhood passions. “But I had sixteen My Little Ponies and I loved them.”
“Sixteen?” I asked, wondering what you could possibly do with sixteen My Little Ponies. Tara looked hurt, and I regretted it immediately.
“Yeah, I know, it’s totally dumb,” she said. “Whatever. Never mind.” She was about to shut down.
“No, I just mean, I never had any My Little Ponies, because I’m a boy,” I said. “So I don’t know what you’d do with sixteen of them. Like, did they each have a different name and everything?”
“They each had a different personality,” she said. “And they liked to be fed at different times.”
I had no idea what to say to this, so I kept quiet. We had arrived at the playground, and we made our way across the sand toward the swings, the kind whose seats consist of a strip of black rubber suspended between a pair of metal chains. We sat on adjacent swings and flexed our knees, propelling ourselves into tiny, ironic arcs.
“Anyway, I know it’s totally stupid and everything, but I still have them in my room,” she said. “And then there was this slumber party and… I can’t talk about it.”
She was about to disclose something that happened among girls, something that might be important. “No, tell me,” I said.
“Michelle and Louise and Emily were all at my house,” she said. There were two Emilys in my notebook, neither of whom had been linked with Michelle, Louise, or Tara. “And I was so psyched that they were there, because it was the first time they’d been to my house, so I was really nervous but I was really psyched too. I made my mom promise to stay out of my room and everything. And we were talking about who we liked, and Michelle said she knew who I liked, and I was all, Cut it out, you do not! and she was like, No, I do, I do, and I was so worried because I thought she knew I liked Leo Garson.” This information appeared with no special emphasis, like a man who brushes past you in a crowd and slides a knife into your stomach. “And then she was like, And the person Tara likes is right here in the room with us right now! And I knew it was a total lie, but I started getting really creeped out — like, what if Leo is in the closet, you know, what if they sneaked him in to embarrass me? And then Louise was like, He’s in the closet, and I’m going to go get him! And I was really freaking out — I mean, I was trying to be all, No way, whatever, but really I was freaking out. And then she went into the closet and she came out and she was holding Sparkler, who was like my favorite My Little Pony. And she was all like, This is who Tara likes, and she — she does it with him every night! Even though Sparkler is a girl; all My Little Ponies are girls. And I was like, Don’t be stupid, how could you do it with a My Little Pony? And they were like, You totally do, here’s how, and they started saying just this really gross stuff? I mean, I can’t even say it, is how gross it was. It really made me ill; it makes me ill just, like, talking about it.”
She was facing the opposite direction from me now, with the chains of her swing twisted around one another. A couple of stray curls had fallen over her face, and through them she surveyed the monkey bars and the seesaw as though from a great and tragic distance.
“And so now whenever they see me, they just start laughing,” she said. “In social studies they passed me a note with a picture on it — it was horrible.”
I was slightly shocked at the mature themes that had entered our conversation. I didn’t know how a girl might “do it” with a plastic toy, although if pushed I would have guessed that it had something to do with inserting it in her vagina. And I was still reeling from the revelation about Leo Garson, who was in my homeroom and was known for doing a retarded character he called Special Ross. I hadn’t expected Tara to tell me she loved me, but I’d hoped I was at least sufficiently on the map that she wouldn’t casually tell me she loved someone else.
“They sound terrible,” I said.
“They are terrible,” she said. “They’re so mean.”
“So why would you want to be friends with them?”
She looked at me with pity. “Everyone wants to be friends with them,” she said.
“I don’t want to be friends with them,” I said with total sincerity. The cryptic remarks about the My Little Pony had frightened me.
“That’s fine for you,” she said sadly. “You’ve got… you’ve got your own stuff going on.” What stuff was she referring to? “But I’m not like that. I wish I could just be like, Oh, whatever, Michelle, if you’re going to be friends with Louise then I can’t be friends with you. But, you know, if I tried to be all tough like that, she wouldn’t care, she’d just be like, OK, fine, whatever. I mean, what am I going to do, be friends with Cheryl Palatino and Emma Price again? I can always be friends with them, they’ll be friends with anyone. But I don’t want to hang out with them. Why would I want to hang out with them? So I’m going to hang out with nobody.” A look of resignation came over her face. It seemed sad, the idea that if Michelle Kessel wasn’t going to be your friend there was no one else in the world.
“I should get back,” she said suddenly. “I’m supposed to be in yearbook right now.”
We began walking back toward school. “You’re really special, you know that?” she said. “You’re a really good listener. You’re a really good person.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I felt like I might be about to sprout wings and soar above the school, up over Denver and into the mountains. And then we were at the corner of the parking lot behind the school building, and Tara headed off across the lot along the diagonal. I watched her heading for the building’s rear door, occasionally raising her hand to wave at a carful of departing kids. I kept walking straight on Randall, alongside the parking lot, beside the school building, and toward the front steps, where my mother had been waiting for half an hour.
“I have no idea what you’re thinking” was what she said when I climbed into the car. “Where the hell have you been?”
“I was talking to a friend,” I said, feeling somehow self-righteous. “I was talking to a girl who was really upset, and she needed to talk to me.” This seemed like a valid justification.
My mom let out a long sigh as she turned the key in the ignition, and I had the feeling that she would have been angrier if she hadn’t been so tired. We drove home in silence. When we got home I went straight into my room and took out my notebook. On Tara’s page I wrote, Beautiful and deep. Truly a good person. Likes LG — serious? Too sensitive for the everyday social world — wants to make a deeper connection. Under Michelle’s name, where it said Lots of makeup and Popular, I added User. Under Louise’s I wrote Mean.