by Susie Kretschmer
We're both sophomores in high school now. I'm fifteen, she'll be sixteen in a week.
I know when her birthday is of course, just as she knows mine. Birthdays don't
change. Almost sixteen, yeah, but I can still see her the summer I turned twelve;
the first day we met, the day I moved into the newly built house at the end of her
street. I was standing half-asleep in the sunlight, looking at the heap of dirt
that was going to be our lawn. And suddenly she was there in front of me, all
buck-teeth, long, thin legs and tumbling, tangled blond-brown hair.
"Hi, I'm Amy," she said, jumping easily over the water meter and looking right into
my face. "I'm David," I mumbled, but couldn't help smiling, answering her frank stare with my own.
Two hours later we were covered with mud, in the midst of a canal-digging project
in the bare dirt of my "lawn". She landscaped it with wild flowers from the ditch
behind our houses and asked if I had ever been to the creek. I said no, and she
showed it to me.
We were friends from then on, best friends that summer. She lived three houses down
from me - if I knelt on the edge of the sink in the upstairs bathroom and craned my
neck, I could see the lights of her house. I knew how far it was exactly, because
with two tin cans and three balls of string we had once run a message line from her
house to mine.
The phones hadn't worked, of course, and the lady who lived in the house in between
ordered it taken down at once - but I remember how it felt to have that line
stretching between us, connecting us even though we were apart, for that was how I
always felt with her.
She showed me the creek and we spent most of our summers there, wading in the current,
catching small fish with my parents' old spaghetti colander, building dams and then
pushing the one stone that would send the water flooding through. We dug up creek
clay and made pots, and painted ourselves wildly with its blue streaks, pretending
to be Indians; Aztecs or Mayas. I remember her standing in the algae-green water that
first summer, her long tanned legs half wet and shiny, half dry with the clay stripes
and dots of an Aztec king. We took out every book in the library on Aztecs and Mayas.
I was an artist, always had been, and I would paint in their style - in reds, oranges
and rusts, on the rocks by the creek- geometric designs and the Nine Lords of the Night.
Amy would build little pyramids of clay. My colors always washed away with the next
rain, and Amy's pyramids would dissolve when the water rose, but we were content to make them new each time. And sometimes we would just sit by the creek in the sun. When she grinned, her braces would gleam. In the summer she was mine alone, and I was hers.
But she hardly spoke to me at school, ever. I thought a million times that I understood
why. Her female friends were the sort that are always popular, those who carry gossip
but never provoke it. All of them had names that ended in -i, and they all dotted their
-i's with circles: Kelli, Lori, Shelli, Tammi, Lani, Terri - and Ami. Though Amy wore
cutoffs and grungy t-shirts in the summer, during the school year her clothes were the
same as theirs.
She moved differently when she came back to me that summer between seventh and eighth
grade. She'd always been more agile than I was, scrambling up bluffs far ahead of me,
but the way she moved was different now. Not bucktoothed and lanky any more, but curvy
and lithe, proportioned like a woman, not a child. And it disturbed me, upset my world
- and I liked it. So I would follow her on the bluffs despite my paralyzing fear of
heights, and when she took my hand to pull me up over the edge I liked her touch. It
was no longer merely the pleasant touch of a friend, but something reassuring as well.
Yet as her body changed, she herself changed. No longer would she wade with me, or
wrestle on the couch, she refused to play pretend games any more. She got rid of her
dress-up clothes some time in seventh grade, and by this, the third summer, they were
gone. Well I hid mine, too - my Dracula capes and Arabian turbans, and I hid away my
wooden sword since she'd no longer duel with me. She stopped eating around me, too.
We had both been famous for the amount of food we could consume, but now she
complained she was fat and ate very little. She didn't look fat to me, but she said
she was. She always wanted to talk about the people in our grade, but only the ones
she knew- and I hardly knew any of them. So we lay on her living room floor and watched
old movies, and I learned to curb my satirical remarks, for what she would once have
laughed at had become serious to her now. We went less and less often to the creek.
I spent more time on my painting, alone, and didn't show it to her, for she didn't want to see it any more. And in August she went away to camp. She came back the day before school started and never did call me. And I was alone.
I'd always been alone at school, with a few acquaintances good enough to talk to between classes, or to get assignments from. But for friendship, I had looked to her. And she didn't dare associate with me in public or talk to me at school. I thought, that eighth-grade year, that it was because Amy had grown up, had left behind childhood
while I was still immature.
So the first Christmas went by that I didn't give her a present, and soon after, her
fourteenth birthday went by, too. I lived in the worlds that I drew.
Amy's grades slipped. We had both been bright, straight A's, but now she was getting B's and C's. I didn't keep close track, for I never saw her except when we passed on the way to school in the morning. I'd see her leave her house every evening - there seemed to be no night when she didn't go out. After a while, I stopped watching.
The less I say about the summer before high school, the better. I was alone. But when it was over, we went to high school, Amy and I. She joined the flag-corps - I joined the newspaper. She was in my top-level English class but dropped down after a week, and I never had her in class again. I hung around with some guys from the swim team I'd
joined my freshman year - and went through the motions of studying, dreaming of college.
So we lived - separate. I didn't date at all, she dated ten guys a month. I hid alone,
she went to every party, every football game, every prestigious event at school. I was
pretty surprised to see her, then, sophomore year, at the local art exhibit where I'd
won for the second year in a row. Why she was there, I don't really know. I think
perhaps some friend of hers had got a prize. But she was there, and she was with her
friends.
I was standing next to Danny, who had won a prize for a painting of a souped up red
Maserati, when she came to my picture. I had painted a great Aztec pyramid under oily
black storm clouds, with nine hideous faces upon it. The lighting was angry and hellish
and red, and an uneasy orange fire burned in each face's eyes. The picture was called
the Nine Lords of the Night.
Amy saw it. One slender hand to her feathered blond hair, the nails polished in coral,
a boy's class ring on one finger, she saw it. As she turned around, I met her blue eyes with a level calm stare. Electric our glance, for she knew. she remembered. I had not thought she would forget. And I saw in her eyes that she knew that I saw. We held it only a moment, for one of her friends broke in with a mocking harsh laugh. "What a gay picture. But everyone knows that all artists are gay, anyway." "Yeah,"
replied the other one, bored, "and the more they win, the gayer they are."
Amy turned her back on me, but not before I heard her saying, "Yeah, I know." And they
left laughing.
And I stood in silence, and I knew I had lost her. She had been more truly mine that
I had ever known, for the person she'd been for me had not existed for anyone else.
I watched her go, and I cried inside, for I understood that it was I who had grown
up and she who had got lost. For I have kept who I am, and it is what I will always
be. And Amy is gone.
(Susie Kretschmer wrote this story when she was a senior in high school. I got this story from my English book at school, Catch 9, in 10th grade.)
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