Stupid mistakes coated with a blinding sheen of immaturity are an inevitable part of youth. The difference in the particular case which had attracted Tanya’s spite was that my stupidity had fallen on the wrong side of malicious, careening into a pit of downright contemptuousness for growing right the hell up.
Needless to say, Tanya was the last person I wanted to bake a tray of cookies with while reminiscing about the good old days of her giving me the hypothermic shoulder. I passed her in the library corridor, my eyes averted, my mouth sealed. After a flutter of indecision crossed her face, she did the same by way of turning back to her heart-to-heart with the freshly-painted plaster wall.
The part of me buried underneath a pile of carefully amassed psychological fail-safes wished that a conversation, no matter how confrontational, had been struck.
At least then someone would’ve finally called me out by way of actual words.
I was 12 years old going on 13. The circle of friends who would carry me through high school had already been established the year before. Tanya had begun year 8 along with a hundred or so new students. I wouldn’t get to know her for another two years.
“You know what this means?” I mouthed excitably to my best friend from the corner of my mouth. “We’re going to be in the same form class for the next five years.”
Her name was Raileen1.
“You know, all I ever wanted was a why,” Raileen said to me as those five years came to a close. “I never said anything about it because I knew it must’ve been bad.”
It had never stopped flummoxing me why she had never brought it up before then. Before I could rein it in, the question slipped from the recesses of the other unsolved high school mysteries stowed away in my mind.
“Because at least if you’d been angry at me, you would’ve brought it up to start with,” she replied. “But you just stopped talking to me. I never knew why. Jane never knew why. You just shut me out, then it stopped, and we left it at that.”
Walking through the library, the conversation came back to me – descending from that unique limbo made up of l’esprit de l’escalier and the reluctant adoption of foreign expressions when the English language just doesn’t do its damn job of handing you the right word – as I felt Tanya’s eyes burning a good-sized chunk into my back.
I considered about-turning and finding a way to ask Tanya the name of the person she had discovered everything from, without satisfying the usual need of being within 20 feet of her. However, lowering my cupped hands from my mouth and dissolving my makeshift foghorn, I re-estimated my ability to shout over the crowd while simultaneously managing to divert their attention to the library’s fascinating plaster wall at the same split second.
Knowing it would be the last time I would ever see her again, I walked away.
1 As is probably obvious by now – ‘probably’ lying on the junction of ‘blaring it into your face with a foghorn’ and ‘commissioning a virtual airbag to fly it around the site every few minutes’ – each name used in these personal posts have been changed. I find it lends a credence on par with client testimonials embedded within spam emails.
