I’ve always been a bit suspicious of this version of yours! Sometimes I’m convinced you invented it – just to make me feel good! You’ve done that a few times over the years. Admit it! You’ve twisted the facts or jumbled up reality a little so I would come out looking smarter or braver or more interesting and special than I truly am. Maybe you didn’t even realise you were doing that. But it always made me smile.
Because the truth is, whenever we were together, I already felt extra special. At school, here at the river, at my home or your home. I was Louise, Faheema’s best friend in the world. And that was special enough for me!
I miss that so much now, Faheema. School has stopped being fun without you there. I haven’t found anyone who could even begin to take your place. Some days it feels like no one would even notice if I melted away into a puddle and lay there on my desk reflecting the fluorescent lights overhead. Until someone came along with a tissue and wiped me away completely. And then threw the tissue in the bin.
That’s what it’s like, losing the person who has always been your best friend since the very first day in Grade One! Well, that’s what it’s like for me. And for you, Faheema? I wish you could tell me how all this has felt for you.
*
Your first day in Miss Walker’s class! You weren’t having a happy first morning either, in your version of those events. You looked around and all you saw were children who seemed strange and different and unfamiliar. And frightening. Some children had darker, much darker, faces than yours. Other children had lighter, much lighter, arms and legs. There were children with freckles. And red hair and yellow hair, or hair that fell in complicated braids with bright beads bobbing and swinging. And they were all so BIG! Like GIANTS!
Always before, in every situation, you’d been surrounded by first cousins, second cousins, family friends whose features reflected your own: deep, dark eyes, thick black hair, beige arms. Here in Miss Walker’s classroom you felt alone and disoriented. Opposite you at the table where you’d been told to stay seated was a girl with short blonde hair that curled wildly as though it had never been brushed. Of all the strange, alien beings swarming around you, this girl seemed the most foreign, the most disorienting.
And this strange girl kept getting up out of her chair and wandering around, not sitting still like she was supposed to. Even when the teacher told her off. You didn’t like that one bit: things or people that didn’t stay put and under control.
Then, with heart-stopping suddenness, came the deafening screech of the break-time bell. With horror you realised you were expected to sit outside in the bright January sunlight with all these strange, huge children rushing about, flinging balls in the air and making skipping ropes fly. Beyond the control of the teacher and the arrangement of desks. Amidst such noise from every corner. So loud that it made your ears hurt. You crouched against a wall, huddling over your new pink lunchbox. At least the food inside smelt of home and your mother.
It was the huge red-haired, freckle-spattered boy who ran past you, snatching your lunchbox on the way. “Bet you can’t catch me,” he yelled. “Come on, just try!”
Instantly, finally, you burst into hopeless tears.
And that’s when the girl with the wild blonde hair supposedly appeared. Out of nowhere. She grabbed at the shirt sleeve of your red-haired tormentor. She yanked your lunchbox out of his hands, shouting at him. “Why d’you want to be so mean? Look, you made her cry. You’re horrible and mean and I’m going to tell Miss Walker on you.”
So you say!
But I must point out that, for one thing, my hair was not wild that first day. I am very sure of that. My mom had washed it specially the night before, using three squeezes of her most expensive conditioner.
“Tomorrow is such a special day, Louise,” she had said as water dripped down my neck. “We want you looking really smart, don’t we?”
And before we left the house next morning, she had brushed and brushed my hair with her own special brush until I barely recognised the girl with the sleek squashed-down hair in the mirror.
And furthermore – as our History teacher always likes to say – furthermore, I have no memory of standing up to anyone, Faheema. It just isn’t the kind of thing I would do. When do I ever, ever try to boss people around? Or shout? I like things around me to be calm and peaceful with nobody in a state. You know that. Even when I’m angry, I’d rather just walk away. So I can’t believe that I stood up to that huge red-haired boy the way you say I did. Sean Groenewald, wasn’t that his name? I remember being afraid of him too. I’ve never been very brave.
“Well, you’re braver than me,” you always argue.
“Everyone in the entire universe is braver than you,” I usually answer back. Which is true!
Yet you insist that this is how it happened. In your version, I stood holding out your lunchbox to you with the sun shining through my wild blonde curls so that it looked like a crown of gold. Just like a princess, you claim. Just like a princess, smiling down at you, saying, “Don’t cry. Everything is okay.”
Me?! Looking like a princess? No, that doesn’t make sense either. I’ve always been very ordinary looking. People never noticed me much. Well, except for my brother, Kyle. But he usually called me “squashed-tomato nose” or “pumpkin head”. Definitely not anything royal!
So! So that’s why I’ve always been suspicious of this Grade One memory of yours. And how many times have we argued about it? But it doesn’t matter, not really. A red crayon or a golden crown, what’s the difference? The main thing is: we became friends that very first day. That’s what counts.
*
I couldn’t wait to tell my mom when she came to fetch me. There in the car while she double-checked that my seatbelt was fastened, I burst out, “Mom! Mommy, I’ve got a best friend. I got her today and she sits at my table. And her name is Faheema Majait and she’s got dents next to her mouth.”
“Faheema Majait?” my mom repeated.
“Faheema Majait?” my dad echoed when he got back from work. And Mom and Dad passed eye messages across the kitchen table. But I was used to that. My parents were always passing eye messages, their grown-up secrets. Sometimes my brother would be included in the exchange since he was in high school already and almost grown-up too.
He was included that night, I remember.
“Do you know of any Majaits at school, Kyle?” Dad asked.
I was busy with my pudding so I didn’t really pay much attention. Strawberry ice cream with hundreds and thousands and three cherries to celebrate my first day at Proper Big School.
“Um. Yeah,” said my brother. “There used to be a guy in Grade Seven. Nazeem Majait. He was the one who always beat me at Maths. But he isn’t at Riverside High now. He’s gone somewhere else. To that Muslim school on Driscoll Street, I think.”
“So the Majaits are Muslims then?” asked my dad.
But I had finished my ice cream. And I’d lost interest in what they were talking about anyway. So I went to my bedroom and put my favourite doll into my brand-new school case so I could show her to you next day.
Except my mom retrieved it before bedtime.
“I’m sure Miss Walker doesn’t want toys at school. You’re not there to play, Louise.”
*
Back at your house, you told your parents all about your brand-new best friend too, didn’t you, Faheema?
“Louise? Louise Van Rensburg?” your mother echoed and you knew from the sound of her voice that maybe she wasn’t as happy about it as you were.