I wasn’t a tomboy. Sure, I’d wear my cousin Noah’s hand-me-downs, but sometimes I’d pick out a sundress, even if we weren’t going to church or out to dinner. I had a collection of stuffed bears that lived in a nylon hammock strung over my bed and I cried like a baby the time Christopher Clark threw a garden snake he’d found behind his garage at me. But before Autumn, I really never had any friends who were girls. None lived on my street.
Autumn was like fizzy water, light and bubbly. I always knew it, but when I transferred to Ross Academy for junior high, it really became clear. For the first time, I saw how effortlessly Autumn made friends, much more easily than I did. So many people would say hi to her in the halls. I remember feeling lucky that I had gotten in early. Lucky, and a little nervous.
She’d get invited to sleepovers. She’d have girls wanting to sit next to her at lunch. Even though Autumn stuck by me, I could still feel her drifting away. Not intentionally, of course. But I think saying no to invitations and trying to score me pity invites had started to get a little old for both of us.
Autumn explained I could be a know-it-all sometimes, only she said it in a much more polite and gentle way. I didn’t deny it. My parents were both intellectual types, and that sort of thing permeated everything we did as a family. We had our kitchen radio always tuned in to NPR. We did brainteasers over dinner. We shared the Sunday paper. And family vacations were to science centers or fossil expeditions or historical monuments. Maybe it made me weird, but it definitely made me smarter than most people I knew. But smart didn’t necessarily cut it in junior high.
I had invited Autumn to come with my family to a laser show at the planetarium. Her face fell, and she explained that she’d accepted an invitation from Marci Cooperstein’s family to visit their lake house for a week.
I played it cool, but inside I steamed. Marci had been trying to edge in on my friendship with Autumn for months. Autumn had held Marci off, but I guess the promise of Jet Skis and barbeques and bunk beds were too much for her to resist. It was seven days of pure misery for me. I made my mom take me to the library about four different times, because all I did was sit in my room and read. By that time, the other kids on the block weren’t friends, only boys to feel awkward around. I had no one else.
When Autumn did come back, tanner than I’d ever seen her, she slept over four nights straight and gave me a friendship bracelet she’d made especially for me, courtesy of Marci’s bead kit. She had used the nicest beads, too — lavender glass spheres alternating with iridescent stones shaped like tiny grains of rice. Every time Marci saw that bracelet, she seethed. I wore it until the string broke, and then I picked up all the beads I could find. I still have a few in my jewelry box.
I guess that kind of competition should have prepared me for Chad, but it didn’t. Guys were not a part of our equation. We didn’t even talk about them. That probably sounds weird, but our friendship had this strange, timeless innocence about it. And though I knew I could compete with the Marci Coopersteins of the world, I was no match for Chad. Chad swept Autumn completely off her feet.
Once I was at her house practicing a dialogue for our French project when Chad called and invited Autumn to meet him and some friends down near Liberty River. Autumn assumed I wouldn’t want to go, but I told her I would. It made me happy, how excited she was to have me go with her. Excited, until she gently urged me to change into one of her sweaters and to try some of her berry lip gloss.
I had a weird feeling when Autumn took my hand and we veered off the sidewalk into a thin patch of woods. We followed a worn stretch of dirt, littered with trash and a few cigarette butts. I was pretty disoriented even though I could hear the river, but Autumn walked like she was both Lewis and Clark. After a few twists and turns, we came upon a big boulder, perched over the silvery water. A bunch of guys sat on it, drinking beers and blowing smoke into the night sky. We were the only girls there.
Looking back, I definitely overreacted. But older boys and beers and dark, dark woods were so far out of my realm of experience. After about ten minutes, I pretended to feel sick. Autumn knew I was faking, and let me walk home by myself.
She only invited Marci Cooperstein after that.
I thought I’d lost her.
Then the Fish Sticks incident happened, and I was the one person who stood by her. To everyone else at school, she was tainted. The boys were grossed out by her, and even some girls were snooty and snotty and suddenly too good for her. Marci actually laughed a few times at the jokes other people made. Right in front of Autumn.
I told Marci that she was pathetic.
And then I happily picked up the slack. I walked in front of Autumn, or struck up a loud conversation about absolutely nothing, casting the best friend force field to distract her from the sniffers and the stinky faces. I think some people were afraid of me. I became known as the nerdy girl with the scary intensity who’d do anything to protect Fish Sticks.
A couple of weeks later, Marci apologized to Autumn in a note she’d written during chorus. Autumn showed it to me. It was full of grammatical errors. Your right to be mad at me, Marci wrote. Idiot.
I thought Autumn would write Marci back, but she crumpled up the note and flushed it down the toilet. I’d never been more proud of her.
With my help, Autumn turned her negative into a positive. Together we channeled our energy into schoolwork. Autumn was never a great student, and that first semester of freshman year, she’d nearly failed out from the stress of everything that had happened. But I helped her come around. We’d take our lunch in the library and study or do homework together. I even got her involved with student council. Autumn still didn’t do well enough to make it into AP classes, but she made regular honor roll, and so long as she didn’t royally screw up her SATs, she’d have her pick of colleges.
After Chad Rivington, Autumn never had another boyfriend. It saved her from a lot of needless heartbreak. And me, well, the whole thing just let me be a good best friend. Which was all I’d wanted to do in the first place.
On Monday, I found one of my posters taped to the wall above my locker. The Friday before, it had hung near the main office, and my original pieces of masking tape were still stuck to the corners. The poster had a picture of me on it, holding a jacket in each hand during last year’s winter coat drive. It read, Vote for Natalie, A Leader with Experience.
Mike (obviously) had taken a marker and done some doodling at my expense. He had given me a moustache, drawn two enormous penises (one for each of my hands) and a bunch of question marks hovering over my head. He’d crossed out leader and written VIRGIN on top of it. And squeezed the word NO in before experience.
The hallway was empty, but it wouldn’t be for long. The classrooms were still locked from the weekend, so I couldn’t grab a chair. After jumping up a few times in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to reach the poster, I headed straight for Ms. Bee’s office, walking so fast that my kneesocks slid down my calves.
I had expected Mike Domski to retaliate for Friday’s pizza incident, of course. I knew he’d want to embarrass me like I’d embarrassed him. But his attack was worse than any grease stain. It was degrading.
Ms. Bee sat at her desk, blowing through the cloud blossoming from the ceramic cup cradled in her hands. Even though she was in her early sixties, Ms. Bee was tan and fit and beautiful, in a loose black linen dress, a tangle of turquoise and red glass beads, and leather slides the color of honey. Her thick white hair curled off her forehead like the crest of an ocean wave and pooled at her shoulders. She had a stack of papers and folders before her. It took a few seconds, and a small fake cough, for her to notice me lingering outside.
Ms. Bee looked up and said, “Natalie. Good. I wanted to talk with you today. Come in. And close the door behind you.”
I was too angry