Wilde Lake(56)

My father had told me I had to shake Randy’s hand, so I stuck out my hand, feeling ridiculous. Randy looked around as if he thought an enormous joke was being played on him, but he took my hand in his smaller, sweatier one, giving it the fastest shake ever.

Still, I doubted he was finished with me. He knew my middle name. I assumed he would use the information to seal my fate, move me from the category of someone who was merely friendless to being a true goat, the butt of every classroom joke, a walking punch line. It might not seem much, my odd middle name, but I could not bear to have it dragged out into the open and mocked. It had been my mother’s gift to me and, as much as I disliked it, my distaste for it was private.

I went to school the next day, resigned to the beginning of the end. Inside my desk, I found an eraser shaped like a giraffe and a pack of Now and Laters, lime ones. Lime Now and Laters were my favorite. I was not likely to put an unopened pack in my desk and forget about it. I looked around, wondering if there was a new kid who had gotten confused, tried to take my desk. I was careful not to let the candy be seen; it was contraband and would be seized. But the eraser—I held it up, examined it. I caught Randy looking at me, but his eyes scooted away. I was still thinking about my middle name.

During recess, it was my habit to take a book and sit by myself. The book was usually something chosen to impress, even though I knew by then that nothing I did could impress my classmates. On that particular day, I was reading Jason and the Golden Fleece. A simplified version of the myth, but a real book, with chapters.

“Why do you read so much?” Randy. It wasn’t the first time he had asked me that question. But it was the first time it hadn’t been a taunt, for an audience. He was alone, standing at the edge of the playground as if he didn’t dare touch the grass where I sat.

“Well, I like it,” I said. “You can do it everywhere, so you’re never bored. In a car, at night before you go to bed. In the bathtub.”

“Not the shower, though.”

My temper almost flared. I hated being contradicted, topped. But then I realized that Randy was only trying to build on what I said. He was trying to have a conversation.

“Yeah, but I don’t take showers.”

“I do. There are five of us and only one bathroom with a tub. We each get three minutes, in and out. Even then, the hot water is kind of weak.” He was explaining to me, I think, the faint odor he carried. Randy didn’t stink, exactly. But he had a particular smell about him, sort of like fall, only not as pleasant.

“I’d like having a lot of brothers and sisters.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Not my sisters. They’re horrible. It’s better just to have one good one. Like AJ.”

I knew then that Randy had fallen for AJ, that the friend he really craved was that golden high school boy who had saved him. But he would settle for me. It was an oddly satisfactory friendship, conducted in secret at first. At school, we kept our distance, trying to look out for each other, but not too obviously. At the end of the day, we walked off in different directions, with Randy circling back to my house. Teensy did not approve of him. He did not receive the kind of extra attention that she had lavished on Noel and Davey. Teensy was the biggest snob in our household, which is saying a lot.

“He lives in those town houses by the high school,” she said one day when I asked if he could stay for dinner.

“Well, Daddy can drive him home,” I said. “If he’s here. Or AJ could. AJ could drive him home in the family car. He loves to drive.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s not about the drive. It’s about—” Teensy didn’t finish the sentence.

By fourth grade, we no longer cared if the other kids knew we were friends. We felt superior to them.

“Don’t pay them any mind,” I told Randy as we headed out together. “They’re jealous because they know we’re having fun. More fun than anyone else has.”

Which was to say, we were the two least supervised kids in our class. Did that make us neglected? Maybe so. But it was a benign kind of neglect. No, more than that, it was constructive. Other kids went home to inquisitive, nosy moms. Randy, like me, had no mom. We were stronger, tougher than our classmates. If we did not know what it was like to come home to a cold glass of milk, a plate of cookies—Teensy was up for the milk, not the cookies—we had learned other things. We knew every inch of open space in our neighborhood. The bike paths on which I had tried to kill Randy the first day of third grade were now battle maps to us. We named them things that revealed our complete ignorance of history—Mason-Dixon Line, Maginot Line. We ran raids, hid in bushes. The only thing we knew about war for certain was that the United States had never lost one. We were winners.



One November afternoon, a Friday, we were lying on our bellies in a patch of overgrown grass near that culvert tunnel that led to Randy’s house, waiting for a German tank to roll by. We held sticks like rifles, pretending to “sight” through the points of the twigs. The game was to pretend to shoot any cyclist who came into view. But the first person we saw was on foot, a familiar figure, at least to me, tall and dark, moving with lanky grace.

“Davey!” I cried, jumping up. I might have been eager to show off a little. Davey was such a natural star. Even if Randy knew nothing about Davey and his accomplishments, he would see that, be impressed that I knew such an amazing person.