SHE MUST BE LOVED
Gabby Luftschein
The blacktop was rough beneath my bare feet. I had forgotten sneakers that day, which earned me a scolding from my gym teacher, but the real downfall was the way my soles were now getting torn up while I jumped rope. Amanda was holding one end of the rope, but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you who was holding the other. All I remember now is her laughing face passing through every turn of the cord that tethered me to her. Looking back, it feels like more of a taunting laugh than a joyful one. I don’t know how Amanda and I became friends. It was one of those things that just were, and you accepted it as such. Perhaps it was our sitting next to each other on the way home from our very first day of kindergarten, or maybe the time she saved me from the ant that was crawling on my leg (a very real threat when it happened), but maybe friendship isn’t something that happens in one instant. I was a quiet girl, she was a quiet girl; we talked mostly with our eyes, sending signals across space and time into our own little universe. There was this one time Amanda got sent home early from school because she was sick. We must have been in the third grade at the time. She was nauseous; I knew it just from the look she was giving me far before she shot her hand up and cried out that she had to go to the nurse. Talking with our eyes was customary. That day, it wasn’t Amanda’s eyes sending signals, but her smile. The way she had been smiling at me during recess…I couldn’t get it out of my mind. This wasn’t necessarily new. It had been clear to me for some time that I thought about Amanda more than most friends think about each other, differently than most friends think about each other. Possibly the first time I realized this was when a boy from the grade above us, Michael, asked her to go to the dance with him. I couldn’t stop picturing them, swaying together, tuning everyone else out, tuning me out. It wasn’t the “dwelling on small actions of Amanda’s” that was different, but more so the actions being dwelled on. The smile she had given me was one I had never seen from her before. Not with me, not with Michael, not ever. It had a different quality to it, one that set my heart aflame. When we got on the bus, we took our usual seat at the back. Being that we were eighth graders at the top of the middle-school food chain, we got first pick. That seat was our sanctuary from the rest of the world—we were always the last stop, and sitting there alone together felt as if time was simultaneously passing at record-speed yet never-ending all at once. Amanda told me she had French homework she needed to do on the ride home. “But I have so much to tell you about from last weekend,” I whined. I didn’t really, but our quiet chat times together were the highlight of my day. “If you wanna speak…” she started, “Parle en français.” I rolled my eyes, but my heart fluttered a bit in my chest hearing her switch tongues.
SPRING 2021 31