It was about this time that Suzie came back out and I saw her for the first time.
Carol was right about her.
She was just a sort of skinny average kid, except that her face was really round and sort of pretty. Her hair was cut in bangs around her face, sort of further setting off the roundness—except that it worked well because her hair was really black. Her skin was very pale and her eyes were this sort of crystal blue with a sparkle that I hadn’t seen too many times in other people, except maybe my mom, because she has eyes like that too, and they’re the kind of eyes that seem to go very deep because they are so bright, and they give you the impression that the person who has them is very sensitive, but whether that’s actually true or not I can’t say, because sometimes with my mom the crystal just turns to ice.
But anyways there she was, dawdling in the screen doorway, still eating half a sandwich. She had on this striped shirt like Waldo in the Where’s Waldo? book, so in truth I’ll say she could have looked a little silly, but the odd thing was the way her face and really her whole head didn’t go much with her body, which was just this sort of string bean kid’s body like Carol had said.
“Hi,” she said, smiling at me. “I’m Suzie.” And just from the way she said it, I knew immediately she wanted to be friends.
“Hi,” I said. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
The best thing about her face was how friendly it looked. She smiled a lot, for one thing—a bright toothy smile between big red lips—and it was pretty hard not to get affected by that smile, because, like those crystal blue eyes, the smile seemed to shine. She seemed like she was always in a really good mood and very friendly, and her voice was friendly too, with a little tinkle of laughter in it.
We did a bunch of things that day, like walking in the woods at the end of the street, and after that, at sunset, just sitting on Carol’s porch in the big dusty wicker chairs, drinking iced tea Carol’s mom brought out to us.
“Hey—can you show us your house?” Carol asked Suzie, sort of all of a sudden. He was pretty eager to further check out who she was, I could tell.
“Can’t,” Suzie said. She smiled at him. “My mom’s a real stickler about me never bringing anybody inside while she’s gone.” She sucked on her straw until it bubbled super loud. “So’s not to mess anything up,” she explained.
I sucked my straw too, just to make the same noise. All Carol did was sit there looking bummed, because I guess he really wanted to check out her house, but he got over it soon enough.
We sat and talked until after dark. And without even trying we all became friends.
I saw her a lot after that. Pretty soon I was seeing her almost every day, because her house was at the bottom of a hill I liked to ride my scooter down, on this sort of secluded street with the houses back behind the trees, where there were never a lot of cars.
Sometimes I found her riding her bike like Carol had said, but the reason she did it was to dry her hair after she’d taken a shower.
I figured this out when once I found her standing in the street with her legs over her bike. I sat on the curb. “I hate using hair-dryers because they always bake my hair,” she said. “Did you ever notice that? How they just bake your hair? I mean until you can smell it?”
I told her I understood perfectly, but what I really liked was what she did next, which was big and dramatic, like something I’d never think of doing.
She pedaled way up the street to the top of the hill, turned in a big loop, and soared down yelling, “Wheeee!” When she got to the bottom she slammed on the brakes in this terrific skid, right in front of me. We talked for a minute until she got her breath, and then she did it again.
I swear, she did it, like, twenty times. The whole bottom of the street was covered with skid marks by the time her hair was dry. She used to do this all the time, and I loved to watch.
Sometimes Carol was there, and he’d tell us all about what commercial he was up for or already did and what TV star he did it with, or about some political candidate his mother was rooting for, because his mom discussed politics with him a lot, and since both Suzie and I knew nothing about politics, he’d ask us in this sort of condescending way why we didn’t know anything about the candidate, because it was important to be up on things like that.
But the truth is, I couldn’t relate too well to Suzie when Carol was around because the stuff he said sort of hogged the atmosphere. I mean, he had this way—what with his squint and everything—of really just hogging the atmosphere, the whole atmosphere. I was glad when he started coming around less and less—his mom was always taking him out of town to be in more commercials—but that didn’t stop me from coming to see Suzie.
I’m not saying that I stole his friend or anything. It’s true that he met her first, but he and Suzie never truly hit it off.
Suzie and I got along really well. I have to admit that the first few times I rode my scooter down the hill I did it sort of accidentally-on-purpose—I mean just to bump into her. But after a few days we were saying to each other that we’d meet there again the next day.
It wasn’t long
