Looking back on those moments as an adult, I cannot help but laugh at our childishness. But at the time, I remember feeling special that Matty considered me “his.” But then he would do something outrageous, like give my stinky gym sneakers to a cute boy I liked so that I would have to walk over to said cute boy to ask for them back; or he would write “I LOVE MATTY” in permanent marker on my brand new white Ked shoes, and I would be mad at him all over again. But now instead of Matty nearly bringing me to tears, he would often make me laugh. By the end of our first semester of sixth grade, I found that I was rather fond of him and missed him when he wasn’t around. I didn’t let on that I felt that way, though; outwardly, I still made sure to scowl at him and let him know that I did not approve of his behavior or his jokes.
Then came Christmas break. It seemed that all of our friends took warm weather vacations with their families over the holidays, and Matthew and I found ourselves the only ones in our friend group who were stuck in town. The other kids on our block were much older, I didn’t want to hang out with my little sisters, and Matthew was an only child. So, if we wanted to socialize during school break, we only had each other.
“Well, I guess I’m stuck with you for the holidays, LEE-AH,” Matthew said in his exaggerated sing-song voice.
“And I’m stuck with you, MATT!” I replied, knowing that he hated being called that. We were standing outside on the sidewalk in front of my house a couple of days after Christmas, already bored of being at home and away from our friends. It’s funny how as a kid you cannot wait for vacation breaks; but then when you are out of school, you desperately want to go back as you miss socializing and seeing your friends.
We both scowled at each other as we debated on what we were going to do before agreeing to walk to a pond on the outskirts of a wooded area, which was about a half mile away; it was supposedly frozen over and good for ice skating. Forget that neither of us had skates or even knew how to skate; unless we wanted our parents to drive us someplace, we were stuck walking. The temperature was hovering in the upper thirties that day, which was a warm up from the previous week when it had been in the teens. At least we’d had a white Christmas.
While I cannot recall everything we said to one another while we walked, I do clearly remember that it was the first time we had ever had a normal, prolonged conversation where we talked like actual friends; no fighting, no teasing. We’d never spent more than a couple of minutes alone together before. That day was the first time we’d ever been together without our friends or classmates around.
We walked….and we just talked. Talked about what we had gotten for Christmas and what we wished we had gotten. We’d both received lots of clothes and some CD’s. Matty had wanted an electronic keyboard and I’d wanted a pair of expensive earrings, but neither were under our trees; Matty’s parents had told him a keyboard was a waste of money and my folks had laughed when they saw the price of the earrings I’d picked out. We compared stocking stuffer contents and agreed that chocolate coins were the best and candy canes were the worst.
For a good part of the walk to the pond, though, we were silent. Not in an awkward way, but with the understanding that we did not need to talk. It was the first time I had ever felt relaxed in Matthew’s presence. And he seemed comfortable in mine, too. It was a striking difference compared to how we had previously acted around each other, constantly arguing and being overly dramatic; and I remember that feeling of contentment, of us finally being able to just be ourselves around each other, to this day.
We arrived at the pond to find it was mostly frozen over, but not in every place. We both realized skating was not going to happen; apparently, we had thought we would glide in our sneakers across the ice. But Matthew thought it would be fun to throw rocks at the frozen-over surface of the water instead of walking out on it. That sounded incredibly boring to me, but not as boring as being stuck at home; so, I joined in the hunt for small stones to toss.
Once we had a decent sized pile of rocks collected, we started throwing them as far as we could out onto the ice. Matthew then decided the game was to get a stone into a section of the ice that was not frozen over, sort of like getting a basketball to go into a hoop. I thought to myself that it was a bit more interesting than just throwing the stones into the air, so I tried to play along and show some enthusiasm, even though I thought it rather childish.
“Oh, I’m not very good at this,” I said as my fourth attempt at throwing a rock barely made it three feet. “I’ve never been good at throwing balls. Or stones, I guess.” I let the rest of the rocks in my hand fall to the ground.
“You can do it,” Matthew said, coming over and picking up one of the stones I’d dropped and handing it back to me. “Here, let me show you how. Point your toes forward, bend your knees, and lean back to throw.” I followed his directions and the rock did go much further than my previous attempts, although it still fell short of making it through a break in the ice.
“See, there
