Friday at lunch, I sat in the cafeteria. I wasn’t seated at a table by myself—there wasn’t enough room for somebody to be a complete outcast—but I wasn’t actually eating with anybody. A girl I didn’t recognize sat down across from me.
She’d clearly chosen this seat on purpose, not just because it was the only open spot. She had thick glasses. Short brown hair. Freckles. Crooked front teeth, which I saw when she smiled as if in greeting.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“Are you Curtis?”
“Yeah.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I’m Tina.”
“Hi, Tina.”
She sat there, as if working up her nerve. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about what happened to your friend.” She glanced down at her lap, then looked back up at me again. “And if there’s anything I can do to help, don’t hesitate to let me know.”
“Thanks, Tina,” I said. “That’s really cool of you.”
She nodded. “Thanks,” she said back. She immediately grimaced, as if realizing that “Thanks” was the wrong thing to say. She reached up and adjusted her glasses. As she lowered her hand, I saw that she’d written on it in pen.
Had she given herself crib notes for our conversation?
She noticed that I’d seen her hand and immediately looked positively mortified. She looked like she wanted to say something, couldn’t find the words, and then got up from the table, seemingly on the verge of tears. She hurried out of the cafeteria. I wanted to call out or go after her, but I thought that might draw everybody’s attention to her and make things even worse.
I continued on with my day. One advantage to being a social outcast was that I wasn’t tempted to talk during class, although of course by the eighth grade teachers had abandoned the “Write your name on the board if you’re naughty” approach. Based on first-week impressions, I liked five of my seven teachers, which was a decent enough ratio.
When the final bell rang, I made a trip to my locker then headed outside. I scanned the crowd of junior high students for Tina. Thought I saw somebody who might be her, walking toward the furthest bus. I hurried after her, still not sure I had the right person.
“Tina?” I called out.
She stopped walking right before she got on the bus and turned around. I had the right person. She looked at me, looked at the ground, looked at me, looked at the bus, then looked at me again.
“Hi,” she said. She stepped away from the bus so that we could talk without getting trampled.
I speed-walked over to her. “Hi.”
“I’m not stupid,” she informed me.
“I never said you were.”
“I get nervous and sometimes my mind goes blank. I thought it was important to say something to you about your friend because I know how much it hurts to lose somebody, but I didn’t want to just stare at you because my brain froze up. So I wrote a couple of words on my hand just in case. That’s all.”
“I totally get it.”
Tina stepped toward the bus, then stepped back in front of me. “So that’s what I was doing.”
“I appreciate you coming over and talking to me,” I said. “I was kind of feeling like I was being shunned.”
Tina nodded. “My mom died a couple of years ago and that’s how I felt. It’s like people don’t know what to say to you. Adults will say ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ but other kids act like they’re spooked.”
“Sorry about your mom.”
“It’s okay.”
“How did she die?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Cancer, but I don’t want to talk about it. Leukemia.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“Don’t be embarrassed about writing notes on your hand,” I told her. “One time we were playing dodgeball in gym class, and I had to pee, and when I got hit really hard I wet my pants, I mean really wet them. So the other kids were laughing at me, and I tried to say that I’d spilled a drink, even though I obviously didn’t have a drink out there on the floor of the gymnasium while we were playing dodgeball. Then I started to cry. So I’d wet my pants, lied about it, and now was crying in front of everybody.” Sharing this anecdote had felt like a good idea when I began, but halfway through I’d decided that this tale of pissing my pants, shared in the spirit of solidarity, was not going to impress her very much, but now that I’d started it I had to see it through to the shameful end.
“How long ago was that?” Tina asked.
“Third grade. But it still hurts. Unlike your hand. I’ll have forgotten about your hand by the time I get home.” I hoped she understood that I was specifically referencing the writing on her hands, and wasn’t simply saying that she had unmemorable hands.
Tina smiled. Her crooked teeth were endearingly crooked.
I decided that I should ask her out on a date.
I’d never asked a girl out on a date.
But I’d also never faced off against a psychopathic serial killer until recently. If I could walk into Mr. Martin’s living room with a gun, I could ask Tina out, right? Surely one of these things was way easier than the other.
“Do you want to go to the movies?” I asked.
Tina blinked in surprise. She glanced down at her hand, as if she might have written a note on it to explain what to say in response. “What’s playing?”
The Goldstream Theater in 1979 had only two screens. One was playing Alien, which was rated R and which I’d heard was the goriest movie ever made (apparently the alien popped out of some guy’s stomach and you saw every grisly detail) and the other was playing Rocky II. Tina didn’t look like somebody who was into boxing movies. Maybe the movies weren’t the best choice right now.
“Or we could go to the library,” I said.
Or we could go to the library.
