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Henry
1997
The girl who liked to play with the boys, who was faster, smarter, and more competitive than any boy he had ever met, was named Piper. She turned around in her seat to look at him, gave him a smile that somehow reminded him that she’d left him in her dust during the hundred-yard dash in PE yesterday. It was the same look she’d given him then. It excited him, made him smile, too, though most guys would be mad to be beaten by a girl at anything.
He liked it—her speed, her confidence.
She reached her arm behind her, and he took the note she dangled.
Loser, it read.
Dork, he wrote back. He put the piece of paper in her waiting palm, heard her giggle when she read it.
He was helping her with math and a few other subjects. She wasn’t a great student, always looking out the window, waiting to be let back outside to run and play. She was smart, though, when she wanted to concentrate.
“Something you’d like to share, Piper?” asked Ms. Banks from the front of the room. She wasn’t mean enough to make them share their note.
“No, Ms. Banks,” said Piper. “Sorry.”
Later they’d meet in the library where they’d study for a while until his mom came. Piper walked home alone. Her house wasn’t far.
“Okay, guys,” said Ms. Banks. “Pop quiz.”
Everyone, except for Henry, let out a collective moan. Piper put her head down on her desk. She was barely clinging to a C.
Ms. Banks gave him his paper and he got to work.
He was starting to like it here, as much as he could like it anywhere. Which made him anxious. Because he remembered that other times he’d started to like places, they were suddenly packing up whatever apartment his mother had rented and leaving, often in the middle of the night, always without notice. Alice never gave a reason, just that it was time. Sometimes she’d seem angry, or anxious. He’d never challenged her.
He’d just come home from school one day and then wouldn’t go back the next. He’d never really had a friend before, someone who might miss him, wonder what happened to him.
He finished his test before anyone else and just sat for a while, staring at Piper’s wild golden mane, her head bent in concentration.
The day outside was brutally hot and humid, the sun blared, heat waving off the playground. The tall palm trees swayed lightly. His mom had been complaining about the heat—a lot. He wondered if that was a sign that they’d be moving soon. He liked it hot, when the air was heavy, and you could feel the sun on your skin. They weren’t far from the ocean; he could walk there and did. Something about the shorebirds calling, and the lapping waves, sand beneath his toes was soothing. It reminded him of—something. A memory just out of reach, a feeling that he’d like to have again but couldn’t quite touch. There were faces attached to the memory—a man, a child. But they were amorphous and strange, like faces in a dream.
The bell rang and he waited by Piper’s desk.
“How’d you do?”
“Maybe okay?” she said, wrinkling her nose at him.
“I’m sure you did fine.” He wasn’t, even though she knew the material. She was an outdoor creature, meant to run and play, not be penned inside regurgitating information she’d likely never use again.
“If I didn’t my mom’s not going to let me play soccer. I have to make Cs.”
“You will.”
“Dork,” she said, nudging him.
“Loser.”
They shared a bag of Doritos under the table in the library where you weren’t supposed to have snacks. He helped her with her biology homework. She told him that he was turning his right foot out when he ran, slowing his time.
At three they walked out and she headed home.
“See you,” she said, giving him a wave. She was certain of that. That he’d be there tomorrow and so would she.
“Yeah,” he said. “See ya.”
