I am nine years old, playing in Dad's front yard on a Friday. Near-summer Friday, wet and unexpectedly chilly. I am not here because I want to be. Dad has just moved here, with Noise, a woman who is not my mother but shares a home with Dad. I hate her. She hates me. She is yelling, so I am outside because it is quiet. I'm reading or drawing with chalk or doing anything to pass the time until her shouting dies down and I can go back inside to the soft fuzzy blur of cartoons on the tv.
Schoolbus rolls past, fat yellow grub, twinkie on wheels. I follow because maybe there are kids on it and maybe they are my age and maybe they want to play. I have no friends here or at home. A friend might be nice. The bus stops a block away and I watch as she and her brother come off. She looks my age, looks friendly, looks beautiful. Most of all this is what I care about: Two weeks ago my reconnaissance of the neighborhood woods led me to a pasture with horses. Her house backs up to that pasture, and maybe she likes horses too.
"Hi," I say as casual as I can. Try to be cool even though I'm sweating with nerves already. "I'm Sal. What's your name?"
"Alicia," she says and I know right away we'll be friends. I know because when she smiles the clouds part and because she has purple bands on her braces and I have purple bands on my braces too. That made it kind of like fate, right? "Wanna come in and have some soda?"
I was instantly happy, blissful and cheerful in the way only kids can be. Everything else I could feel was obliterated in the tidal wave of my victory. I had made a friend. Things would only go downhill from there.
i should add that the horses belonged to her parents, who did not scream at anyone and always had hugs and smiles. I didn't know how fucked up they were until much, much later. Her brother, Elias, was annoying in the way little brothers are, and so the two of us usually tolerated him.
