Plus my parents would’ve co-opted the whole thing.
I was waiting for you to come over, but it’s just as well we met like this-if you’d come over I’d’ve probably been a freak. She had blue-gray eyes with very light lashes, and a long, pointy noise. The girl’s hand was still out, and though I’d never shaken hands with another kid before, I held mine out for her, and she pumped it up and down. The Jacksons had spent a year in London, and afterward Helen Jackson had been such an oddball her parents had taken her out of public school. Teddy Levine was spending the year at the American Academy in Rome, and the Levine kids were going to go to some Italian school and come back fluent and probably strange. Now I got it: she was part of the family renting the Levines’ house. Your name is Richard Appleby and you live around the corner from me, in the house with all the ice plant.” I didn’t mean who are you what’s your name-I meant who are you who are you. I had never met anyone who talked like this, and it took me a moment to respond. Or maybe I should say ‘I’m New.’ We can call each other Sorry and New, and then when we get to know each other better we can switch to something else. She came forward and offered me her hand. “Sorry.” I was afraid she thought I was following her when I was just heading home.
She stopped suddenly and turned, and I got my first glimpse of her face: pale and peppered with freckles. There was even a Nixon button with a giant red X drawn over his ugly face. She was small-boned like me, with thick red hair spilling halfway down her back and covering part of her backpack, which was decorated with at least a dozen McGovern buttons, rather than the usual one or two. Down on the bright sidewalk, she was headed in the direction I had to go, and I followed after her, walking slowly so I wouldn’t overtake her. I waited until she was off the bus and then made my way up the aisle, keeping my eyes away from Bruce Cavanaugh and Tony Halpern, who’d been my friends back in elementary school. To my surprise, she shouldered her backpack at my stop. A couple of stops before mine, a clump of kids rose and moved up the aisle, and that’s when I saw her, a new girl sitting up near the front. Finally we came down out of the hills and arrived in Stanford, where the last twenty or so of us lived, in houses built close together on land the University leased to its faculty. The route home meandered through Los Altos Hills, with its large houses sitting in the shadows of old oak trees and dense groves of eucalyptus. It was the first week of eighth grade, and I sat alone near the back of the school bus: a short, scrawny honor-roll boy with small hands and big ears.
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