How It All Came to Be

I moved to my current home in the middle of first grade. It was pretty tough. I went from living in the country and having hick friends to entering a new class around Christmas and dealing with suburbanites. Of course, it would all work out in the long run. My parents decided to move so that I'd have a chance to go to a better school (and they did it fucking right. I was in the best district in my side of the US).

Depending on how good your memory is, your first one may be when you were three or four. Maybe you went to Disney World, met Mickey Mouse, and your very first recollection is of you screaming in terror as a giant mouse swoops down to feast upon your organs. Me, I don't remember anything before I was six, when I was halfway through first grade. When I first met her.

Yeah, it's corny. But it's also true. Absolutely nothing of significance happened before then. I had preschool friends and left them all without regrets. I had birthdays, Christmases, tenderfelt moments between just my parents and I before my sister was born, and I don't remember any of it. The following is a more-or-less accurate transcript of what happened that day in December.

My memory starts when my new class was walking somewhere on a mini field trip. I don't know where the shit we were going, but I do remember hating my partner. She was some sullen fat kid who didn't have friends and so got stuck with me, the new girl. I wasn't exactly thrilled to be with her either. I was born a month early and small, then at six years old I was small, and I'm only a few feet taller today. This girl was like, mammoth. I can still remember her face leering down at me.

Enough fat first-grader bashing. The teacher kept telling us to walk next to our partner, but there was no way in hell I was gonna do that. I sort of wandered off and got myself lost without her noticing.

I should mention that I have Mazeophobia- the fear of getting lost. I never remember this until I am lost.

So I was standing in the middle of the hallway and I was freaking out. When I am absolutely without-a-doubt scared to my core, I'm ashamed to admit that I'm like a small bunny. I freeze and find myself completely paralyzed. Which is not the best survival technique in the middle of the hallway. Those big lumbering sixth-graders kept running me over as they went to the library, or wherever it was that giants hung out in those days. It was a shove from one of them that finally made me move.

I stumbled over to the wall of the hallway and sat down with my back against some cubbies, utterly at a loss. The school, in my opinion, was HUGE and there was absolutely no way I could find my way back. Ever. I was so completely fucked. My country pre-school had like four rooms. This school had to have at least forty. Maybe two million. It didn't really matter. Just thinking about the hopelessness of my situation made me tear up. Okay, truth be told, it made me bawl in a flat-out sobfest.

"Hey."

Someone was interrupting my crying, which I thought pretty rude. I looked up, face completely red and tear-streaked, and there was Marlie. She already had her huge bush of more-frizz-than-curl brown hair and enormous owl glasses (much like myself). It was like looking into a mirror.

"You're in the way of my cubby," she said, not quite delicately, and I muttered a "sorry" as I scuttled sideways. I didn't notice it, busy as I was in sobbing, but she paused, looked down at me and hesitated. I've asked her. She doesn't know why she hesitated. She doesn't know if it was because I looked like her, or because I was crying, or for no reason at all. Whatever the reason, her next statement was pivotal.

"Hey," she said again and paused until I looked up. "I'm gonna go get ice cream." I blinked. "And there's a lot of it," she added casually. I blinked a second time. "... there's chocolate."

I finally got it. "Can I... can I come get some with you?"

"Yeah!" she enthused. "Just follow me."

We toddled off on our little first-grader legs through the hallways. I was no longer nervous because I wasn't lost- someone had found me and was taking me to ice cream! Except now her slightly longer legs were leaving me behind.

"Wait up," I called out, panicking slightly, and Marlie immediately stopped.

"You've got to walk quicker," she said severely, grabbing my hand and tugging me along. "Soon the teacher will come looking for me."

"She wants ice cream too?" I was breathless from walking at such a speed.

"Uh-huh," Marlie lied effortlessly. We turned into a hallway the led behind the cafeteria. And there... in glorious freezer after freezer... was ice cream. This was like a dream come true. "I think they have vanilla over here." Still leading me by the hand, we walked over to the freezer and rubbed off the glass to look inside.

"That's chocolate," I said, squinting at it. "Can I have some of that?"

"Yeah." Marlie shrugged. "I'll get spoons." She disappeared through a door I hadn't noticed while I helped myself to a mini-sized carton of chocolate. I retrieved her vanilla while I was at it. She returned and I handed it to her.

"Uh- thanks." The word popped out of her mouth in surprise. "I only found one spoon," she said apologetically. "We'll have to share." She handed me the spoon and I dug out a bite.

"That's okay," I said, beaming. "Friends share." I swallowed the ice cream in one gulp and got brain freeze.

"We're friends?"

"Not if you don't want to," I amended, looking worried.

"Yeah, I want to!" she said hurriedly. "I don't have any. My name's Marlie." She looked down at her ice cream.

"I'm Alyssa. And you don't have any spoons?" I asked, feeling silly, and she giggled. I passed the cutlery.

"No friends," she answered, her tone sobering up a little, and my smile drooped. She scooped out a mouthful of vanilla and passed the spoon back.

"Hey," I objected. "Now we're friends, right?" She nodded. "And as your friend, I'll want to eat ice cream every day for the rest of my life forever and ever with you!" I declared, waving the spoon and successfully splattering melting chocolate ice cream over our clothing. "Oops..."

And the rest, as they say, is history. In one of my mother's fondest memories of me (yah right), she was forced to come pick me up from the principals office on my very first day of school because I had broken into the kitchens behind the cafeteria as an accomplice, eaten three small containers of chocolate ice cream, ruined my first-day-of-school clothing with chocolate splatters, and made a new friend. Well, I wasn't in the principal's office for making a new friend, but he really did want to write that up on the list of charges. Marlie was apparently classified as a bad influence.

The only difference is that now, she's my bad influence. And I like her that way. So if we go out to get ice cream, and I get plain chocolate in a cone and she gets vanilla and we both start giggling, you now know why. Especially if we start passing a spoon back and forth and laughing as I manage to get chocolate all over my shirt. (Shut up, I'm messy.) And if I should say something like "Every day for the rest of my life?" and she replies, "Forever and ever", don't think it's from a Hallmark card, because that sentence was totally the best sentence I've ever said and will probably ever say. Ever.

***

So apparently all my readers are a bunch of masochistic bastards who would rather be in pain than swallow one or two itty bitty pills. Pansies. Question for all of you (there'll be no myth tomorrow):

How did you meet your best friend/boyfriend/girlfriend? It doesn't matter who it is, but what do you remember most about the memory?