On September 3, I barely noticed a tall, beautiful blonde girl climb aboard the school bus. ‘Get your butt over here!’ a guy at the back of the bus screamed at her. Other guys made whooing noises. ‘Where’ve you been all summer, Claire?’ a girl cried.
Claire? I started up, alarmed. The blonde girl in the pink shirt and form-fitted jeans took off her pale sunglasses. There were those familiar blue-green eyes, that lush, pink mouth, but her hair was so smooth, her clothes so brand-new. She whipped her head around, as if looking for someone. I slumped down in the seat and pretended to be fascinated by my lunch, a cold can of Coke that had sweated through the brown paper lunch bag, a smushed PB&J, crammed into a Ziploc. Finally, Claire walked to the back and fell into a seat with one of the girls.
‘Anyone sitting here?’ asked an Indian boy who I would later learn was named Vishal. My hand was still saving the empty seat next to the aisle for Claire. I curled it away into my lap and squeezed myself as close to the window as I could.
When the bus pulled up to our school on Lincoln Street, I stood up, but Vishal grabbed my sleeve. ‘I think we’re supposed to let them off first,’ he said, in his loopy I-didn’t-grow-up-here accent. And there they came, Claire among them, shoving each other and laughing, all of them with clear skin and hiking backpacks even though there was nowhere around to hike.
Claire noticed me cowering behind Vishal. ‘Summer!’ She stopped short, holding up the line in back of her. ‘When did you get on?’
‘I was here,’ I said quietly. ‘I got on before you.’
‘Claire, c’mon!’ A girl behind her shoved her playfully.
But Claire didn’t move. ‘I didn’t see you.’ She seemed honestly sad.
‘I was here.’ My voice sounded pathetic. Claire noticed, too; her lip stuck out in a pout.
The next day, she made a big point to sit with me on the bus. The day after that, too. The whole time, she was up on her knees facing the back of the bus, laughing with them. ‘Just go back there,’ I said on the third day, pressing my body against the cold, drafty window, my knees curled up to my stomach because I’d stupidly chosen the bus seat above the wheel.
‘No, it’s okay.’ Claire moved her knees to the front. ‘So what’s been going on with you? Are you liking school? Wasn’t I right-isn’t it easy to find your way around?’
‘I’m busy reading this,’ I snapped, staring at the oral report schedule for my American History class. I was to give a report about the Gettysburg Address on November 14, more than two months away.
‘Summer.’ Claire wore shiny lip gloss. Her earrings were dangling silver pears.
‘Just go.’
Claire shrugged, then monkey-barred from seat to seat, listing sideways when the bus went over bumps. Maybe I should’ve told her to stay and sit with me. Maybe I should’ve asked why she hadn’t suggested that we both go back and sit with them. But I was afraid what the answer might be-what fatal flaw of mine prevented her from introducing me around. I told myself I was being charitable, a real friend, letting her go off there alone. I’d given her a gift.
By the time the end of the year rolled around, if Claire and I passed each other in an empty hall, all she might say was, ‘Steal any Monopoly money lately?’ I hated her by then. I’d begun to blame Claire for everything that was going wrong-that, two weeks before, I had woken up and realized I’d peed in the bed. That a window in our front room had been broken, and my father asked my mother to call to have it replaced but she argued that he had fingers, he could call to have it replaced, and it still wasn’t replaced because they were at some sort of standoff, and there was still a huge crack in the window, sloppily sealed up with duct tape. That I would probably die an old maid without ever kissing a boy. That my father had begun to spend whole Saturdays in bed, and that my mother didn’t take me shopping anymore.
One late May afternoon, I was in keyboarding class, typing line after line of the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Two girls in the front row leaned close together. ‘Claire Ryan is moving to France,’ one whispered to the other. ‘They’re taking the Concorde.’
I typed a whole line of nonsense so it seemed like I wasn’t listening. France?