When I first met Sara, she stood face to face before me, asking what was stuck to the front of my dress. I was allergy-prone, and on my first day of first grade, Mom had fastened by safety pin a fancy, embroidered handkerchief to my chest. I stood there in banana curls, Mary Janes, and crinoline, donning my infantile badge, realizing then that I must have looked like a doll who’d just climbed down from a toy store shelf. Mom lied that morning when she said all the girls at school would be dressed like me. Sara still looked dressed for summer vacation, as did all the others. I not only envied her casual outfit, but, adding to the simmering September air, I felt the swift heat of embarrassment, a newly experienced, yet-to-be-learned emotion, as it rushed through me. She stood in her page boy and freckles, wrinkled plaid shirt, khaki shorts, and Keds, her arms crossed, defiantly staring, waiting for my answer.
“In case I have to blow my nose,” I said.
She laughed loudly and ran off, my new, first-grade classmates following closely behind her. At first I thought she was trying to start a fight, while the whole class watched, but in time I’d find that inquisitiveness was just her way.
The next day, refusing to wear my doll’s outfit with badge, I dressed informally, planning to deliberately rub snot on my sleeve, if needed, hoping Sara might be close enough to notice. Being a painfully shy only child feeling as if I never fit in made me hesitant to approach and converse with children my own age. Each year, even the simple sound of someone dribbling a basketball on the street in front of my house caused my stomach to knot. That sound signaled spring, when everyone in town was set free from a long winter spent indoors, including myself, reluctantly released from my refuge, literally pushed out the door and told to walk to the park to “find someone to play with.” Fearing rejection, I’d opt for playing alone in my yard, spending long, lonely afternoons trying to amuse myself, as I’d watch other kids come and go from their houses, most not needing to find friends, having brothers and sisters to occupy their time.
Sara was the first person to rescue me from my solitary self, when she asked why I chose to sit alone every day at recess. From that point on, I not only became one of her faithful followers but her best friend. Our personalities were opposite: Sara was energetic, mischievous, and outgoing, while I was sluggish, timid, and afraid of authority; but to my surprise, she, too, was an only child, creating an unspoken bond between us. Yet I wondered why she wasn’t painfully shy like me. And I hoped that by being only children everything else about our families might be similar, too, but I’d soon learn that with me having a married, Catholic, stay-at-home mom and her having a divorced, freethinking, doctor mom, no siblings was the only thing our home lives would have in common.
Lasher Lane has worked many years for Prentice-Hall’s art department in book composition and is published in Volume 1 Brooklyn’s Sunday Stories, Hippocampus, the Zodiac Review, Down in the Dirt, Foliate Oak, and Obra/Artifact.