“But airplanes are beautiful, too,” he called up to me from the ground. “The sun shines off their wings and the pictures on their tails can sometimes be really pretty.”
I hung limply from the bar, concentrating on the next one, just a foot beyond my hands, barely out of reach. “Yeah, I guess,” I said, though I wasn’t really paying attention. I was much more focused on the challenge that stretched out before me.
“So then you like airplanes as much as birds?” he asked, bobbing up and down on his toes. I rolled my eyes: he did this whenever he was excited, and that annoyed me.
“No. I still like birds more,” I said, probably just to disappoint him.
“But Mary,—”
Before he could finish his sentence, the whistle blew, signaling that we had to go back to class. Defeated, I dropped from the monkey bars and shuffled off next to Eugene, who continued a well-worn rant about the superiority of machines and science over art and nature. I rarely paid attention to those anymore. In fact, I had begun to not pay attention to Eugene at all much anymore.
When we got back to the small room, Miss Deligio had us sit in a clump by the whiteboard, where she had written a sentence:
“All stories have characters, actions, and settings."
She asked Ashley to read it aloud, and while she did, I turned to Eugene, who was sitting next to me, like he always did, and said, “That looks like ‘Ch-aracter.’”
Of course, Eugene, being the outspoken nerd that he was, put his hand to his mouth and said loudly, over Ashley’s timid, first-grader voice, “That word looks like ‘Ch-aracter.’”
“Eugene,” Miss Deligio said with a dark look, “please raise your hand when you want to talk, and wait until I call on you.”
He shrugged. “I still agree with you,” he whispered to me. Then, narrowing his eyes, he asked, “Why are you blushing, Mary?”
“Nothing,” I said, hiding my face. I couldn’t help but be embarrassed for him, and for myself.
Most of that year was spent with me feeling embarrassed for Eugene, actually. He was socially awkward (though, at the time, I didn’t know what either of those words meant) and I was one of his only friends.
“It isn’t a flood,” he said. “If it were a flood, the basement would be all wet.”
In retrospect, I suppose it wasn’t a good idea to invite Eugene over to my house: he and my brothers didn’t get along very well.
“It is a flood,” Dennis said with all of his eleven-year-old empathy. “Do you hear those sirens? That means we’re all going to die.”
“We are not going to die!” Eugene said in a frenzy, jumping up and down and flailing his arms everywhere, almost smacking Patrick in the nose. I buried my face in my hands.
“Don’t worry about it, Eugene,” I said quietly. “They’re just trying to scare—”
“You’re not going to die, Mary,” he said, still looking at the prepubescent bullies towering over him. “I promise.”
“Well, whatever, but I’m going to go to higher ground,” Dennis said, walking towards the stairs. “Come on Patrick.” Patrick, sniggering, followed.
Eugene was absent from school a lot. When I’d ask him why, he said it was because he was always tired and him mom didn’t want him to get sick. I kind of resented him for it, because if I told my mom that I was tired and that I didn’t want to get sick, she would have sent me off to school anyway with only a reminder to drink lots of water. When he was gone, though, I was free to spend time with my other friends.
Like Mark, the boy I was going to marry.
Mark and I were meant to be. He collected beanie babies, just like me, and I had a dog, just like him. He liked to play kickball at recess, just like me, and my favorite color was green, just like him. We’d play with K’nex in his basement and share stories about Star Wars on the bus rides to and from school. In the long history of this world, there have never been two people more destined for each other.
Sadly for me, Mark was a rather dense boy, and had his eyes on my best friend, the aforementioned Ashley. I tried not to let it show that I was jealous, but I think I blew my cover when I cried for ten minutes after intercepting a letter Ashley wrote professing her love to Mark. To this day, our friendship is tainted.
With Mark “out of the way” so to speak, Eugene had a new spring in his step. That Eugene had hated Mark had never been much of a secret. Now that I was spending less and less time with my ex-fiancé, Eugene took it upon himself to fill the void with exciting adventures pretending to break the sound barrier on the playground. He came to school more often so that he could draw me pictures of underwater turbines in the sandbox and try to teach me how to make dye out of dandelion petals.
“You need two stones,” he said, diving under the Yellow and Green Thing where thousands of pebbles waited. “You use one big one to collect the dye that you make by rubbing a smaller one against the flower.” He demonstrated for me and showed me the piddly color that resulted from his efforts. It didn’t look to me like it could dye anything, but I didn’t tell him. We sat under that plastic play set during recess for an entire week just making yellow juice that would dry up every day.
But I didn’t complain, because, as much as I try to play off Eugene as the lone nerd in our dynamic-duo, I’ve come to realize that I can’t escape the fact that I had fun. Every ridiculous day he and I spent making purposeless, pus-like nonsense. Every stupid knock-knock joke he told. Every weird game we ever made up and played together. I had fun.
Which is probably why Eugene was taken aback when I stopped paying any attention to him at all. That was when James came.
James was from Texas. He was tall and had a funny accent, and I only have two distinct memories of him.
“What’re you makin’?” he asked me one day when it was too cold for us to go outside for recess. “Looks like fun.”
“It’s a town for Dragons.” Heaven help me, I had just seen Dragonheart and had cried my poor, innocent eyes out. “Do you want to help?”
And in one sentence, James replaced both Mark and Eugene. “Yeah, I do!”
After that, no matter the weather, and even if we were the only ones in the room besides the teacher, James and I stayed inside for recess and played with our paper dragons in their paper school and paper houses. There was a small contingent of students, The Dragon club, that stayed with us sometimes, but he and I were always there.
Eugene stayed most of the time, but after a while, he stopped playing with us and would just sit at a table and watch us from afar. I remember looking over at him and seeing the most malicious look on his face.
Then, just before school let out, James invited most of the class to his birthday party. It was the first (and last) time I went to Chuckie Cheese’s. I remember I had gotten him a figurine of a dragon that lit up and could be attached to a key chain. Eugene was there and had gotten him a book about leaves, but didn’t look to happy about it.
The rest of my first-grade year is fuzzy after that: I can only remember three things that happened.
“Will you marry me, Mary?” was one of them. It was shortly followed by, “I’m moving to Ohio and if you don’t marry me, we’ll probably never see each other ever again.”
Which was followed by our entire class going to our teacher’s wedding over the summer. Eugene wasn’t there. I hadn’t married him. I haven’t seen or heard from him in ten years.
But I hardly think that matters anymore. Ideally, I think we all wish that we could keep all of our friends forever, but reality dictates that we make concessions, choose one thing over the other, even if one or both of those “things” is a person that means a lot to us. Eugene and I were pretty amazing friends, even though, looking back at him, I can’t help but think of him as an outlandish, troubled child. Ten years ago, when asked to list the people I thought had made a huge impact on my life, he wouldn’t have been on it. But I’ve come a long way in that ten years and have forgotten a lot of things, but I haven’t forgotten Eugene. That has to mean something.
