Social Science

I tried to make a break from the fantasy and sci-fi genre. (If you note the similarities between the main character and Poddy from Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars, or the main character from Menace from Earth, you will note it's not exactly a clean break, bu

 

 

            I never could get the hang of meeting new people.  It’s like to strangers, you’re this blank slate, and everything you say is new to them because they haven’t already heard all your stories a billion zillion times.

            My grandmother—Grandma Rosie, that is; not Grandma Pat—told me you only really look at someone the first time you meet them; after that, you’re just recognizing them.  Even if the way they look or the way they act changes, you’re always going to recognize someone from when you first meet them. They’re going to be that same person to you forever.  I suppose that’s why first impressions are so important.

            That’s a lot of pressure to put on a single meeting.  I mean, how are you supposed to convey who you are to someone, and find out who they are, in such a short time?  Do you pick which aspects of your personality are most important to you, and just try to project them?  I don’t get it.

            I wish there was some kind of limbo that acquaintances could hang in, like suspended animation, until enough information has been given and received to make a fair assessment of who they are.

            Not that I really feel like anyone’s got a fair assessment of me, so far.  I wonder how long it takes?

            My name’s Alison Munchler, by the way. I’m thirteen years old and actually intelligent, though it doesn’t show because I look like Barbie’s kid sister: insipid.  This used to entertain me, because nobody expects the short blond girl with the button-nose to build a combustion engine for her science project.  But now the entertainment value has worn thin.  Because now, I have to go to high school because my parents had me skip eighth grade, and I had to leave behind those people I had loosely termed my “friends” and attempt to make new ones.

            I don’t want to be completely friendless at the start of the new school year, and labeled a pariah until I graduate, so I have 84 days to make a friend, preferably a best friend, who’ll laugh with me and be there for me when I’m sad, and who won’t get all mad at me when Danny Reston wants to be my lab partner, not that I’m naming names Tiffany Riley.

            Danny Reston is one of the reasons I don’t consider my parents’ transplanting me to high school to be a sure sign that they secretly hate me.  He’s a stupid oaf and yet everyone likes him—there is much unfairness in the world.  The only reason Danny wanted to be my lab partner in the first place was because he knew I’d do all the work and he’d be free to stare at Tonya Dwight and write her love notes with atrocious grammar.

            And yet, because of Danny Reston and his opportunistic laziness, Tiffany is no longer my friend.  You’d think she would be sensible and focus her hormone-driven fury on a more appropriate target, like Tonya Dwight, but I’ve come to the realization that I am the only sensible person in the seventh grade.  Scratch that; ninth grade, in 84 days.

            Like I said, there is much unfairness in the world.

           

*          *          *

 

            I’m at the swimming pool, 61 days ‘til school starts, and no progress has been made.  I saw a girl by herself and figured I’d pretend not to know how to swim very well, so she could teach me. I’ve heard that the best way to get on a woman’s good side is to put her into the role of teacher.

            Unfortunately, this girl didn’t know how to swim, either.  I suppose I could have admitted I’d lied and just taught her how to swim, but I was too proud. Besides, she may have been lying, too, and just plain didn’t want to teach me, because she was very snooty and seemed far more occupied with the lifeguard than is strictly necessary for pool safety.

            Well, there’s no way I was going to let Little Miss Pretends-to-not-know-how-to-swim-so-she-can-lie-on-the-pavement-and-stare-at-boys know that I lied about my swimming abilities just to be her friend, so I leaned against the chain-link fence and counted my blessings that I wouldn’t have to deal with someone who’d probably end up being a Tiffany-clone anyway. Dodged a bullet there.

            While I was looking for different prospects, my sister Jessica tugged my hair a little through the fence and said, “Heya, Squeak.”

            I wish she didn’t call me that; adding to my oh-so-charming underdone-angel mien, I sound like Minnie Mouse on helium. I swear, the second I turn twenty-one, I’m going to drink enough alcohol to float a dinghy and smoke so many cigarettes I’ll need my own fire brigade. If that doesn’t work, I’m fairly certain there are cosmetic surgeries available—widening my vocal chords or something—to deepen my voice.

            “Hey, Jess,” I sighed.

            “No long face, Squeak. You’re supposed to be enjoying the summer.  Why aren’t you swimming?”

            I gave her a brief summary and explained my dedication to the lie.

            Jess let out a low whistle.  “So you’re just going to stay here at the pool, not swimming, until, what, she leaves?” She barely gave me time to nod my assent before she continued, “You’re the dumbest genius I know, kid.  Didn’t they do all those irritating ‘Be Yourself! You’re the only you you have!’ campaign things in your school, or was it just when I went there?  Because, yeah, they were cheesy, but they have a point. Remember, Squeak: ‘define yourself, or anyone can label you.’”

            Jessica is nineteen, so she thinks she’s very mature and very Zen.  She feels bad about not being around a whole lot when I was younger, so every now and then she tries to act like an after-school-special big sister to improve her Karma by inflicting “wisdom” on me.

            “I don’t think lying about being able to swim compromises my integrity. It’s not like I’m pretending I have a whole different belief system or personality or anything. I’m just creating an opportunity to make someone feel useful and appreciated, and thus forge a bond of friendship.”

            She rolled her eyes. “‘Forge a friendship.’ Eww, Squeak. You make it sound like welding.  Or plagiarism—would that have been a Freudian slip, do you think?”

            Her little barb might have been more effective if she hadn’t pronounced it “Froodian.”

            I could tell Jess just wasn’t going to go away until I had filled some sort of mentor-protégé obligation for the good of her Karmic alignment or something, so I consented to let her buy me some ice cream.

            Don’t get me wrong; I love my sister, and not just due to chromosomal duty.  It’s just that when she graduated high school, she distanced herself from the melodrama and ennui (which is her favorite word these days) to the point where she denied ever having gone through it.  I know for a fact that she was every bit as self-involved as everyone else, and blew things out of proportion and cursed her fate to the skies at every opportunity. In short, she participated in all the histrionics that are clichéd to high-schoolers.  Hormones, I guess.

            So any advice she has to give is just going to be bumper-sticker platitudes about how high school isn’t the end of the world and I should always be myself—like I know who that is, anyway.  She just doesn’t get that I already know these things, and I already know that years from now, getting a pimple on the night of the Homecoming dance won’t matter. But I also know that time is subjective, and while four years is short in hindsight, it is an eternity while you’re living through it, and I am darn well going to do my best to make them comfortable years.  Which I can’t do unless I have at least one friend.

            And I know I could probably make friends easier if wasn’t so discriminating, but having seen Jess live through a few catty ex-friends, and having been on the receiving end of Tiffany Riley’s female fury, I think it’s in my best interest to be selective.  I don’t want my alleged best friend dropping me so she can be popular, or deciding to hate me because of some stupid boy.  I don’t want to have to dumb down my conversation to include only boys and shopping and hairstyles, like I did with Tiffany.  I just want a real friend.

*          *          *

            I have 37 days left in the summer.  I have abandoned the pool as a lost cause, but have not yet found a viable substitute meeting place. 

I’d hoped for a more intellectual (read: less boy-crazy) crowd in the coffee shop, but it’s mostly full of sixteen-year-olds who pretend to be lesbians to make boys want them.  I would appreciate the irony if I were not so rapidly approaching desperation.  There was a girl with a T-shirt that said “But if God is dead, who will save the queen?!” written on it, and we had a nice conversation and she had a sense of humor about herself which is more than I can say for most people, but it turns out she was a tourist. No help there.

Preemptively eschewing the mall, I next tried the community theatre.  This required a rather painful singing audition. I am the pity of Agnes Zimmer, the pianist who feels a soprano like myself is completely wasted by my utter tone-deafness.  I suppose “Squeak” is apt.  What aroused pity in a sixty-seven-year-old, however, seemed only to provoke scorn from girls there my own age.

I took a yoga class, a belly-dancing class, a sculpting class, and a “journaling” class (Which is absurd, but who am I to judge?) at the community center, but most of the people there were older and not in high school.  And they all reminded me of Jess.

Then, I decided to try my hand at tomboyhood, having pretty much lost faith in the female gender.  I went to the skate park to see if my short stature and consequential low center of gravity would translate well to skateboarding.  This is not, in fact, the case.  I tried playing basketball but found that while I can shoot free throws like nobody’s business, I can not for the life of me get the hang of dribbling.

The less said about my dalliances into hacky-sack, field hockey, volleyball, softball, karate, and soccer, the better.

I’ve discovered something valuable. Boys are no less contemptuous than girls.  From an equalitarian viewpoint, this is good news; observed more subjectively, it sucks.

I am seriously considering building a robot and programming it to be my friend.

But that’s Plan Psi (Plan Omega is catching mononucleosis and being tutored at home) and I’m only up to Plan Omicron now: meeting my neighbors.

You’d think this would be higher up on the list, but, having seen my father’s unyielding hatred for our next-door neighbors, the Campbells, I have learned that geographic closeness is no indication of compatibility.  Besides, most of our neighbors are old people.  There’s a subdivision nearby, though, and there’s bound to be kids there.

I’m feeling a bit sanguine as I think about meeting a girl who would rather stay at home than go to the mall or the pool; maybe it means she’d rather be reading, or is simply as shy as I am.  It took a bit of…creative ethics to figure out a way to go door-to-door in hopes of meeting such a girl, but I managed it.

I am holding in my hand a picture of Kwizach, my cat.  And though I know exactly where he is—in a basket on the kitchen table, usually—he’s about 120 years old in cat years, and has lost his mind to feline senility. Therefore, “Lost cat” is not nearly as misleading as you’d think.

“Hello, my name is Alison Munchler, and I have a lost cat.  Have you seen him?”

 “No, little girl, I’m afraid I haven’t. I’m a grown-up and so I can call you ‘little girl’ even though you just told me your name and I must be completely self-absorbed not to have bothered to even repeat it. Good luck and other disingenuous remarks.” Repeat until cynical.

And yes, I did ask them if maybe their kids have seen the cat, but, of the people who had kids, most answered in the negative on their children’s behalf without even asking them.  I find this an irritating form of conceit.  Of the would-be freshmen I personally talked to, they were inside because they were playing video games. Obsessively.  At the expense of their hygiene.

No thanks.

I rang the doorbell, gave my “lost cat” speech.  I was in the process of getting a door closed on me when I wedged my shoe into the doorframe. “Do you have any kids, ma’am? Maybe they’ve seen him, while playing in the neighborhood or something?”

The very haggard-looking woman sighed.  “Jason,” she called over her shoulder, “Have you seen a cat?”

“Felis Domisticus? The most common tame animal in the state? Yes, Mom, I believe I have, at some point in the past fourteen years, seen a cat.”

My heart skipped a beat: could it be?  Smart—or at least verbose—funny, of the correct age…

“But have you seen this cat?” I persisted.  I winced when I heard my voice; it sounded like chocolate-covered sunshine. It sounded like little woodland creatures would be by any minute to perch on my shoulder and chitter and chirp and burst into song.  I clamped my mouth shut.

A smirking boy emerged from around the corner; his hair stuck up but didn’t look oily, and his eyes didn’t have the glazed-over, “I’ve been playing video games for the past week with no break but it’s totally worth it because now I’m at level 60” look.  Potential.

I hand over the photo, trying to think of something to say that would supersede my determination not to let Snow White out of my mouth.  He’s shaking his head, about to close the door on me, and I haven’t thought of anything yet!  Hurry, Alison—say something smart and witty!

“I almost built a robot.”

Where the heck did that come from?!  “Err…Not a cat-robot or anything, in case you’re thinking that because we’re talking about my cat. Just a regular old robot.  But I decided against it. For now.”

If I had drooled all over myself, he could not look at me any more disdainfully.  Jason rolled his eyes, grunted that long-suffering snort of one whose lot in life it is to be surrounded by idiots.  “Pssh. Whatever, Disney. Sorry I haven’t seen your cat.”

Hello, door.

*          *          *

I have less than a week before school starts with nothing to show for it.

            Plan Psi was a joke, a placeholder to stave off Plan Omega, which I just don’t have the guts to go through with. Besides, how am I supposed to get “the kissing disease” without human contact anyway?

            I am completely out of ideas.  I even tried the mall.  Vapidity.  I’m just going to have to resign myself to figuring out which evils are the lesser evils.  Stinky video-game-guys or insipid boy-crazy girls?  Openly scornful drama queens or blatantly sneering jocks?  Faux-lesbian caffeine junkies or an intellectual snob?

            I was sitting in my room, staring at the array of school supplies on my bed: backpack, pens, highlighters, spiral bound notebooks—color coordinated by subject, each with pockets for photocopied or mimeographed assignments—a three-ring binder to hold the notebooks; compass, protractor, ruler, lead pencils and extra lead, as if I’d run out of lead before I lost the stupid things anyway.

            “Shave and a Haircut” was knocked on my door.

            “Come in, Jess.”

            “Heya, Squ—Ali.  I just came over to do some laundry and find out how you’re doing…. So. How are you doing?”

            The typical response to this question, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, is “Fine.”  But I found myself telling my sister everything: how I’d made a fool of myself in front of pretty much everyone I could find; how for whatever reason nobody seemed to want to be my friend; how the more I come in contact with other people, the more convinced I become that people, as a whole, are not worth coming into contact with.

            Before I knew it, I was crying and hugging her and acting like some little kid—or worse, a teenager.  “And I don’t know what’s worse, Jess—that everybody is a jerk, or that I want these jerks to like me! How pathetic is that?”

            “Aww, sweetie,” she cooed.  “It’ll be okay. You can’t force people to like you. Like I said before, friendship isn’t forged; it just kinda…happens.”

            I sniffed. “But Tiffany Riley ‘just kinda happened’ and then explosively unhappened.  I don’t want to make a friend and then have her hate my guts. I don’t want to leave it up to chance.”

            Jess looked like she was trying not to giggle.  “Control freak,” she joked. “Look, you can’t systematically classify people and set parameters for who you think would be a good friend.  It’s not a science experiment.”  She lifted my chin, looked me in the eye. “Do you know how Myra and I became best friends?”

            I shook my head.  Jess and Myra have been close for years.

            “I loaned her my shoes.  She had a chorus concert that day in the auditorium, and everybody needed white shirts and black pants and black shoes—she completely forgot about the shoes, and nobody was home at her house to bring them to school.  No one else in homeroom had black shoes, or would loan them to her. So I lent her mine.”

            “But what did you wear?”

            She laughed. “Her shoes.  A size and a half too small, I might add. I wore those things all day and it was agony.  After school, when we were using the Jaws of Life to get those things off, we started talking—”

            I rolled my eyes. “And you found out you had a lot of things in common and became bestest friends in the whole wide world, right?  Golly-gee, sis, that’s swell!”

            “No! And don’t say ‘golly-gee.’  It’s… unsettling.  We found out we have nearly nothing in common, but for whatever reason, we got along really well and liked each other.  But that’s not the point.”

            Now I was at a loss. “But then what is the point?”

            “The point is, Ali, I had no idea when I loaned her my shoes whether or not she’d be nice, or if we would become friends at all. I didn’t know when I talked to her that first time that we’d have thousands of conversations and that I’d love hearing the viewpoint of someone that’s so far off-base from mine.  And once we became friends, I didn’t look for omens of her dropping me to climb higher in the high school hierarchy; I didn’t imagine melodramatic betrayal around every corner. 

“I had no empirical data, no checklists, no formula to figure out that lending her my shoes would get me anything more than sore feet.  But I went ahead and did it anyway, because she needed them.”  She stroked my hair. “It’s lame, but…sometimes things just happen.  You gotta trust that.  And yeah, it may take some time to find somebody you really connect with, and you might get burned or feel like you’re acting like somebody else—I went through it—but it’ll happen. And besides, until then, you’ve got me.  I’m not so bad, am I?”

            I shoved her.  “I guess you’re tolerable.  For a big-footed sister, I mean.”

            “And you’re not so bad yourself. For a really dumb genius, I mean.”

*          *          *

            Homo Sapiens, being capable of language to express very complex thoughts and ideas, are the only species capable of learning from the experiences of others.  I’ve found, also, that we are unique in that we so rarely do so.  I intend to remedy this, in myself at least.

            I’m not saying I’m thrilled to go to high school, and that everything is peaches and cream.  I’m not even saying that I’m not dreading it with every fiber of my being.  All I’m saying is, whether it’s Jess’s advice, or from personal experience with the alternative, I’m willing to be patient and let things just…happen. And she’s right: until then, I do have her.

            And possibly a robot.

 

Author's Note

I'm utterly convinced it's too sentimental. Is it sappy? And how can I fix that?

Reviews

[Khef Kha]

The writing is solid, but the pacing is too slow in the middle. I really think it's the perfect amount of sentiment. Although, you could add a robot...

[Dj Golden]

Okay. This is really well written and has a FANTASTIC ending (I nearly wet myself at "And possibly a robot." Hilarious!), but the events in this story take to long to get to. Like the swimming pool conversation, the geeky boy at the door, and the touching moment near the end. You either need more gripping lines, jokes, or other mixed into the batch or more events. However this could be because this isn't my type of reading material, and my bias just doesn't allow me to enjoy this all that much.

Otherwise though you have a great story about the difficulties of meeting new people in a new environment and a much better version of the proverb of "be yourself." So good job on that.

I of course would like to remind you that normally I wouldn't point out these things, but we do have an agreement.