Grade Four.
Grade four was the best year, ever.
The first day of school, I wore pink nailpolish, a pink blouse, a kilt, and white knee-socks that covered up my mosquito bite-scabbed legs. My shoes were brand-new 'Buster Brown' t-straps, and the left one squeaked when I jumped Double-Dutch.
This was the year I squished my fingers in the hinge of one of the big metal doors, and got to wear a tape-wrapped splint on my hand that everyone signed with a green marker.
Mr. Johnson was my teacher, and he let us play records every afternoon while we did art and handwriting and clean-up. He was a big teddy bear of a man, with a red beard, and a kind, kind smile.
Our choir won the Kiwanis Elementary Music Festival in November for singing a song in Chinese. None of us were Chinese.
I also ran the 2500m race at our school track and field day, somewhere before or after which I got a wicked sunburn. It was the best sunburn ever, though, because I shed my rosy skin like a snake for a week afterwards. Whole strips of skin would pull up chiffon-like from my back and arms, and my mother would slather on Noxema and aloe to try and stop me from molting further.
My student teacher was Miss Messier, and she was a cousin of the hockey player, Mark Messier. When the Oilers won the playoffs that year, she brought us in pictures of him holding the Stanley Cup. I didn't like the Oilers, being a Canucks fan like my dad, but I didn't tell anyone that. I just smiled at the pictures, like everyone else. Anything else probably would've earned me a poke in the eye.
That year, our class managed to raise the most money for a children's charity (whose name I cannot recall), thus winning ourselves a day-trip to the amusement park at West Edmonton Mall, which, at that point, seemed like the Eighth Wonder of the World.
Everyone had to choose a date.
This was, of course, not a requirement of the contest, but somehow we all decided, in the same way that a kiss beside the swings decides who you will marry one day, that we all needed to go on this trip as 'couples'. I was pretty sure I would go with Kevin Burton, because he and I had this great David-and-Maddie-from-Moonlighting-except-two-feet-shorter thing going on. He was adorable...dark hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks, good at sports...just the kind of boy I would end up falling for ten, fifteen and twenty years later. He was horrible to me, but consistently horrible, so I knew he liked me. He was putting off asking me to be his date, just to be coy, but it felt like a sure thing.
Then Ainsworth asked me first.
Ainsworth was a touch shorter than the other boys, and the only black kid in our class, a fact only notable because of his singularly exceptional afro. His curls were big, silky, and plentiful enough to stand out several inches from his scalp. None of us had locks that could even remotely compare with that head of hair. I recall wanting to touch it all the time, but never quite getting close enough to do it.
His clothes were always kind of askew and untucked, and his socks didn't match, more often than not. That wasn't terribly unusual for boys in our class, but somehow, Ainsworth seemed to be a bit more intentional about it; instead of a black sock and a navy sock, he would sport a green sock and an orange sock. And then he would roll up his cuffs.
He didn't say much of anything, and when he'd try to, it would come out halting, and mangled by nerves. You wouldn't want him for a presentation partner. But he got killer grades, won a service award for taking care of the class hamster, could draw a great Snoopy by hand (without tracing), and despite his fear of public speaking, sang a solo in the choir (but not in Chinese).
Ainsworth sat across from me every day at the Math table, and we got along fine in an un-speaking kind of way. I was an absolute idiot at math, but I could read upside-down, and his answers were always right. I think he noticed me looking at his paper, because he would turn it around right-side-up for me now and then, with a sly smile.
Kevin Burton, however, sat right next to me, and would write me notes during class that said things like, "Stupd!" and "Dum". Apparently, I found this approach charming and witty, and would continue to revere such behaviour well into my twenties.
One day, I think he was writing yet another one-word missive when Ainsworth slid a scrap of paper towards me, across the table. Kevin's friend Casey went to intercept it, but I nimbly kept it from his grasp, and held it tight in my lap. At this point, two questions came to mind:
1. Why is Ainsworth passing me a note?
2. What could it possibly SAY?
Well, reading the note actually answered both queries. It simply said:
"Please be my date for the trip."
Now, this brought sudden complexity to my life that I would rarely experience again. I looked up at Ainsworth, who was smiling shyly, and then over at Kevin, who was scowling and trying to read the note in my hand. He snatched it from me a second later, and shot Ainsworth a horrible look. Immediately, he copied the words from the note onto his own page (with errors, mind you), and slid it over to me. I read it, blushing furiously, and then stared ahead at Mr. Johnson, suddenly engaged deeply in the lesson he was scrawling on the chalkboard.
I had no idea what to do. I'd expected to go with Kevin, but he hadn't even asked me yet. That was kind of rude. And Ainsworth had spelled everything in his note correctly, which I gotta say...then and now...is a big turn-on for me.
The recess bell brought almost instantaneous confrontation in the hallway.
"She is going with me." Kevin stated this without a shred of doubt in his tone, and then stood next to me, as though staking his claim through sheer proximity.
"I asked her first." Ainsworth responded without anger, sincerely believing his logic to be the most powerful factor at work in the situation. His voice was uncharacteristically calm, and that sly smile teased again at the corners of his mouth. They both looked at me, waiting for my decision. I had no idea what to do. Then, as always, my friend Stacey spoke up.
"I am going with Casey, and Meaghan is going with Kevin. We planned it a long time ago." She grabbed my hand, and dragged me down the hallway, leaving a smug Kevin, and an expressionless Ainsworth in my wake. I was relieved in the most cowardly way possible; someone else had made the call for me, and I would be going with my first choice. But something still buzzed in the back of my head. Was that mean? Was Ainsworth right?
Kevin celebrated his victory by throwing a large rock at me when I was on the monkey bars after school. I automatically burst into tears, shouted something nasty I cannot recall, and started the block-long walk home from the playground. This wasn't abnormal girl-boy treatment, and I wasn't a wussy kid, but I gladly used the potential injury and trauma as an excuse to go see my mom. I imagined she could make sense of the whole mess. She was usually pretty good at that.
I only noticed a few feet before I went in my door that Ainsworth had followed me home. I hadn't seen him on the playground, but then I realized that he hadn't been there at all; his house was near the complex in which my family's townhouse was located. He must've seen me go by, sobbing in all my dramatic glory.
I turned to face him, bewildered as to why he was there. He looked nervous, and stopped a good fifteen feet from where I stood. "You okay?"
"Yeah." I replied, wiping my runny nose on my sleeve.
"You know..." He paused for a second, then blurted it out. "I wouldn't make you cry." I had no idea what to say to this, so I just mumbled my previous response as a question.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I like you." He smiled a smile that was more confident than any expression I'd ever seen him wear before.
"Okay." With that, I went into my house, shut the door, and began to cry again.
The rock hadn't left a mark, so there was nothing for my mom to kiss better. But I did sit down with her and tell her the whole story. After she got past her initial disapproval of the whole 'couples' thing, she told me I should do "what my heart told me to do".
Stupid heart. I went with Kevin.
Ainsworth and I did talk that day at West Edmonton Mall, when he and I stood in the same by-last-name line to get our free Big Macs (we were both F's). He asked me if I was having fun, and I told him I was. He smiled a genuine smile at me, told me that he was glad, and then went to sit with his date, Deanna, who was making a log cabin with her french fries.
Kevin, on the other hand, ignored me most of the trip, in favour of smashing ketchup packets in various locations throughout the mall with Casey. One such explosion trashed my aforementioned pink blouse.
I moved the next year. I never heard from Kevin again.
I'd like to be able to say that this experience taught me a lesson about picking the right types of guys for which to fall...
About recognizing serious potential in boys who are a bit different in terms of their skills and loves...
About appreciating men who show an unconventional grace and thoughtfulness in their demeanor...
About seeking out someone who might just be a little less obnoxious than the average dork, or...well... actually kind to me.
And it has. Without a doubt.
Pity it took 22 years.
I never got any better at math, either.
3:08:19 AM 
|
