The situation was compounded by my own difficulties in love. My heart had been shanghaied by a young woman named Mirele, whose father was a diplomat temporarily working in industry. She had come to our school via Sydney, Hong Kong and London, with black, unruly hair cut jarringly short in a time when all girls had long hair parted in the middle and brushed straight down their backsides. She had a white, sculpted, troubled face, and hazel eyes with little flecks in them that looked metallic, glinting different colours in the changing light, and long, slender limbs like a gazelle, and a boyish near-lack of breasts compensated entirely by impertinent nipples that poked out at her shirt in cool weather. We walked together along the same route-- about a mile--to school, and she was the one who started talking to me. She said--"Is this the way to Wigwam School?" and I said, "Waghorn," and she said, "Whatever," in that dismissive way of hers that could reduce nation's capitals to remote village status with the turn of a phrase.
Mirele was two years older than me--light years, it seemed, at that age, when I was so bottled up inside that having a conversation with a bona fide member of the opposite sex happened about as rarely as an earthquake and was just as terrifying. We lived in a closed and claustrophobic suburb of a rather conservative town, or perhaps it was just being thirteen that was so closed and claustrophobic and conservative. Almost everybody in my class had been in my class the year before, and before that, and before that, starting when the boys were tiny tyrants running around on the playground with frogs in our hands, looking for dresses in which to deposit them, and the girls were circled like chuckwagons, skipping and talking, endlessly talking... Actually talking to one of them meant physically approaching a whole cluster, and singling one out, and trying to figure out what to say before embarrassment struck you down like dengue fever.
(Struck you down like dengue fever was something that Mirele was always saying, as in, "Oh that toad-brain Lawson--I wanted to strike him down like dengue fever!" I had no idea what it was, but it sounded appropriately awful.)
Mirele was outside that world. It was not difficult at all to start a conversation with her. We walked along the same route; if we were not quite synchronized she would wait, or I would wait, or she would catch up to me. And I would hardly have to open my mouth, because Mirele had far more than enough to say for the both of us, and it was in my nature to listen.
"I have period two today with Lawson, that lech. He came up behind me--it was Wednesday--and put his hand on my shoulder GOD!--it was like being touched by a pod-person--I hate it when people make you feel completely flammy--do you know what I mean?"--and I would nod, yes--"No, you don't know what I mean. Anyway, my Mom has found a new therapist, finally, but I caught her yesterday with those pills I was telling you about --"
And on and on she would spill until our twenty minutes was up. Her father was having an affair with some new woman Mirele had not been able to track yet, but was working on the case; her mother was barely inflated and floating about two feet under the surface, an apparent wreck of a woman completely enslaved by alcohol, sedatives, boredom and menopause, who told her daughter everything and then swore her to silence, who was forever taking correspondence courses on the human condition and dropping them before she could finish and then signing up for another and another. And then when I got to my school, Waghorn Elementary, I would turn left and Mirele would continue on to Waghorn High, a bare fifty yards further that might as well have been the Atlantic Ocean.
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