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are right, but don’t trust us. Prize loyalty, but don’t count on me.

Real Friends
    I remember, if I concentrate, the clutter of children, can’t see the teacher more than a smudge. She wrote our names on the blackboard, and Marjorie in chalk, like fabric in the fingers, is the texture of first grade.
    Marjorie was not my friend, but so central, bossy, taller than the rest of us, I never forgot her. She wore white tights and a tartan jumper with large white buttons at the waist to fasten the green straps that crisscrossed her yellow shirt between her shoulder blades (I sat behind her). Her name is still woven into plaid, into my idea of plaid. She was the first girl I saw wear a headband, and she had white patent-leather Mary Janes. The hairband, shiny red plastic, made grooves in the strands at her hairline. I don’t remember anyone else in first grade. She commanded all my attention.
    I had a certain standing in the classroom, allowed to be off by myself. Sometimes I’d cry. Marjorie would walk over.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” she said, looming over me, pigtails rooted behind her ears. She hardly ever talked to me.
    â€œI miss my best friend. She died.” There was a pause. I’d suffered, had met the depths of life’s mysteries.
    â€œHow did she die?”
    At home my mother handled the story. “Your very first friend died,” she’d tell me, and get sad, which made me sad. I loved tohear it: the first attachment beyond family, a tragic ending, my early heart broken but petted and mended by my mother. Sophisticated pain was part of me, and so, too, the passions of friendship. “Her poor mother!” my mother would say. “Just imagine how awful.” I could not imagine, had no image of the woman, but could almost picture the girl, this golden wraith, this perfect beauty. Scarlet fever or a weakened heart, something sneaky, stole my beloved friend away. One day she was there, fine. I could remember us, just about, three-year-olds with chubby wrists and white tights, half a lifetime ago. The next day she was dead: the empty stroller. According to my mother, I was inconsolable at her disappearance. “Don’t you remember? You thought she didn’t want to be friends with you anymore. You cried and cried. You kept asking where she was.” She stroked the top of my head. “We used to push you in your strollers, side by side.” I searched for any sense of proximity, any warmth. Blond curls? Did we dig in the garden with kitchen things? Did she cry when she dropped Ritz crackers in the dirt? She wasn’t mean, ever, of course not. She was the sweetest girl anyone had ever met, not like Marjorie, who scared me, whose voice grated, whose very name bullies my memory. My dead friend gave me her dolls, to keep. She wanted me to have them. She brought candy canes. We read Little Golden Books on the couch and sucked the peppermint. I followed her, waiting my turn as she pushed the clacking bubble toy over the flagstones. In the park we chose the swings, and our mothers stood behind us, didn’t they, their doubled voices sweeping far and near. All this I imagined, so I could miss her, feel kin. I pictured her stroller on the sidewalk, the waist strap to hold her in, her Mary Janes kicking up. See her dark curls; she clutched a doll under one arm; her big eyes were hazel, like mine. I tried to cope under this net of confusion—suggested drama, disappearing picture, willed memory.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, sweetie?” said the teacher, who left what she was doing with the others to come over, crouch next to me, palms down on her stockinged knees. Marjorie walked away.
    â€œMy friend.” I sensed longing in the word, but I couldn’t quite touch it, arrive there. I needed more. “My friend died.”
    â€œYes, that’s very sad, isn’t it? When someone we love dies.”
    Feeling better, I went back to the scissor table to