On the first day of 5th grade, you stood up and told the class you were a witch. It was protocol: your name, where you were from, one fun fact about you. We went by rows. The boy who went after you was a skinny little kid named Paul Berkshire. I still talk to him every once in a while, but I haven’t seen you in a long time.

I don’t remember what I said. The Mexico trip from the summer before, probably. Maybe that I had never broken a bone. I was quite proud of that.

I gaped at you when you said it. Everyone giggled. You were sitting in front of me-- second row, right in the middle. I suppose that meant I was in the third. The teacher nodded, because she was used to that type of thing, and said, “Paul?” 

I leaned forward and whispered in your ear-- in hindsight, it was a bit mean-- “no you’re not. Witches aren’t real.”

I was the kind of kid that told other kids on the playground that Santa didn’t exist. Not to be mean. I just figured they ought to know.

“How am I a witch if witches aren’t real, then?” you said, with a tone that meant you certainly thought you had won the argument. You didn’t even turn around.

“You’re not.”

“Prove it.”

“You prove it.”

“No, thank you,” you said.

I was quiet for a minute. “You can’t just say no,” I said eventually.

You giggled, but the teacher shushed us before you could say anything. For the rest of the period, I watched your ponytail, swishing back and forth when you wrote.

We became friends, I think. Those things are funny in fifth grade: you could know someone for years and never really know them. We never said more than a few words to each other every day-- I ate lunch with other people, you ate alone-- but we were friends. 

My grades suffered that year. I still think it’s your fault I never became an engineer or a wealthy businessman. No matter how I tried, I would always end up staring at your ponytail, my notes forgotten.

“You’re staring,” you would say, when I was.

“No, I’m not,” I would say. “How do you know, anyway? Did you put a spell on me?”

“We don’t use spells,” you said scornfully.

I teased you. That was all right: fifth grade, after all. “How was the broomstick traffic today?” I would ask when you got to school. I wasn’t very funny back then.

You were odd, but you weren’t bullied, not really. You seemed immune to the others and immune to me. When you were teased you simply laughed and shook your ponytail and said something witty, and people were left feeling stupid and silly and childish and wondering why they had even bothered to make fun of you in the first place. 

You liked things-- that was the strangest part. You liked school, and homework, and tests, and teachers. One day, after a test, I complained to you how horrible it had been. I think it was math. 

“I think it was wonderful,” you told me. What a thing to say! That was your response to many things: the teachers were wonderful, and the fire drills that interrupted our lunch were wonderful. You were wonderful, too. People looked at you sideways when you said it, but knew if they asked “why,” you would giggle and say, “why not?” 

I was simultaneously proud and embarrassed to be around you. My friends would think it was odd that I even spoke to you. But then, at the same time, none of them got to sit behind you, and look at your ponytail, and talk to you every day, even if it was just a sly comment about potion-making or asking you to borrow a pencil-- of which you had eleven, expensive-looking green ones-- or hearing you talk about how wonderful the homework was last night.

I got an F on a science test one day, to my horror, and the teacher had written in big red cursive see me after class, right on the front where everyone could see. I blamed you, then: it was your fault I hadn’t been able to learn fractions right, your fault that I spent the day staring at the back of your head. I dragged myself to the teacher’s desk after class with deep foreboding. 

“Um, you said I should see you after class.”

“I did?” the teacher said, glancing up. “Let me see.”

I handed over the test. “I never wrote that,” she said.

“Yes you--” but as she handed the test back, the F on the front was now an A. Instead of see me after class, it was written good job! There was even a smiley face sticker tacked on. I gaped.

“Never mind,” I said, and left as quickly as I could.

These things happened, that year. Strange things. Inexplicable. It would be pouring rain one minute and I was thinking about how we would have to have lunch inside, when I would look out the window and see it was sunny and the sky was clear. I would go to sleep on Wednesday and wake up on Friday morning, my father chatting animatedly about a test I had never had, a day of work he never went to. I mentioned it to you one day. This was beyond our normal interactions, but I had a feeling no one else would understand.

“The weirdest thing happened,” I told you when I sat down. “I think I missed a whole day. I was sure it was Wednesday yesterday.”

You just nodded. “Things are funny like that sometimes,” you said. 

I squinted at you. “How come you know what happened? No one else does.”

“How come you know what happened?”

I considered this. “It’s not that I know,” I said. “It’s just the way it is.”

“Is it really true if we’re the only ones who know it?” You smiled at me. You seemed to know that you had said something extremely clever. 

I was at the age that I had not quite grasped the concept of consciousness, and that there were other people besides me who really thought things. This was all terribly confusing, even for a bright little kid like me. “Um,” I said, “yes?”

“What a funny way to think about the world,” you said, and then the teacher was setting her books down and saying that she was going to check the homework. 

It was then when I knew-- watching your ponytail bounce when you said “wonderful!” and the little smile you gave me before you turned around and the way you seemed bigger and more important that everyone else-- it seemed so clear at that moment, I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it before-- you really were a witch.

That was the last day before winter break. It was that afternoon, hours later, when the principal poked his head into my classroom and asked for me. He said some vague things about a car accident, and something about an impact, but I didn’t really understand until he reached across the desk and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m so sorry I have to tell you this, but…” and when he said it, I felt sick to my stomach and everything went all fuzzy and spotty like when you stand up too quickly.

My mother was dead.

The funeral was four days later, and my father and I spent the rest of the break bouncing aimlessly from one room to another, looking at the spaces where she would have been and wasn’t. We let Christmas slide past that year without presents or even buying a tree. I loved my father, but being alone with him felt like I was suddenly in the presence of a distant, vaguely irresponsible uncle. He had never been good at talking about anything serious, and there wasn’t anything else to say, so we said nothing at all, and spent the holidays in silence, eating takeout food and letting the leftovers rot and stink in the back of our refrigerator. 

I came back after winter break. My father made me. I think it was to get me out of the house. I walked in and felt strange and different and lost, as if somehow, the little brightly-colored classroom should have ceased to exist when my mother did. 

I didn’t speak to you in class: I let everything slip past me, as if it didn’t matter, because, to me, it didn’t, and nothing would ever matter again. 

During recess I sat alone, behind the bench, my back pressed against the brick wall. You came up and kneeled on the bench above me and looked at me. “What’s wrong?” you asked, and smiled at me. 

I said nothing.

You dropped down beside me and pushed me over until we could both fit behind the bench. I figured, then, that not a soul could see us behind there, and maybe they couldn’t. “Want to see something cool?” you asked brightly.

“No,” I said.

“Look at that dandelion,” you said, and pointed to one between us. “Look.”

“I’m looking.”

“Now it’s not there,” you said. It wasn’t: it hadn’t disappeared in any noticeable way, one second it was simply there, the next it wasn’t. “It’s not there,” you said, and giggled like it was the funniest thing in the world. 

“Please go away,” I told you.

“Your mother is dead,” you said. “You’re very sad about this.” You said it like a fact. I didn’t say anything. “Do you want to see her?” you asked. 

“What do you mean?” I asked, but already, my eyes were rolling up into the back of my head and my stomach was churning and my head was knocking against the brick and I was seeing her grave, the fresh red dirt, the headstone. I was seeing beloved wife and mother. I was seeing her name and the date of her death and I was seeing the flowers on her grave, white roses and lilacs and gardenias and the beetle crawling up the headstone--

“You don’t want her to be dead,” you said, your voice cutting through the vision and forcing me awake, my eyes snapping open, my head jerking forwards. I said nothing, blinking against the too-bright sun. “Do you want to see her again?” 

Before I could say no, you were pulling me back under again, with that same nausea, and I was seeing another picture-- my mother, again, sitting in the armchair in our living room, reading a book, looking healthy and whole and unbroken and alive. My heart twisted and stung and I felt the tears in my eyes--

Then I was awake again. I rubbed my eyes with my palms. “Why did you show me that?” I yelled at you, and you put your hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s okay. That’s what’s happening. The second one. It’s real.”

“What?”

“It’s okay,” you said again, and you suddenly looked very tired. Still, you smiled at me. “You can go home now.”

Just then, the end of the day bell rung. It didn’t make sense; we hadn’t had any of our afternoon classes, but you stood up and pulled me up with you. 

“The bus is waiting for you,” you said. “Go.”

And I did, running, and the bus got home in no time at all, and I ran through the door and into my mother, standing there like she had never been gone in the first place, and my father was there, too, reading the newspaper and asking what had happened at school, was I okay, why was I crying?

I got to school early the next day, bouncing on the balls of my feet, but you came in five minutes late and disappeared during lunch, only coming back in the afternoon. I leaned forward and tapped on your shoulder during history, but you didn’t say anything, not then and not when they dismissed us to go home. 

I jogged after you as you left the building, meaning to catch up to you and say something-- I don’t know what-- but you walked fast and I ended up lagging behind. Overnight it had snowed a foot, almost enough to close school. It must have been January by then, and the icy wind was kicking up, blowing the snow in gusts. I normally hated the snow, but I don’t think anything could have dampened my mood, not then.

You walked past the school bus where everyone else got on, but the teachers didn’t notice you, just let you slip right by like you weren’t even there. I found myself following you. 

I only made it halfway down the block before you stopped and turned around and looked at me. “Stop following me,” you said.

“I’m not,” I said, although I knew, by then, lying to you was useless. You turned to leave. “Wait!” I said. “Um. Uh. Did I do something... wrong? To upset you?”

“No,” you said, and didn’t turn around. 

“Right,” I said, and, half-embarrassed, I added, “Um-- also-- I just wanted to say-- Thank you-- I mean, I never said-- about my mom.”

There was quiet, and I was beginning to think you hadn’t heard me over the far-away howling of the wind, but then you whipped around and said, suddenly, “I shouldn’t have ever done it.”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have. I’m in trouble. There are rules. I’m not supposed to-- I mean, people like you-- you’re not even supposed to know I’m here.”

I watched you. “You brought her back to life,” I said. “She was dead. You saved her.” 

“That doesn’t matter,” you said. “You don’t matter. It’s all a joke. You have no idea, do you? About who I am?”

“You’re a witch,” I said. “You’re a witch, aren’t you? That’s what you told me.”

You smiled bitterly. “Sure,” you said. “You can call it that.” You puffed out freezing breath into the air. “This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have begged so hard to come here. I thought— I thought I could make friends. I never should have told you. I wasn’t supposed to tell you. No one was supposed to know. I was supposed to blend in, I was supposed to be a normal girl, and now I’ve messed everything up, and everyone is angry—” you took a deep breath, shook your head, turn away. “Never mind. You’re not going to remember any of this, anyway.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Go home,” you told me.

You turned away and I watched you walk away, reach back, do and re-do your ponytail; I listened to the sounds of your boots crunching in the ice; I watched clouds of your breath puff out in front of you; then, I was sitting up in my bed, my alarm ringing, shivering with cold. I heard breakfast-making sounds from the kitchen, my mother humming, birds outside singing in defiance of the snow. 

You didn’t show up at school that day. You had never been sick before. As the teacher let us go for lunch, I leaned over to the boy next to me and whispered, “Where’s the girl who sat in front of me?”

“No one sits in front of you,” the boy said-- I think his name is Alex. I think I’m Facebook friends with him. 

“She does.”

“What’s her name?”

“Oh,” I said, and by all accounts, it should have sprung straight to my tongue, but it wasn’t there. I sat there, stunned: how could I have forgotten? Had it never come up when I had talked to you? Had the teacher never said it while taking attendance or calling on you to answer a question? “I forgot?”

The boy next to me rolled his eyes. “What’s she look like?” 

It was a simple question, but I was left speechless. I simply couldn’t remember. I gasped, desperately, at something, anything, a skin color, hair or eye color, whether you were tall or short or ugly or beautiful, but there was nothing. You could have looked like anyone in the world. “She has a ponytail,” I said, weakly. “You know her. She’s-- she’s weird. She always says everything is wonderful, and she’s really good at everything, and she’s always giggling and saying these smart things--” 

But the boy had already gotten up and was running off to lunch. And suddenly, I felt a horrible sinking in my chest, and I was grabbing a piece of paper out of my notebook and scrawling words on it-- notes about you, what you looked like and what we had done together and what you said, although the memory of you was already beginning to slip away from me. I clutched the paper to my chest and tried harder than anything to remember you. But I was already beginning to forget. 

When I got home I pulled out the paper, and crumpled it into my folder; I looked at it and wondered how I could have thought up such a story. It was funny-- I didn’t even remember writing it. 

~~~

I’m on my lunch break now, and I’m writing this all down because I know I don’t have much time. It won’t be long before they realize who I am, and what’s happened, and why I remember, and they take everything away from me again. The thing is, there’s a new woman at my job, with a ponytail and a bright smile and clever eyes, a woman who told our boss how wonderful her new office was and sat down next to me and held her hand out for me to shake. I don’t think you remember me. I don’t blame you. It’s been a long time.