PLUSTER

Gaby Navarro and I first went to the Milton Public Library to research Benny Goodman for our Music History project.

We were burgeoning into a kind of a something ever since the seats in Bio were reassigned and the pair of us were moved to the very back lab table.

This was always my journey. On first days, when students reigned, I would pick the seat closest to the front and furthest to the side. A spot nobody seemed to notice. Least of all, desire.

Once the teacher seized control, we’d, of course, end up arranged alphabetically and I’d find myself somewhere in the central void. But after the first few weeks of the school year progressed and identities were formed and a familiarity was forged, I’d be sent to the back.

I sometimes wondered if I was the first decision or the last.

If my teachers thought, when sitting down to design their charts that, as the least of their problems, they could figure me out before the rest. And there would go my little name card, all the way back.

Or, if they only just realized, seeing me still standing against the wall, one hand tugging at the opposite elbow behind my back, everyone else already in their respective seats, that my quiet, competent, friendlessness had completely eluded their strategy. And they’d fluster, and recover, and pretend that empty seat in the back had been mine all along, pointing to the spot on their chart where my name card wasn’t.

Either way, they got it right. I never needed to be watched. Or worried about. I was listening. I was being good. I wasn’t trouble.

I was perfect for the back of the room.

-

I hadn’t yet interacted directly with my counterpart.

Paul D’Amico told me at lunch, on the first day of 7th grade, that the girl version of me was on our team.

“She’s you,” he said, “but a girl.”

It wasn’t news. There were murmurs. All through 6th grade.

She was from Carter Elementary, I went to Hansen.

“Just-as-quiet,” they would say, like it was unbelievable. Inciting competition, I guess, for teachers pet, or something.

A fascination, we were. Probably because when she was at Carter and I was at Hansen, we were, like, anomalies. But now we were like an untethered set. Not quite a pattern, but no longer a singularity.

When I walked into Bio after Lunch, she was sitting up front, all the way to the side. And Paul nudged me, indelicately, like - that’s her. But I knew. Because you know, somehow, who people are, by 7th grade.

And there she was.

And it was true, I learned, over the next few weeks.

Just as quiet.

And it was hard to deny the potential destiny of us.

Like we should -

But, how could we?

Because shy kids don’t make themselves known. They let other people find them.

There’s nobody to say hi, first. If, ever.

But I guess Miss Fletcher took care of that for Gaby and I when she sequestered us to that back lab table a month or so into 7th grade.

And, I swear, something cosmic happened in that moment.

A surge of the inevitable.

A hum vibrated the linoleum.

And flickered the overhead fluorescents.

And puffed an all but imperceptible cloud of chalk dust into the air.

A shrill squeal sung in the halls as the lockers expanded and settled.

As the important burden of fate was thrust upon us.

And the whole of Milton Middle absorbed its impact.

And I don’t remember who made the first move.

I’m sure we never even said hello.

I don’t know when it was decided.

But, soon, Gaby Navarro would become the other half of me.

Her sisters would call me brother.

Her mother would call me son.

And when Mr. Shapiro told us to buddy up for our Music History project, we chose each other, implicitly.

Wordlessly, as it were.

And we started spending our afternoons in the back stacks on the second floor of the Milton Public Library pretending to learn about Benny Goodman, but really learning one another.

Learning what best friendship meant.

What forever felt like at the beginning.

-

So, anyway, that’s why, one month into our Senior year, sitting in the front seat of her Christmas Tree green Jetta, covered in Craig McIntyre’s blood - wasn’t so much a surprise, as it was a commitment.

To her.

To us.

To a 7th grade promise still hidden in the stacks of the Milton Public Library.