This is what she wrote on the note to me: Be my friend at arms length. Like someone holding a hedgehog that doesn’t particularly like hedgehogs, but not so much that they wouldn’t hold one out in front of themselves. And there you’ll be with your hedgehog legs dangling in the air, looking at me like, where are we going with this? That’s as close as we ever need to be.
A few weeks later I got another: You keep trying to tell me your secrets. That’s too much responsibility. You can tell me things that not a lot of people know, but I don’t want to hear things you’ve never told anyone. Those things are private. We keep them inside for a reason. They are embarrassing. Like suppose those stories people heard from a friend of a friend about a cousin were true, like the one with the hot dog or the one with the peanut butter. If something like that happened to you, or you did those things, I’d rather not know. I have my own closet of shame. And it’s full. I don’t have any room for your stuff. So if you want to go to the park or play some sort of game that’s cool, but we aren’t just going to hang out in my room and talk. It’s too dangerous.
Eventually I wrote back: Perhaps I shouldn’t have showed your notes to my older sister, but I didn’t know how everyone in the school would react. Is it true you have to have a conference with your parents? Wasn’t it weird how they took the guinea pig out of our homeroom – they aren’t anything like hedgehogs. I know you liked that guinea pig. What was that name you called him?
Later that day there was another note crammed into the bottom of my locker. I waited until I was two blocks from school to read it.
