There are certain stones I prefer over others. One is the Tiger's Eye. A long time ago, a friend asked me to pick out a ring for her, and I chose the one with the Tiger's Eye.
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In sixth grade, our homeroom teacher was a hip young lady, liberal enough to favor such things as field trips, unlike the old relics who never left their classrooms. She allowed us kids to go exploring by ourselves in the Epcot Center. Ever independent, Alice ventured off by herself. I was with my friends, David and Carol. They helped kill time and boredom. Together we acted like The Three Stooges. I played along with them for an hour, until I realized that I would much rather be alone with Alice than with my friends. However, she was nowhere to be seen. The building had several floors and was not exactly small. I looked within my heart. As sure as following a map, I walked up two flights of stairs, turned left, then right into another room, and found her.
She was alone, as expected and desired. When she saw me, she greeted me neutrally. She discussed the exhibits and the science behind them, which fascinated her. I recall nothing of what she said. She was simply thinking aloud. I liked watching her, being in her presence. Her mind was active and alive, never idle, and her store of knowledge was more than can be imagined for a girl of that age. She was full of contagious energy, eager to learn and discover. If there was anything she could not do, I was unaware of it. I was euphoric, feeding off of her energy.
She said, “Do you think we should go and find the others? The teachers may be wondering where we are. We shouldn’t make them worry.”
I shook my head. No! This was the last thing on earth I wanted to do! Rejoining the others would mean the end of our conversation. She would prefer the company of her friends, other girls. We went searching for the others, but I directed us to places where I felt the others would not be, until she gave up. My legs grew tired with the walking, but hers did not, and so we continued examining the exhibits. Eventually we came upon a gift shop, and Alice found it irresistible.
“Oh, do you want to go in?” she said.
“Not really. I have no money!”
“I do. My father gave me thirty dollars and told me to buy myself something nice.”
“Well, I’ll just wait outside.”
She was gone for about ten minutes. I remember wishing I had money and wondering whether it even mattered. She came out and asked if I would give her advice. I said yes, of course. She wanted to buy herself a ring, but couldn't decide which one to buy. She wanted my opinion. I had no clue about girls’ rings and said as much, but she insisted. I entered the store with her, took a careful look at all the rings, and chose the one with a tiger’s eye. She said she preferred another stone, a green one. I told her it was all right, and she should get the ring that she wants, not the one that I picked. I left the store and waited outside.
She emerged with a new ring on her finger. It was the tiger’s eye. She smiled, admiring her ring, and I smiled, very pleased.
Soon after that, we found the other students and the teachers. As expected, Alice deserted me to talk with her girlfriends. I rejoined my friends with regret. We walked around for an hour or so until it was time to head back to the bus.
All of us were waiting in line to go to our next destination, the airport. The bus was being refueled. Alice was in the middle of the line. My buddies and I were in the back. We were bored, standing around doing nothing, just waiting for the bus to arrive. David asked where I had been, because he had not seen much of me at the museum. I confided that Alice and I had gone off alone together, not realizing the implication. David’s eyes lit up in amusement. “You like Alice, don’t you?” I was startled into silence, and then denied it, too late. A grin spread across David's face. “Hey, Carol, guess what! He’s in love!”
They reacted as boys do at that age to the spectacle of love, giggling and doing their utmost to embarrass me. David began singing a silly rhyme:
Alice and Igor, sittin’ in a tree!
K – I – S – S – I – N – G !
First comes love, then comes marriage!
Then come Carol in a baby carriage!
This was a common schoolyard rhyme. The person in the baby carriage could be anybody at all, but using Carol was funnier than others, because he was a runt. A chorus developed. I did not participate. I was mortified. I told them to shut-up, but my threats were ineffectual, as I wasn’t any bigger than anybody else, except Carol, though Carol was strong and stocky and capable of defending himself against me. They started making comments about her breasts—far too small, in David’s opinion. So why did I like her? You can just imagine how Alice felt. She heard every word that was spoken. Noticing her deep scarlet blush, they laughed all the harder. I hated my so-called friends just then.
How to salvage the situation? I sensed that it was my duty to protect her. I approached her with arms outstretched and my palms raised, as if to say it’s not my fault. In retrospect, this was a stupid gesture, but I was young, and did not know what to do. I said, “Hey, Alice, I didn’t... I hope you don’t think that..."
Suspicion was written all over her face. Her face was livid, her eyes burning into mine like hot coals. She thought me the ringleader.
I said, “I’m sorry that they are acting this way, and...” I stopped. My words were not having any effect. She hated me for standing there, for drawing attention to us, because that was making things rather more embarrassing for her, not less.
Her anger I perceived as dark waves flowing from her body. I was startled by the thought of her as an enemy. She hissed, “Why don’t you just leave me alone! Go away!”
Our teacher seized me by the shoulder and snapped, “Get back in line, right this minute!” I was pushed back to my place in line, where I stood defeated. Alice smiled, saying, “Good!” Then she turned around and never looked at me again.
David said, “Look at him! He’s head over heels in love!” Carol made smooching noises. But seeing that I was in no mood for jest, and with the teacher now exercising new vigilance, the joke died away, though the damage was already done.
I foresaw that she would give the tiger’s eye ring away to one of her friends. She never wanted to see it again. In the days that followed, she was implacable. She avoided me. If I ever spoke to her, she ignored me.
After a few weeks, I conveyed a message seeking reconciliation through a mutual acquaintance, a girl named Shannon who had volunteered her services to me. This proved to be another indiscretion and resulted in a different girl’s feelings being hurt, though that was not my intention. I had failed to detect Shannon’s feelings for me, being focused upon Alice. If I had known that Shannon was interested in me, I certainly wouldn’t have agreed to her being our intermediary.
Alice responded with a written note dictating terms. I was to agree that we would only ever be friends, and I was never to mention the incident on the field trip again. I tried to see if there was any wiggle room, but her position was take it or leave it. I reasoned that friendship was better than nothing. I liked her company and hoped that she might come to appreciate me better in time.
A sad little sideshow then developed in the melodrama between Alice and me. Shannon sent another written message through David to me, but it was not from Alice, it was from her. She confessed that she liked me and gave me her phone number, asking me to please call. I was quite surprised, since I had not suspected this at all. I am sorry to say that I felt completely indifferent to Shannon. She was pleasant and polite, but unfairly treated by other boys owing to her proportions. Upon consideration, I borrowed Alice’s line (“friends only”). Unlike some boys, I have never been one to pretend just for the presumed prestige of having a girlfriend.
When I shared my opinions with David and asked what he thought, he agreed, and cruelly, without my permission, revealed my thoughts to Shannon, casting them in the crudest and most hurtful light. Weeping, she came to me and asked if it were true. I grit my teeth and lied as much as I could bear. I at first denied all that my insensitive friend David had said just to heal the hurt, but she became encouraged and pursued her cause, asking me whether I actually liked her. Alarmed, I felt compelled to concede that some parts of what David said had a small basis in truth. Shannon ended up by blaming David for his cruelty.
If I had been attracted to Shannon, we might have been happy together, because she was a decent person. Human beings are far too fussy about the physical appearance of their mates. I always have been, and the same can be said for Alice. Most people are judged unattractive due to weight, age, or facial bone structure. In truth, Alice’s rejection more likely finds its basis in my physical characteristics rather than any faux pas. Her boyfriends were not more refined than me. Brutes are forgiven a thousand slights, have they a handsome face. The best strategy for most people is to indulge the powerful passions of romantic love through movies and stories, rather than seeking it in reality. Experience the strong passions vicariously, if at all! This is my best advice.
A few weeks later, I spoke to Alice during recess, and she could not bring herself to snub me, since we had signed a peace treaty. Of necessity, I obeyed the ground rules she set down for our platonic friendship. I never spoke of the incident at the airport again, because it was forbidden to do so. She was firm and of an iron discipline, but hungry for conversation, so I endeavored not to bore her. She found in me a good listener, ready to absorb new ideas. Despite herself, she found my company agreeable.
She warmed up to me sufficiently to teach me the Basic version of Dungeons and Dragons during recess. She played the Dungeon Master, and I played a rather clueless fighter stumbling about her dungeon, slaying goblins only because Alice fudged dice rolls out of kindness to me. I was fascinated by the colorful, gem-like, nontraditional dice that she used: a four-sided, eight-sided, ten-sided, and even a twenty-sided die! It was because of Alice, and out of boredom with an easy academic curriculum, that all of my friends and me soon went deep into the world of role-playing games.
We were to all play D&D for the next three years, cycling through the Basic edition to the Expert edition and finally ending with the Advanced version, a complicated system at which I became the master, absorbing every one of the many rules.
[The End.]
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Epilogue:
I submitted an earlier version of this story to an online writer's group for critique. One writer praised it with many reservations due to stylistic errors, which I felt was the most honest and helpful response. I have great difficulty with style issues, such as logical errors, redundancies, telling instead of showing, and stating the obvious. One writer praised it too much, and I felt she was just being kind, in hopes others would treat her stories with a similar kindness. One panned it, and made a snippy comment about writers like me jumping on the "Harry Potter" bandwagon, which was strange, because I've never read HP, and the first draft of this story was written before HP existed.
One writer had a violent reaction against my story, and I do not know why, other than it had stylistic errors, as he pointed out, which I already realized at the time. Maybe he found my story too sentimental. Perhaps it is or was at the time in its earlier incarnation. Maybe he was competing with the other reviewers in cutthroat fashion, trying to sound witty and original. He told me, in public, to shove a broken glass bottle up my ass. I was not interested in anything else anyone in that group had to say after reading that. I envenomed a dagger that would do the maximum damage possible to his public reputation, which I perceived he valued, as it was the only possible motive for his insult. I posted my sharp reply without any concern for what the moderators might say, as they had said nothing to the troll. How deeply my poison dagger penetrated his black heart, I cannot know, because I left soon after the stab. For a week later, in my email box, I received thirty replies from various writers, as well as the moderators, and they ranged the gamut, sympathetic, neutral, and skeptical, all of which I ignored, because I had concluded the writer's group was not for me. The troll, however, did not dare to write back, although I had planned to ignore him as well.
Many people have difficulty coping with online trolls. Here is my advice. Don't read their words. You are in control of your own internet browser. Not anyone else. You can control what and who you read. If you are curious and want to monitor what is said, but fear getting caught up in a flame war, wait a month, six months, or a year, then read. In this way, it is a simple matter to avoid involvement. But once you have identified an online personage as being a troll, is there any point in reading anything that they say? Would you pay the slightest attention to such a person in real life? In all probability, no. You would ignore such a twit in real life. It is ridiculous to give more attention to online twits than to real-world twits and even rather unfair to the real-world twits. Also, just because a message is in one's email box does not mean one must read it. Consider the source. As one would not read spam, one should not read scum. Kill filters are a perfect solution, deleting such emails based upon the sending address.
I don't know who my writing is for or what the purpose is. Publishers have never been the slightest bit interested in any of my material. I enjoy capturing certain experiences and imbuing them with a permanence beyond my own memory. Whether they are later ignored or lost is not in my power to foresee. Most writing is lost. All writing prior to a certain point in ancient history has been lost. Better writers than me have been silenced forever.
Some people say, "Why bother writing?" But if that is the attitude one takes, one could take it further: why do anything at all? One does what one knows, likes, or thinks is important. Money is not the sole motivation for doing things, or it shouldn't be.
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