Not That Kind Of Girl. Siobhan Vivian

silly, too. She taught me how to make a particular kind of fist, that when you squeezed, it would shoot a stream of water.

      Except those things didn’t exactly make us friends, just girls who swam together. My parents both had extremely demanding jobs — Mom at her architecture firm, and Dad at his ophthalmology practice. Either one would show up at exactly five minutes to three, and I’d get put in the car, even before I’d had a chance to properly dry off. Autumn, on the other hand, would make plans to play with one girl or another as soon as she was out of the pool, like swim class was a warm-up for the fun she was about to have.

      It wasn’t until the very last lesson, when the lifeguard let kids jump off the highest diving platform, that Autumn and I bonded for real.

      Autumn froze with terror, but I forced her up the ladder with me. Mainly because none of the other girls in class would do it, probably because they all wore two-pieces and a jump that big could easily make you lose your top. They hung near the shallow end and laughed as the boys leaped off and did ninja kicks or screamed like Tarzan. I wasn’t scared, but it did feel like we were climbing forever. At the top, I laced our wrinkly fingers together and counted to three before jumping. Well, I jumped. Autumn sort of got pulled along with me, screaming the whole way down and getting water up her nose once we plunged in.

      She doggy-paddled out of the pool, coughing hard. I followed her, feeling terrible, and decided that I would sit out with her for the rest of the lesson. Instead, Autumn raced to the ladder. She kept jumping. On her own. Each time, she’d spring a little higher, a bit farther out. I loved watching her test herself. Autumn had real courage, buried deep down inside her. All she’d needed was a push from me.

      We announced ourselves as best friends when our moms arrived to pick us up that day.

      Autumn and I were definitely an odd couple. She would show up at my house in a skirt and sandals, even though I’d tell her I wanted to try to get the boys down the block to invite us to play Manhunt. She’d say I was the worst fingernail painter in history, and that she’d do a better job with her left hand than I’d do with my right.

      I wasn’t a tomboy. Sure, I’d wear my cousin Noah’s hand-me-downs, but sometimes I’d pick out a sundress, even if we weren’t going to church or out to dinner. I had a collection of stuffed bears that lived in a nylon hammock strung over my bed and I cried like a baby the time Christopher Clark threw a garden snake he’d found behind his garage at me. But before Autumn, I really never had any friends who were girls. None lived on my street.

      Autumn was like fizzy water, light and bubbly. I always knew it, but when I transferred to Ross Academy for junior high, it really became clear. For the first time, I saw how effortlessly Autumn made friends, much more easily than I did. So many people would say hi to her in the halls. I remember feeling lucky that I had gotten in early. Lucky, and a little nervous.

      She’d get invited to sleepovers. She’d have girls wanting to sit next to her at lunch. Even though Autumn stuck by me, I could still feel her drifting away. Not intentionally, of course. But I think saying no to invitations and trying to score me pity invites had started to get a little old for both of us.

      Autumn explained I could be a know-it-all sometimes, only she said it in a much more polite and gentle way. I didn’t deny it. My parents were both intellectual types, and that sort of thing permeated everything we did as a family. We had our kitchen radio always tuned in to NPR. We did brainteasers over dinner. We shared the Sunday paper. And family vacations were to science centers or fossil expeditions or historical monuments. Maybe it made me weird, but it definitely made me smarter than most people I knew. But smart didn’t necessarily cut it in junior high.

      I had invited Autumn to come with my family to a laser show at the planetarium. Her face fell, and she explained that she’d accepted an invitation from Marci Cooperstein’s family to visit their lake house for a week.

      I played it cool, but inside I steamed. Marci had been trying to edge in on my friendship with Autumn for months. Autumn had held Marci off, but I guess the promise of Jet Skis and barbeques and bunk beds were too much for her to resist. It was seven days of pure misery for me. I made my mom take me to the library about four different times, because all I did was sit in my room and read. By that time, the other kids on the block weren’t friends, only boys to feel awkward around. I had no one else.

      When Autumn did come back, tanner than I’d ever seen her, she slept over four nights straight and gave me a friendship bracelet she’d made especially for me, courtesy of Marci’s bead kit. She had used the nicest beads, too — lavender glass spheres alternating with iridescent stones shaped like tiny grains of rice. Every time Marci saw that bracelet, she seethed. I wore it until the string broke, and then I picked up all the beads I could find. I still have a few in my jewelry box.

      I guess that kind of competition should have prepared me for Chad, but it didn’t. Guys were not a part of our equation. We didn’t even talk about them. That probably sounds weird, but our friendship had this strange, timeless innocence about it. And though I knew I could compete with the Marci Coopersteins of the world, I was no match for Chad. Chad swept Autumn completely off her feet.

      Once I was at her house practicing a dialogue for our French project when Chad called and invited Autumn to meet him and some friends down near Liberty River. Autumn assumed I wouldn’t want to go, but I told her I would. It made me happy, how excited she was to have me go with her. Excited, until she gently urged me to change into one of her sweaters and to try some of her berry lip gloss.

      I had a weird feeling when Autumn took my hand and we veered off the sidewalk into a thin patch of woods. We followed a worn stretch of dirt, littered with trash and a few cigarette butts. I was pretty disoriented even though I could hear the river, but Autumn walked like she was both Lewis and Clark. After a few twists and turns, we came upon a big boulder, perched over the silvery water. A bunch of guys sat on it, drinking beers and blowing smoke into the night sky. We were the only girls there.

      Looking back, I definitely overreacted. But older boys and beers and dark, dark woods were so far out of my realm of experience. After about ten minutes, I pretended to feel sick. Autumn knew I was faking, and let me walk home by myself.

      She only invited Marci Cooperstein after that.

      I thought I’d lost her.

      Then the Fish Sticks incident happened, and I was the one person who stood by her. To everyone else at school, she was tainted. The boys were grossed out by her, and even some girls were snooty and snotty and suddenly too good for her. Marci actually laughed a few times at the jokes other people made. Right in front of Autumn.

      I told Marci that she was pathetic.

      And then I happily picked up the slack. I walked in front of Autumn, or struck up a loud conversation about absolutely nothing, casting the best friend force field to distract her from the sniffers and the stinky faces. I think some people were afraid of me. I became known as the nerdy girl with the scary intensity who’d do anything to protect Fish Sticks.

      A couple of weeks later, Marci apologized to Autumn in a note she’d written during chorus. Autumn showed it to me. It was full of grammatical errors. Your right to be mad at me, Marci wrote. Idiot.

      I thought Autumn would write Marci back, but she crumpled up the note and flushed it down the toilet. I’d never been more proud of her.

      With my help, Autumn turned her negative into a positive. Together we channeled our energy into schoolwork. Autumn was never a great student, and that first semester of freshman year, she’d nearly failed out from the stress of everything that had happened. But I helped her come around. We’d take our lunch in the library and study or do homework together. I even got her involved with student council. Autumn still didn’t do well enough to make it into AP classes, but she made regular honor roll, and so long as she didn’t royally screw up her SATs, she’d have her pick of colleges.

      After Chad Rivington, Autumn never had another boyfriend. It saved her from a lot of needless heartbreak. And me, well, the whole thing just let me be a good best friend. Which was all I’d wanted to do in the first place.