I remember it perfectly: it was the Year It Snowed.
The usual gray of the world had gone, replaced by a layer of white. Everything was crisp, new. Everything was beautiful. On the ebony-black metal window frame, snowflakes lined up perfectly in a display of crystal geometry of the purest kind.
I watched from the window.
Some days earlier, I had watched from a balcony. Distracted from my work, I had looked down into the
foyer in time to notice a new arrival.
It was her. I was captivated.
Had Snow White ever existed, it was she, there before my eyes.
I first saw her white woolen hat with the two pompoms. Then her hair. Her jet-black hair, smooth as silk. Her skin, pale as the snow.
It was right there and then that I fell in love.
I can't remember exactly which year it was in terms that would place it on a timeline, it was just the year it snowed. I might have been four, or maybe five. It could have been either the middle section or the big section of
école maternelle. But I remember that our class was making books, a story about sirens and wondrous undersea castles. That day, I was on the balcony with a few others and our teacher, making covers, fighting for the yet-unspoiled tubs of colored oils. I was not strong or particularily willful. By the time I got there, every single basin had black in it. The colors I'd wanted were ruined. I settled for pink and light sea-green. The oils swirled and mixed together to achieve a near-perfect marble, dotted by splotches of black where my classmates' previous attempts had overrun. This black, the brownish black that comes only after the others had done their deeds with the brushes, was all over my book. The paper sirens, carefully painted in ink, were black. The salt-and-ink jewels were stained. The markers had been black, too, from too much coloring over other colors, the colored pencils were down to a stub, and the little pots of glue were empty, the plastic paddles bent and broken.
But once I met her, it was the last time it happened. I fought for her, defended her and her big round glasses and shyness. She was my friend. She was my best friend.
When we moved to the 'big school' across the street, the
école élémentaire, we were in the same class. We sat together, learned to read together, learned to write together, learned to count together, learned to swim together. When she pierced her eardrum and couldn't go to the school swimming lessons, she still sat with me on the bus on the way to the pool and read a book while I and the other children listened to our teacher.
When our class took a weeklong trip to Bretagne, we roomed together. We stood next to each other in the circle that would assign us to our groups for the week, but as Fate would have it, the groups were formed alternatingly. She became a Pig and I a Cow. Pink and green again, her pink slip and my green one, unable to mix. We could not eat together or do activities together. Each had to stay with her group.
When we had the opportunity to be together again, we were overjoyed. We sat in the bus together, on the beach, in the sand together. We cheerfully glued sand fleas to our sand art together, bought goat cheese and deer
terrine to bring back home together at the various farms and factories our class visited.
But I remember the horror of meals, when she sat in another room, and not even the most cheerful of tomato, egg, and mayonnaise
mushroom lookalike sitting in each plate could make me smile.
I remember when we left, to take the night-train to go back home, and she said goodbye to the gym teacher's son, who was our age and therefore had been taken along on the trip, whom she had begun to like, in the way that seven year olds like members of the opposite sex. It was one of the rare times I saw her cry, and the teachers had allowed the boy to pick a flower from the roadside--
foxgloves, which we were strictliy forbidden to touch on account of them being poisonous--to give it to her. Like all seven year olds, I felt this was definitely unfair, but I did feel better about it, no matter how slightly cruel it was to laugh, when the goat in the pasture in front of which he was standing got bored of just watching and took a bit out of the bottom of his trousers. Thus was justice reestablished.
The following two years, we were split. But in
CM1, we were reunited. By some miracle, or possibly a spot of tenderness for our now-famous friendship, the teacher sat us next to each other all through the year. We were good students, never talked in class, and always scored perfectly on each and every test.
Coincidentally, that year also was the year when the entire grade was chosen to go spend a week in the Alps to learn how to ski. Here again, we roomed together. We sat together in class, at the very first desk in front of the teacher's.
The most marking moment of the week, though, was discovering Harry Potter together. I had received a set of the first three books for Christmas, and so had she. At night, after class had been dismissed and the obligatory activities dealth with, we would retire to our room, ignore the other four girls, and read together.
This began another chapter of our life together. For the next two years, during recess, we would make up stories, create our world between the drab Indian chestnut trees, the gray cement walls and the cold, wet ground of the school courtyard. We escaped to dungeons and towers and smoky rooms filled with potions. We lost our names and became Françoise and Hermione. When the fourth book was released, the next year, and we were in different classes, we each hurried to meet each other so she could tell me the story bit by bit, until, when I was finally given the book for Christmas, I already knew more than half of the story.
But these two years were also the years when I was the most cruel to her. In addition to school, we went to Wednesday-morning catechism and the church choral after that. In our little group of five students, one of the boys once made fun of us when she misspoke on a detail of our game, and to save my face I lied about having pretended to play that game with her. She was incredibly hurt, but was too nice to ignore me like she should have.
As if that hadn't been enough, I later tried, that year, to become friends with a little group of three. As a test to prove my worthiness, they made me tell her that I wasn't friends with her anymore. I cried the entire time, but I did it. I don't know why. She didn't say a word, but burst into tears when it was time to line up to go back to class, to the point that the teacher inquired as to what was the matter, and made me apologize to her.
I have never, ever meant an apology as deeply, as wholeheartedly as I meant it then.
After these incidents, we became closer, it seemed, but somehow it was more artificial. We spent a lot of time at each other's house.
That year, I learned that we were going to move to America. At first, it was just an unfounded idea, like the rumor that the principal would retire at the end of that year. Then, as my father then both my parents took trips to the US and brought back images of faraway places with names like Texas and Santa Fe, it became more substantial.
Together, we "researched" the United States like two ten year olds without access to the Internet, a decent school library, and an accessible public library could. We looked at dusty encyclopedias from her father's study that we had to stack two chairs together to reach, explored the colored supplement pages at the end of our school dictionaries, tried to understand an American atlas my parents owned from the time they lived in Boston before I was born.
My mother took me out of the circus school where I spent my Monday nights with her to put me in an English course. Rather than doing our clown act by herself, she switched to fencing. Meanwhile, my mother hired a young woman from Australia, followed by a Canadian student, to talk to us in English. Australian Kate taught us stop and go, Canadian Erin what the Hokey Pokey was really all about.
I had less and less time to see her as the number of boxes piled in our entranceway increased.
After we moved, we wrote letters. Sometimes. We almost lost contact over those two years.
When we moved back for a year, we started spending time together again. But, for the first time, we were in different schools. She went to the private Catholic school that was the only decent middle school in the district, and I went out of town to a dual-language school.
After we went back to America, we completely lost contact for several years. Only this year, through some chance fluke, did we start communicating again. This time, I'm not letting her go.
That day I watched from the window, I saw her walking outside, holding her father's hand. They were the only black shapes in a world of white. I'd only known her for a day, but already I knew we were going to be friends.
