Chapter three:

 

 

When I was a kid, my mother used to bake the most delicious cookies. They were healthy, too, not the kind that are filled with sugar and colorings. High in additives and preservatives or whatever. They were made from beetroot and chocolate, which shouldn’t work, but it did. It’s another odd combination that I find myself lying awake thinking about at night.

How can two opposites work so well together?

They say opposites attract, and I think that’s how it was with Carrie and me.

Carrie.

She’s laughing. Or crying. I can’t be sure anymore. And there is so much blood.

But I love her. I would do it all again for her.

Right?

Because if I wouldn’t, what does that mean? About her? About me?

About everything?

We were opposite in every way—a strange combination of personalities and looks. But we worked. We went together perfectly. Like my mother’s chocolate-and-beetroot cookies.

My memories aren’t always red.

Some of them are bright and pretty and full of color.

Those are the best ones.

The ones that didn’t ruin me.

The first time I saw her, she was playing in the dirt with a stick. She was six and I was eight. Her hair was slicked back from her face, and it looked damp. She had been crying; I could tell because she had tear stains down her dirty cheeks.

Those were probably the first things I loved about her.

Her tears.

They were real.

The realest thing about her.

Those tears would change my life.

*

“Why is your hair so wet?” I asked, my hands shoved deep into my shorts pockets. I’d been watching her for twenty minutes and my curiosity had finally got the better of me despite my mom’s words ringing in my ears about asking too many questions of people.

She looked up at me, her eyes glassy and sad. “My mom said I have bugs in my hair,” she said, reaching up to scratch at her head.

“Eww,” I replied, feeling sort of grossed out by the girl with dirty tear-stained cheeks and bugs in her hair.

“She put some cream in it to make them go away,” she said.

I sat down next to her then, making sure there was enough distance between us that the bugs couldn’t jump across onto me. “Why are you crying?” I asked.

Her cheeks flushed pink and she looked away. “I killed a worm.” She poked the worm that was cut into two halves with a stick. It was gross and it made my stomach feel sick. I’d never known anyone to kill something intentionally before.

“Why?” I whispered as if I might get in trouble by my mom if she knew about the worm.

“Because it needs to suffer for being both the bottom and the top.” She poked the worm again, almost angrily.

I didn’t know what she meant. Even then I think I knew I wasn’t supposed to. So I stayed quiet and watched her poke the dead worm.

And then I went home and asked my mom what the little girl with the tear-stained cheeks meant, but Mom didn’t know.

I didn’t see Carrie for three weeks and two days after that. But in that time my mom took me to the library and I checked out a book about worms. I read that thing from front to back and learned everything I could about worms. I learned that you can chop one in half and the front half will regenerate and the worm will live. But if you chop off its head it will just die. I learned that they can go forward and backwards, and that they have no eyes. But I didn’t learn anything about a worm being at the bottom and at the top.

When I next saw Carrie, she was sitting in the dirt again. She had on shorts that were tied with string, and I could see bruises on her legs. I asked her about the worm thing, and she looked at me like she had no idea what I was talking about. So I told her the story of how we met, and what she had said about the worm.

She said I was weird.

I wanted to cry.

I didn’t want this sad girl to think I was weird. Not her. Never her.

She stood up and hugged me and told me not to be sad.

Carrie said that all the best people were weird.

I knew I would love her forever after that, not just for a short time before I loved something or someone else.

My love for Carrie was the always kind. Even when I wished it wasn’t.

Later that night, when my mom was washing my hair and getting rid of the mud from my knees, I thought about Carrie and decided that she was weird too.

But Carrie was wrong.

The best people weren’t weird. Sometimes the weird people were something else entirely.