kids. You know the kind. They do everything right. Everyone loves them or at least longs to be like them.
“I fantasized quite a bit about being friends with Pamela. She was in the fast group in math like me, so I was sure if I showed her my science projects in the attic, she’d think they were cool. She read a lot, so I dreamed of us making plays together of stories we’d read. And I just knew she’d understand about Torgon, about the real Torgon, who was so much more than a game of make-believe in a cottonwood tree.
“My chance came in the spring of fourth grade. When I was out playing, I found a duck sitting on a clutch of eggs in the underbrush by the lake; so during Show-and-Tell, I told everyone in the classroom about how, if the duck sat on them long enough, the eggs would hatch and we’d have ducklings in 28 days’ time. I must have talked quite eloquently, because afterward the teacher allowed me to stay up in front of the class and answer questions from the other kids. I was Celebrity-for-a-Day because of it.
“At recess, Dena and I were playing hopscotch when Pamela strolled over. I remember her standing beside the hopscotch diagram and watching us, her hands stuffed into her coat pockets.
“‘You wanna play?’ Dena asked.
“‘No,’ she said in a bored sort of way. When it was Dena’s turn, Pamela beckoned me over beside her. ‘Come here. I want to ask you something.’
“I readily abandoned Dena.”
“‘Can I come over to your house after school tonight?’ Pamela asked. ‘I’ll ask my mum at lunchtime if I can come, but she’ll probably let me. I want to see the duck. So can I?’
“Of course I said yes. Indeed, I was delirious with joy. I shot out of the school at lunchtime and ran all the way home to tell Ma the news. Pamela, who had never so much as talked to me in the playground, wanted to come to my house to play! I could hardly eat a thing for lunch, because I had so much to get ready. I rushed up to my bedroom to straighten up my things and make my bed. Maybe Pamela would want to see my horse collection or my rocks or my pressed leaves. Maybe Pamela would like to see how I could turn blue water clear, like magic, with my foster brother’s old chemistry set. Maybe Pamela would feel like drawing. Just in case, I clambered up to reach the top shelf where I kept the box containing drawing paper. Then I asked Ma if she would bake some of her special peanut butter cookies that were shaped like cats’ faces.
“Pamela did come. She walked home with me. She came into my house, looked at my room and had a glass of milk and cookies at my table. She wouldn’t eat any of the peanut butter cats, because she said she didn’t like peanut butter cookies; so Ma opened a package of Oreos for her. Then Pamela said, ‘Can I see the duck now?’
“I took her down by the lake. We crawled on hands and knees into the willowy darkness and Pamela muttered about the awful smell of duck poo. The duck, sitting on her nest, hissed at us.
“‘I want to see the eggs,’ Pamela said. I fended off the duck and got one for her. Pamela examined it carefully. ‘Can I have it?’ she asked. I didn’t think to say no or even wonder what she wanted it for, since she didn’t have any way to hatch it. I just gave it to her. Then we crawled out of the underbrush again.
“Pamela put the egg into the pocket of her jacket. ‘Okay,’ she said casually, ‘see you at school tomorrow.’ She turned around and started walking off.
“‘Hey,’ I cried. ‘Wait a minute! Don’t you want to play?’
“She shook her head. ‘No, I got to be home by 4:15. I need to practise my piano. I promised my mother I wouldn’t be late.’
“‘But … but, we haven’t done anything yet,’ I said.
“‘I only came over to see your duck eggs, Laurie. Now I’ve seen them, so I got to go.’
“‘But don’t you want to do something together?’
“‘I said, I need to practise my piano.’
“‘Do you want to come another time? My horse collection usually looks nicer. I polish them with hand lotion and it makes them really shiny. Do you want to come see them after I’ve polished them? I’d let you play with Stormfire. He’s the one that’s white and bucking up on his back legs. He’s my best horse. When Dena and me play, I always save him for myself and she never gets to play with him, but I’d let you.’
“‘No.’
“‘Ma doesn’t always make peanut butter cookies. Lots of times she makes chocolate chip. Do you like them better?’
“Pamela said, ‘Laurie, didn’t you hear me? I only wanted to see your duck eggs. I’ve seen them, so now I want to go.’
“I stared at her blankly.”
“‘Why do you think I’d play with you?” she said ‘You’re crazy. Everybody at school knows you’re crazy.’
“‘That’s not true!’
“‘Yes, sir,’ Pamela replied. ‘You talk to yourself and that means you’re crazy. That’s why nobody wants to play with you.’
“‘I’m not crazy,’ I retorted indignantly. ‘And lots of people want to play with me.’
“‘Just Dena. And you know what her dad does? He works at the water treatment plant. He stands in people’s poo all day.’ She pinched her nose. ‘That’s why she plays with you, because she’s too stinky to play with anybody else.’
“‘She is not stinky,’ I said. ‘Besides, she’s not my only friend. I have lots of friends. Friends you don’t even know about. Friends who wouldn’t even like you.’
“‘Yeah, sure, Laurie, I bet. Like who, for instance?’ she asked.
“‘You don’t know them.’
“‘Yeah, because probably you just made them up.’
“‘No, sir, real friends.’
“‘Crazy people think everything’s real. They don’t know any better. That’s why they’re crazy,’ Pamela said and gave me a haughty little smile. Then she turned, let herself out through our gate and walked on down the street.”
Laura paused. She leaned back into the softness of the sofa and sat for several moments in deep silence.
“The thing was, I wasn’t lying,” she said. “This is what people always kept accusing me of. That what I experienced wasn’t real, and therefore it had to be lies. Black and white to them. Real or unreal. Truth or lies. But it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t making it up. It wasn’t false. There was another world there. Like ours, but different. I could see it, but, for whatever reason, they couldn’t. I don’t know why. But that didn’t make it unreal.”
There was a long, reflective pause.
“I remember learning about bees when I was in fifth grade,” she said softly, “about how bees can see beyond the visible colour spectrum. Humans look at a white Sweet William flower, they see it as plain white. To us that’s true. But if a bee looks at the same flower, it sees intricately patterned petals. That’s because bees can see on the infrared spectrum beyond what human eyes can. The pattern is there for them, but it’s invisible to our eyes. And when I read that, I remember thinking, ‘That’s just like it is with the Forest.’ Simply because we can’t see the pattern on the flower, that doesn’t mean the bee is lying. Because I can see the Forest and other people can’t, that doesn’t mean I’m lying.”
Laura stopped speaking and looked at James. Again the silence, spinning out around them like thread.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to share this whole thing about Torgon with you in a way that shows the vibrancy of it all; how something can be real and unreal at the same time and so beautiful. Because if you can’t get a sense of that, then it does quickly reduce what I’m saying