DD Warren 00 - The 7th Month

loved the feel of freshly polished wood. I loved the way I scrubbed the floor again and again, and each time, it looked pretty and fresh and new.
    Cleaning meant controlling. Cleaning kept the shadows at bay.
    First day of school, Aunt Nancy personally walked me down the street. I wore stiff new clothes, including black patent Mary Janes I polished obsessively for the next six months. I felt conspicuous. Too new. Too fresh out of the box.
    I still wasn’t used to all the noise and clamor that came with “village” life. Neighbors, everywhere I looked. People who made eye contact and smiled.
    “Your tea set is tarnished,” I informed my aunt, one block from my first ever school. “I’ll go home and polish it for you.”
    “You’re a funny child, Charlene.”
    I stopped walking, my hand rubbing my side and the scar that still itched sometimes. I had more scars, spiderweb fine, on the back of my left hand, let alone the ugly surgical mark on my right elbow, burn marks on my right thigh. I was pretty sure other kids didn’t have such blemishes on their bodies. I was pretty sure other children’s mothers didn’t “love” them as much as mine had sworn she loved me. “I don’t want to go.”
    My aunt stopped walking. “Charlie, it is time to go to school. Now, I want you to march through those front doors. I want you to hold your head high. And I want you to know, you are the bravest, toughest little girl I know, and none of those kids have anything on you. Do you hear me? None of those kids have anything on you.”
    So I did what my aunt said. I walked through those doors. I kept my head high. I slid into a desk at the back of a room. Where the little girl on my left turned and said. “Hi, I’m Jackie.” And the little girl on my right turned and said, “I’m Randi.”
    And just like that, we were friends.
    But I never told them everything.
    You know what I mean, don’t you?
    How sometimes, even with best friends, even with the sisters of your heart who laugh with you and cry with you and know every single minuscule detail of your first crush and final heartbreak, you still can’t tell them
everything.
    Even best friends have secrets.
    Take it from me, the last one standing, who’s spent the past two years learning most of our secrets the hard way.
    We grew up in the last days of real childhood. Spending our summers running wild in the woods, where we built tree forts out of downed limbs and had tea parties featuring acorn soup and pinecone parfaits. We raced leaf boats down eddying streams. We discovered secret swimming holes. We wired soup cans with twine in lieu of cell phones.
    I’d help Aunt Nancy every morning and every evening during the summer. But afternoons were mine, and I spent every minute with my two best friends. Even back then, Jackie was the organizer. She’d have our afternoons all mapped out, probably would’ve developed a marketing plan and forecasted future opportunities for play if we’d let her. Randi was quieter. She had beautiful wheat blond hair she wore tucked behind her ears. She preferred playing house in the tree fort, where she always had the perfect finishing touch for her tree stump, maybe some creative combination of berries and leaves that made a random pile of decaying limbs feel just like home.
    I recommended her skills to Aunt Nancy, and for much of our high school years Randi helped out in the B&B on the weekends, hanging holiday ornaments, preparing fresh centerpieces for the dining room, decorating the front parlor. Jackie would come along as well, hooking up Aunt Nancy’s first computer and, when the time came, introducing my aunt to the Internet.
    I didn’t have Jackie’s drive, or Randi’s artistic skills. I thought of myself as the glue. Whatever they wanted to do, I did. Whatever hobby they had, I took up. I’d been raised at an early age to go along, so going along was what I did best.
    But I meant it. I loved them. I’d grown up in the dark, then I’d come to the mountains of New Hampshire and found the light. Randi and Jackie laughed. They asked my opinions, they complimented my efforts, they smiled when I walked into a room.
    I didn’t care what we did. I just wanted to do it with them.
    Of course, small town kids inevitably have big city dreams. Jackie started the countdown our junior year in high school. She was sick of nosy neighbors, community theater, and a post office that doubled as the biggest gossip center in town. She had her