How to Talk to Girls at Parties (eBook Original)

Had you told me that I was seven again, I might have half-believed you, for a moment.
    “Thank you.”
    I walked into the farmyard. I went past the chicken coop, past the old barn and along the edge of the field, remembering where I was, and what was coming next, and exulting in the knowledge. Hazels lined the side of the meadow. I picked a handful of the green nuts, put them in my pocket.
    The pond is next , I thought. I just have to go around this shed, and I’ll see it.
    I saw it and felt oddly proud of myself, as if that one act of memory had blown away some of the cobwebs of the day.
    The pond was smaller than I remembered. There was a little wooden shed on the far side, and, by the path, an ancient, heavy, wood-and-metal bench. The peeling wooden slats had been painted green a few years ago. I sat on the bench, and stared at the reflection of the sky in the water, at the scum of duckweed at the edges, and the half-dozen lily pads. Every now and again, I tossed a hazelnut into the middle of the pond, the pond that Lettie Hempstock had called . . .
    It wasn’t the sea, was it?
    She would be older than I am now, Lettie Hempstock. She was only a handful of years older than I was back then, for all her funny talk. She was eleven. I was . . . what was I? It was after the bad birthday party. I knew that. So I would have been seven.
    I wondered if we had ever fallen in the water. Had I pushed her into the duck pond, that strange girl who lived in the farm at the very bottom of the lane? I remembered her being in the water. Perhaps she had pushed me in too.
    Where did she go? America? No, Australia . That was it. Somewhere a long way away.
    And it wasn’t the sea. It was the ocean.
    Lettie Hempstock’s ocean.
    I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.

I.
    N obody came to my seventh birthday party.
    There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.
    When it became obvious that nobody was coming, my mother lit the seven candles on the cake, and I blew them out. I ate a slice of the cake, as did my little sister and one of her friends (both of them attending the party as observers, not participants) before they fled, giggling, to the garden.
    Party games had been prepared by my mother but, because nobody was there, not even my sister, none of the party games were played, and I unwrapped the newspaper around the pass-the-parcel gift myself, revealing a blue plastic Batman figure. I was sad that nobody had come to my party, but happy that I had a Batman figure, and there was a birthday present waiting to be read, a boxed set of the Narnia books, which I took upstairs. I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories.
    I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.
    My parents had also given me a Best of Gilbert and Sullivan LP, to add to the two that I already had. I had loved Gilbert and Sullivan since I was three, when my father’s youngest sister, my aunt, took me to see Iolanthe , a play filled with lords and fairies. I found the existence and nature of the fairies easier to understand than that of the lords. My aunt had died soon after, of pneumonia, in the hospital.
    That evening my father arrived home from work and he brought a cardboard box with him. In the cardboard box was a soft-haired black kitten of uncertain gender, whom I immediately named Fluffy, and which I loved utterly and wholeheartedly.
    Fluffy slept on my bed at night. I talked to it, sometimes, when my little sister was not around, half-expecting it to answer in a human tongue. It never did. I did not mind. The kitten was affectionate and interested and a good companion for someone whose seventh birthday party had consisted of a table with iced biscuits and a blancmange and cake and fifteen empty folding chairs.
    I do not remember ever asking any of the other children in my class at school why they had not come to my party. I did not need to ask them. They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.
    I made friends slowly, when I made them.
    I had books, and now I had my kitten. We would be like Dick