Vivacious.
Irrepressible.
Effervescent.
Natalie Nova Fletcher moved in next door the year I started second grade. She hated the name “Natalie” for as long as I could remember, too. She was a year older than me, so we ended up in the same class at Dale’s only elementary school. Rick, blissfully, happened to be a year older than myself as well, and the three of us become fast friends as social outcasts.
According to her own legend, Nova’s dad wanted to name her after his favorite green muscle car while her mom wanted her to share her grandmother’s name; they compromised, figuring the issue would resolve itself when she was old enough to choose what she wanted to be called. Of course, the inextinguishable mischief of Nova’s very being dictated her choice, and thus “Nova” took over in place of “Natalie,” which was entirely too plain of a name for a girl of her spirit.
Nova’s mom was a straight-edge, the way she told it, and her father was a good ol’ redneck born and bred in western Kansas. They met and fell in love while her mom was working as a flight attendant on the Dallas-New York-Atlanta route, and her dad’s band was playing in a dive bar next to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. A whirlwind later, Nova was born, love cooled to indifference, and she and her dad were alone and living off of meager welfare checks in a bad neighborhood in St. Louis. Distraught, drunk, and distracted, her dad lost custody of her just months after her mother died of a heart attack halfway across the country. In the summer between second and third grade, Nova moved in with her aunt and uncle, who live right next to my dad and I in a one-story ranch on two acres.
“Uncle Mike’s military pension must have racked up a ton,” she joked to me one time, “because no one would live in this crappy town for less than half a million.”
The day I formally met her, Nova punched me in the face.
“Andy, this is Natalie,” was how her Aunt Sandy introduced us when I was six. “She’s just a year older, but you two can still be friends, I’m sure.” Sandy was a bit of a hippy (though her husband, Mike, was a concrete, ex-military Republican) and insisted upon forcing Nova and I to become friendly from the get-go.
The words “Hi, Natalie,” had hardly cleared my mouth before her fist connected with my face. With a loud oof! I landed on my butt in the lawn, far more shocked than hurt.
“My name isn’t Natalie,” she said, crinkling her face up and giving me an angry look after her aunt made her apologize. “It’s Nova. Like a supernova. Or a muscle car.” Though she was only about two inches taller than me, she was skinny as a stick and couldn’t have weighed more than sixty pounds soaking wet. That didn’t stop her for scaring me so badly that I hid in my house for the rest of the day, terrified of meeting her on the street.
Thus began my long complicated relationship with Nova.
When my mom died, Nova was the only one who seemed to comprehend what I was going through, if only just the grief. She had words for me--words that anyone else had yet to offer:
Understanding.
Compassion.
Sympathy.
We had both lost someone dear, her twice. Even so, I was still a wreck. My dad took me to a psychologist that summer, desperate to figure out why it ruined me such as it did, but it didn’t do any good. Even I knew I was a lost cause when the shrink suggested that I write about how I felt if I couldn’t talk about it. That was the thing: I didn’t want to talk about it, period, much less write about it.
Destruction.
Ruination.
Defacement.
I didn’t trust myself with words.
Nova got that though, and still hung out with me when I felt like crap about it.
“I miss my dad,” she said one day when we were sitting on her porch swing. “I miss him a lot. But I know he’d be mad if I spent all my time being moody about it, so I miss him when I’m happy instead of when I’m sad.”
“Your dad isn’t dead,” I pointed out with a sniffle.
“So? I can miss him as much as you can miss your mom, can’t I?” She gave me a peculiar look and I shrugged, trying to drop the subject. “Your mom would be happy to know you miss her.”
“I guess. That fact that it’s my fault probably ruins it for her though.”
“It’s not your fault, Andy, for the thousandth time.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Neither do you.”
Nova had a way with words that was short, simple, effective, and yet somehow alluring and elegant. I clamped my mouth shut; arguing was pointless.
I knew my mom couldn’t be happy with me, because it was my fault that she was gone.
I was confident of this fact despite what Nova said to make me feel better. I hadn’t told anyone about the sentences I had typed, and I wasn’t about to tell anyone either. It was my darkest secret. My inability to share my feelings with other people made the transition from elementary to middle school especially hard, too. Luckily, Nova seemed to have the same problem though, so at least I had someone by my side to help cope with the viciousness of our prepubescent peers.
Between the two of us, Nova and I fostered enough hate for Gerald Ford Junior High School to all but telekinetically burn the damn place to the ground. I was what you’d call “socially awkward” and Nova was what some did call “a bitch.” Looking back, it was totally understandable; people simply didn’t get her. They made fun of her for her name. They whispered about her being a tomboy. Bit by bit, she retreated within herself until she reached a place where she just didn’t care anymore. It was hard for me to watch because outside of school she was still as lively as ever. In the way that proximity dictates contact, Nova and I remained platonic friends.
As I’ve mentioned before, I sucked at math--badly. As soon as regular equations—which I barely got anyway—started developing intimate relationships with the alphabet, I became hopelessly lost. My grade in algebra plummeted from a B to a D, meriting a call home from my teacher, which brought down my dad’s wrath upon me.
“No self-respecting son of mine is going to fail junior high arithmetic!” he proclaimed angrily. So, being the prudent father that he was, he found me a tutor.
Who just happened to be Nova.
“Why didn’t you ask me sooner?” she asked as we sat at her kitchen table.
Her aunt and uncle were out for the day and we cracked our books open to study. I mumbled something about not knowing she was good at math, which was a blatant lie. Nova was basically a genius when she applied herself. Truth be told, I was a little afraid of what people would say to me if they knew Nova was helping me with math. My only real friend at that time was Rick, and I couldn’t afford to let whispers degrade me even further. We worked quietly for half an hour. She attempted to help me grasp the basics of solving for variables before we both gave up and she suggested we take a break and walk down to the creek. I agreed, as all boys do when commanded by a member of the opposite sex at that age, and put on my jacket.
The creek lay at a bottom of a gully about two hundred yards from the back fence of our yards, across a certain Mr. Bennett’s large cow pasture. A nippy, mid-March breeze swirled around us and I shoved my hands into my pockets. Nova wore nothing but a pair of faded blue jeans and a yellow t-shirt. I followed her across the pasture and down a thin path into the leafless brush. Our hangout was a wide, flat area around a bend in the creek, hidden all around by thick growth. We had dragged two faded old plastic lawn chairs down there during the summer to make it more comfortable. Other than the two of us, only Rick knew about the spot.
I plopped down into one of the chairs, trying not to look too cold. She doesn’t look cold, I noted, as I watched Nova nimbly hop from rock to rock, up the creek and back. Her flawless winter-tanned skin glowed every time she passed beneath a ray of sunshine that weakly filtered through the bare branches. Something about the way she moved, lithe, catlike, graceful—whatever it was, it started causing a rather hormonal reaction in my body and I tried to look anywhere else. My resolve was killed when she bent down to pull an interesting looking rock from under the water, exposing to my innocent eyes most of her cleavage. It was then and there that I realized that my neighbor Nova was seriously attractive. The kind of attractive that makes your heart flutter and your palms sweat when you’re thirteen.
I was a sure gonner.
If she noticed me staring, she didn’t say anything. She dried the rock off on her sleeve and put it in her pocket, then hopped back onto the bank and sat down on the arm of my chair.
“Hey, Andy, have you ever kissed a girl before?” She asked with a curious look on her face. Her blue-green, piercing eyes dared me to lie.
“N…No,” was all I could stammer out, suddenly very nervous. I forced myself to look her in the eyes, but I could feel an embarrassed flush creep up my neck.
“I’ve never kissed a boy, either.” I didn’t get a chance to respond before she leaned in lightning-quick and I felt her lips on my own, soft and warm. It was an awkward kiss, clumsy, and it probably only lasted two seconds. Those two seconds, though, were the longest two seconds of my thirteen short years on earth. With a triumphant and embarrassed laugh, Nova detached herself from me and sprinted up the path and out of the gully, back toward her house.
I stood there for a full minute, a stupid smile on my face, and couldn’t decide whether I should laugh or cry. I had a strange sense of accomplishment growing in my chest, though I couldn’t figure out where it came from.
If I thought things were going to be normal after that, I was dead wrong.
Thus continued my long and complicated relationship with Nova Fletcher; just like she had a way with words, she apparently had a way with certain actions.
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