There's Something About

It was an unusually sunny day when Velvet Astrington knocked on my front door. She was wearing an expression as dubious as her clothing, the satin skirt paired with knee length socks and a turtleneck sweater, all of the same hue as her frizzy auburn hair. When she smiled, it looked like she was trying to ask a question, her neck stretching out of her turtleneck, as if she were truly a turtle, and her head cocked to the side like a curious bird.

I still remember her first words to me. “Well, there’s something about that, isn’t there?”

From there, she asserted herself as the top dog in our friendship. Her voice carried no sense of command. On the contrary, the faint lisp and high-pitch, the way all of her sentences rose just slightly at the end, gave her the distinct aura of a field mouse. And yet, in the way that the wind whispers its unbending will, her words carried me away like chaff.

I was an awkward child, too short for my feet and still growing into my front teeth. Velvet, for her part, was thin as a bean pole and twice as tall, her wild fiery hair making her look like a broom with the end on fire. Apart, we were quite nearly repulsive. Put together, we created art, an eclectic blend of short and tall, stout and thin, bright and dull.

Velvet had a propensity for finding things that no one else could see, and she always showed them only to me. She showed me the corner of Mrs. Laura’s shed, where the bull snake hid its nest, and the tree in the schoolyard with the hole full of acorns. She found a pink shoe with a pointed toe in the forest behind my house, small enough that she insisted it belonged to a fairy. I’m certain she was right. And every day, sometimes twice or more, Velvet would wonder aloud, “There’s something to that, isn’t there?”

There was a day, standing out on the frozen pond beyond mean Mr. Miller’s house, that Velvet admitted to me that she did not much like the winter. I was quite puzzled, as she had been the one to insist that we take a stroll outside, leaving behind two steaming mugs of hot cocoa. Then, rather unreasonably, she demanded we walk out onto the frozen pond, despite our lack of ice skates or even proper mittens and hats.

Then she leaned down-she had to lean quite far-and kissed me. It was a supreme moment of wordless meaning, the wintry land holding its breath to watch this moment of unity. For a brief second, the strangeness of our individual selves melted away under this unity.

And then the rain began. It was an icy December rain, but it still should have been snow. The ice was made unbearably slick as we tried to escape nature’s fury. Velvet broke her arm that day, reaching for me to catch her balance but just missing.

Two months later, she disappeared. I never saw or heard from her again. Neighbors whispered that her father had whisked her away to a land of palm trees and dolphins. I wondered if the palm trees would see her as one of their own, with blazing fronds atop her head. I imagined she would become the phoenix queen of the palm trees, reigning over them in her land of eternal sun.

I didn’t leave. I didn’t try to find her. The frozen pond melted, and the days grew warm. I found myself wishing for winter. Velvet would have demanded I cease such silly thoughts, and she would of course be right, as always.

But there was something about a day in the rain, on a frozen pond, when the world released a sigh of fulfillment.