Boy’s trip to La Buena Bakery every morning to coffee with Meche had now being going on for the better part of a year.
Most days they talked about their old days in grade school. The rare occasions when they dipped their toes into romantic waters, they quickly backed out.
Boy didn’t have a plan for taking their relationship anywhere, although he assumed Meche wanted to. He’d just moved back to the Southside after being gone since he went off to college several decades earlier. Indeed, he came back seeking succor from old friends and family after pursuing a career that allowed him to come back home only once a year. He didn’t know if he wanted to stay there the rest of his life or if he wanted to have any kind of romantic encounter. He didn’t know why he even sought out Meche, whom he hadn’t seen since high school, when they stopped talking to each other. The only thing he was sure of was that she touched a part of him that needed nurturing. He could think no further than his next trip to the bakery to see Meche again.
“Just day by day,” we told himself every day.
Meche didn’t seem to mind the open-endedness of their new relationship. There was a lot of satisfying material to cover from grade school.
“Remember when you told me Little Gilbert tried to kiss me?” Meche asked one morning after she put a big tray of cuernitos into the oven before she stepped into the coffee room.
“Simón. He told me, and I told you to be trucha,” Boy said.
“Saw you push his face back,” he added.
“You saw it?” she asked.
“Siról,” he responded.
“Why didn’t you stop him?” she asked.
Boy remembered Meche asked him the same question at the time. It was fraught then and now.
“Didn’t know exactly when he was gonna try,” Boy said.
“That’s what you said then. I thought it was chafa. You were my best friend back then,” she said.
Boy paused. He recalled the incident disrupted their relationship a long while. They didn’t get back on speaking terms until just before the summer break, their last year of grade school. That fall, he ran into her in the junior high school building, and they both had changed. Their encounters from then on were as boy and girl, not as children. They still talked, but it was different.
Boy remembered how at first he wanted to go back to their gentler days with her, but Meche wouldn’t have it. He was a boy to her, and she wanted him to see her as a girl.
Here he was at that bridge again, and he again wanted to stay on the other side.
“You’re right. It was chafa. I should’ve stayed by you—or him, and prevented it,” Boy said.
Meche smiled the way she used to smile at him in the 6th grade.
This story was made possible by generous donations from supporters like you. Please consider showing your support with a contribution today.
