I fell in love with Raina Allen the day she brought her diorama to class in third grade. It was a project for the school science fair. We had been assigned mandatory projects in November, a series of boring topics that mostly had to do with measuring precipitation levels and learning about the various flatulent land mammals of our region. But Raina had raised her hand when we got our projects and said, “Mrs. Boswell, I don’t want to be a pain, but I think it would be better if I did a diorama.”
And Mrs. Boswell, who spent a decent amount of time squashing the dreams of Raina and others like her, froze for a minute. I could see even with my puny third-grade powers of perception that she was on the verge of saying “Nope. Sorry. Precipitation levels for you.” But maybe because she was distracted, or in a rare good mood, or bored out of her mind at the thought of seeing another graph of Minnesota snowfall, said, “Okay, Raina. But don’t make me regret this decision.”
And Raina meanwhile had this look on her face like: Okay, Mrs. Boswell, you can send your teacher threats my way, but I AM going to make you regret your decision because this diorama is going to BLOW YOUR FUCKING MIND. And sure enough, when Raina brought her project to our pathetic little science fair in the cafeteria on a slushy December morning, it was nothing short of astonishing.
Imagine, if you will, a large box.
Now imagine eyeholes cut into this box.
I can see you being underwhelmed, but stay with me.
Because now you walk up to this large, unsuspecting box and adjust your face so that your eyes line up perfectly with those eyeholes. You blink a few times, and it takes a second for your eyes to adjust to the dim red light that has been switched on inside. But when your vision clears you see a battle between two 12,000-year-old woolly mammoths rendered in photo-realist detail.
There they are: constructed in clay, frozen mid-attack, their tusks tangled together in a grapple for dominance. One of them is falling down, but he hasn’t quite reached the ground yet, his mouth constricted in an angry mammoth death grimace. The other lunges forward, his leg pierced from a prior attack from the now-victim. In the background is a watching herd of tiny mammoths surrounded by a canopy of giant dinosaur-times ferns. And in the sky above them, a red sun blazing.
That is what I saw inside that box.
And what I felt was joy. Not admiration, at least not right away. Not jealousy. Just pure unadulterated joy. The box was like a movie. A movie that didn’t move. And it elicited the same joy I would feel later when I watched the Millennium Falcon jump to light speed for the first time, or the DeLorean disappear at the end of Back to the Future or later still when Ben and Elaine are running from the church in The Graduate, stumbling onto a bus completely unsure of what’s coming next, with only their flawed love to guide them. The kind of joy that plucks you, temporarily, out of your life.
And when I finally pulled away from that diorama and locked in on Raina’s expectant eyes, I was speechless. What I wanted to say was: I love you, Raina. And while I don’t really know what moors are, I am going to find out someday and then we are going to get married on some. But once I found myself able to actually utter words again, I think I said something like: “Cool mammoths.” To which Raina nodded, and then went back to being effortlessly awesome.
And that was that.
It was my first experience with unrequited love. It would not be my last. But for the moment, Raina Allen could do no wrong in my eyes. I must have realized on some level that she did not just exist for me. Her role was not to make my life awesome. Her mammoths were not created just to expand my sense of wonder. She made them for herself. She made them for the progress of third-grade science.
No matter the reason, I just knew I wanted to be near her.
So for the rest of elementary school, I watched her from afar, occasionally joining one of her elaborate role-playing games at recess, happy to be given the part of the robot dog in a sci-fi epic or, more than once, “bumbling squire” to the first female Knight of the Round Table. She rarely said my name, and each year on Valentine’s Day, when I chose the best cartoon franchise valentine for her and tucked it into her cardboard mailbox, I allowed myself the hope that she might finally reciprocate my feelings of adoration. But her valentines were never personalized, and she never let me know she had received mine. And that’s the way things went until we left the halls of Hillcrest Elementary.
In sixth grade, though, things began to change.
In grade school, Raina had held us in sway with her strange ways. No one cared that she cut off her bangs with safety scissors in art class. Or that she ate ketchup with a spoon. No one cared because weird was cool in grade school. Weird was fun. Weird made the games better and the days go faster.
Then, in junior high, suddenly weird took a fall from grace. Weird was no longer cool. Weird was wrong and bad and embarrassing. At least according to the eighth-grade overlords who controlled everything with their perfectly timed eye rolls and shrugs and new boobs and amazingly fragrant lip gloss. They took one look at Raina with her messy blond hair and boys’ shoes, and they decided that she was anonymous.
Anonymous like me.
We met again in gym class, the great equalizer. Well, we met outside gym class technically, both of us using the same evasion tactic of a bathroom break. The hallway outside the sweat-fogged gymnasium had two drinking fountains side by side, and we both took a drink and then hesitated to go back in where the terrible sounds of a game called Prison Ball were echoing around. It doesn’t matter if you know what Prison Ball is. It has the word “prison” in it. That should give you the gist.
“Ethan, right?” she said.
And then I’m pretty sure I choked on some water I was trying to swallow.
“Yeah,” I squeaked.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Oh. Some water went down the wrong tube, but I think I’m okay.”
“No,” she said. “I mean how did we get here? How did this happen?”
I listened to one of my Prison Ball teammates screaming like a Viking raider inside the gym. I didn’t know how to answer Raina’s question.
She continued: “Last year we were playing Oregon Trail and eating cupcakes on people’s birthdays. And now . . . all of this.”
She pointed at the halls, a bewildered look in her eye.
“Yeah,” I said. “I get what you mean.”
She looked at me, waiting for more.
“I mean. It’s even worse than everyone said. It’s like Battle Royale or something,” I said.
She had been nodding, but now she stopped.
“What’s Battle Royale?”
“Oh, it’s this film by Kinji Fukasaku about these kids who have to fight to death for the Japanese government. Early on, someone gets a knife to the head for whispering. It’s intense.”
Her face was unreadable. She seemed to really look at me then. She took in my skinny legs and too-tight gym shirt. My haircut that looked accidental at best.
“How are you going to make it, Ethan?” she asked.
It hadn’t occurred to me to ask that question yet. And being asked directly shook me to the very moorings of my soul.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t really have a strategy or anything.”
She thought for a minute, and I could see her wondering if she should mention the next thing at all.
“Listen,” she said finally, “this might be your thing. It might not. But my mom’s signing me up for acting classes on Saturdays at the Community Playhouse. It seems pretty cool. They have real costumes and everything. But so far, we don’t have any boys for the plays. I mean, I’m down for playing a boy if I have to, but I’d like an element of realism if possible. Anyway . . .”
I stared at her.
“You think I should join?” I asked inanely.
“Well . . . if it’s your thing.”
“I don’t know what my thing is,” I said. “I might not have a thing.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s sad.”
I looked at her. Her eyes were already looking past me.
“Listen,” she said. “Come if you want, or you know . . . don’t.”
Then she walked off toward the cafeteria, and I never saw her in gym class again. Later, I found out she faked a back problem. But I did see her at the Playhouse, which would miraculously bring us closer together for a short time before pushing us as far apart as we could possibly get.