“It may be noticed that decimals are very much like fractions. In fact — and this is exciting — they are fractions. You see, a fraction is any part of a whole — though you can express them as being bigger than an integer even though not all of them are — and a decimal is just a fraction expressed with a denominator of some multiple of ten. The notation for decimals entails putting your digits that would otherwise be thought of as integers when on the left-hand side of the decimal point and-”

BAM!

My forehead smacked my fake wood desk. Our teacher, Mr. Grayson, has all the charm of a cinder block, so I tend to fall asleep in class a lot.

“Dude! Are you ok?” Jordan loudly whispered. I looked around. Mr. Grayson, who never notices anything, also seemed to not notice one of his fifth graders nearly getting a concussion in the second row. All the kids in the class did, though, and I was getting some funny looks and a lot of snickering giggles.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, blushing. I rubbed my forehead to numb the pain.

“Hey, since you’re up,” said Jordan, under her breath, “why’d you dump Henry? I heard you guys made out.”

“I didn’t dump him,” I protested. “He-…we-…it just wasn’t quite right.”

“What, the kissing?”

“No!” I almost yelled. Mr. Grayson didn’t miss a monotone beat. I vaguely heard him say something about proper and improper as I stalled for time, trying to figure out what I was going to say. Why is it so uncomfortable to talk about boys and stuff like that?

Jordan let out a little squeal of excitement. I rolled my eyes.

“So you did kiss him! What was it like? Jenny Marcinko said that last year at theater camp she kissed a boy from Toronto, which I was like Toronto?, really?, and anyway she said it was weird and terrifying and wet and it was magical. Was it magical?” Sometimes she talks so fast it’s like someone throwing an extra big water balloon at you. It hits you and explodes and it takes you a second to realize that it’s all over and you’re soaked to the bone.

“He just…” I trailed off. Words failed me. Mr. Grayson droned something about Line up to add up. What was it about Henry anyway? And why did Jordan care? It seemed like a lot of people cared about other people’s relationships, come to think of it.

An incident from Labor Day a week or so prior popped into my mind. My mom was off work and I was off school, so she took me to Jumpstart!, one of those coffee shops where the employees don’t seem to shower very much. It was near our house, and Mom wanted some “mother-daughter” time. Oy. Anyway, we were sitting there sipping our drinks, my mother trying her best to get me to “share.” Gross.

Over Mom’s shoulder and behind the counter I could see a dreadlocked barista methodically swaying her hips to the funky beat of the in-house live band, which consisted entirely of a guy sitting in the corner in ratty clothes belting out an acoustic, slow-jam version of Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off.

“How are you?” She made serious, sincere, earnest parental eye contact. It was unbearable.

“Fine,” I said, putting on my best fake smile. A group of mid-forties moms had just collected their drinks and crammed themselves around the tiny table next to us.

“No, how aaaare you?” She dragged out the are the way only moms can. She put her hand on mine and squeezed. “I want to know what’s going on with you.”

“I’m into drugs now.” Ugh. Forced touchy-feely talk with a parental unit. The neighboring mom-squad all chatted at once. They sounded like hyperactive geese…well…hyperactive geese wearing matching black spandex workout clothes. With make-up.

“Come on, Emma,” she pleaded. “I’m just trying to get to know you.”

And she was; I knew that. Whenever she gave me that Mom Look, though, my words would get all squished up in my throat like two fat guys trying to fit through a little door. Time to pull out something shiny.

“Well, I was just thinking about how I want to have an important job like you someday.” That did it. Mom looooved to talk about her job. Her eyes lit up like a puppy who has just spotted a squirrel, a duck, and two chickens sitting in his food bowl.

“Oh, honey, I’m so glad you’re interested! Just the other day we got this new report about organic farming yields and….” She was in the zone and would be occupied for at least fifteen minutes.

The mom-squad was quieter now, focused on one storyteller. The fair-haired, sun-freckled speaker dished the latest gossip about another mom who apparently spent her mornings actually working out (which I’m guessing meant she ran a real risk getting some bit of genuine sweat on her black spandex workout clothes).

“I mean, you know why she’s killing herself in the gym, right?” Freckles said, faux-whispering and clearly audible. The group leaned in, totally focused. “Ever since George left her, she’s been, you know, looking around.” The other moms nodded, getting something that I didn’t. “Anyway, I hear she’s found one. He’s an orthopedic fellow at Sacred Heart, he’s just twenty-eight, and he looks like what’s-his-name in Thelma and Louise. Can you believe it?”

The other moms inhaled sharply and covered their mouths.

“Shaaaake…iiiiiitt…offff…” moaned the guitarist. Dreadlocks slow-motion pirouetted, not spilling a drop of the extra large macchiato she was preparing.

“And get this,” Freckles continued, “You know her oldest, Spencer, is pre-med, right? Well, I hear that Mr. Cowboy-hat Doctor is pulling strings to get him a spot in next Fall’s med school class. He’s only six years older than Spencer!” The moms variously shook their heads, clicked their tongues, and hmmm’ed.

I couldn’t hear much more of the conversation because Mom had gently smacked her palm on the table, apparently to make an important point about something to do with the hole size of swiss cheese. That brought me back to pretending to pay attention to her. The soloist in the corner shrieked, “MY…EX…MAN…AND…HIS…NEW…GIRLFRIEND….”

Despite that, I could tell that the mom-squad kept gabbing about their friend and the doctor for a while because over the next few minutes, I could make out a NO! and a They’re going where? and a Married!?.

Anyway, it stuck with me that these women seemed to be living their lives through the adventures of their divorcee friend. Why did they care? I mean, I like Jordan and Eva and my other friends, but it just doesn’t matter to me if they say they like this boy or that boy.

~

And now Jordan sounded just like the spandex-clad mom-squad. She looked at me, waiting. I hesitated.

“What?”

“OMG, I knew you weren’t listening.” Jordan rolled her eyes. “I swear I don’t know how your head doesn’t just wander away from your shoulders sometimes.”

“How could my head wander away?” The memories, Mr. Grayson’s droning, and my aching forehead all made me foggy. Jordan smiled and shrugged. She returned to drawing hearts all over her notebook cover. In the upper right corner she had drawn a really fancy one with curly cues and three different colors of pen. In the middle it read E+H 4ever. It was crossed out.

“You don’t talk normal.” We were sitting in the grass at the park, the Quickening park.

“Normal-ly,” I said. I hate it when people confuse adjectives and adverbs. I mean, we’ve studied this for two weeks straight in school.

“What?” he said.

“Normal-ly. You said I don’t talk normal. But it’s normally. The word describes the verb not the noun.”

“Ah. Well I beg your kind and gracious pardon, then, and dearly hope that you will continue to educate me in the finer points of grammar, syntax, and all things semantic. Or semantically, as you please.”

“What?” I said. “I don’t know what all those words mean.”

Brendan smiled. “I know. Here’s your first lesson in our little project: The better part of maturity is knowing when to let things slide.”

Brendan was my neighbor. He was twenty-seven, single, cute-ish, and he had a guitar and no girlfriend. Somehow, someway he had recently decided to buy a large house in our boring suburban neighborhood — the kind of house with big white garage doors that look like Mater’s buckteeth. My mom called him a tinker toy in a LEGO set, whatever that meant.

Three days ago, I had been skipping down the sidewalk trying to remember the words to a song. I had forgotten who sings it, but it had that catchy bit and it was just stuck in my head like a Tootsie Roll jams in your molars.

I was staring at my feet and singing that ring of fire for the thousandth time when I looked up and stopped, mid-skip.

I turned slowly to my right. A man was staring at me from a cheap plastic patio chair on his Twister-mat-sized front porch. Not creepy-staring. More confused-puppy staring. I stared back.

“You like Johnny Cash?”

“W-who?” My throat stumbled.

“Johnny Cash. He sings that song. Ring of Fire.” He switched to a low rumbly singing voice. “That riiiiiiiing…” I could feel my gut shake. “…of fiiiiiiirrrrrrrre.”

“Wow. You’re really good! I didn’t know it was called that. I mean, it makes sense ‘cause it’s said so much in the song but I never really thought that they called it what they say when they say it.” I paused. “Why were you staring?”

“You’re different.”

“What do you mean?”

“Every day I watch kids walk to school and walk from school.” This made a little sense. The Oakcrest Low-Security Prison for Exceptionally Short People (or OLSPESP, as I had come to call it, though most everyone else called it the Oakcrest Middle School-Elementary School Combined Campus) sat at the end of his street. “Most kids have a walk about them that says something. For kids your age, their walk usually says they’re blank. Nothing cookin’ upstairs. But not you. Why not, I wonder.”

“Sometimes I ride my bike. It’s awesome.”

He screwed his face up just a little on the one side, like he was really thinking, but without really thinking, if you know what I mean.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Just spit it out, jerk!” I tried to conjure up a mean look and hold it.

The man stood up. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I-”

I cracked. Couldn’t hold it. I felt afraid, the kind of afraid you feel when you’re called on in class and don’t know the answer.

He looked into my face, not hiding his curiosity in the least. A pause. Then a smile. “Yes!” he burst out. “You were faking, weren’t you?”

All I could do was nod. Barely. A slight dip of the chin was all.

“Ha! That’s what I was talking about! Your walk gives you away, but so does your expression.” He ambled toward me, looking a little too self-satisfied for my taste. I shifted and tried not to look too guilty or nervous or weird. He closed the distance between us, casually.

“Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Why you yelled at me just now.” His eyes bored into my brain.

I looked away, down. “I was just…I was j-…”

“Out with it!” He didn’t yell. It was almost a whisper, actually. But it felt louder than a scream.

My words sprinted out of my mouth. “Sometimes I try to act like grown-ups do, to see if it works.” My eyes reached his. Something wild and serene came over him.

“How old are you?”

“Ten,” I said.

Another pause. “No. How old are you…on the inside?”

How could he know?! No one had ever paid enough attention to me to notice much of anything beyond my curly hair (with flecks of auburn). And now here was a total stranger, an old stranger, seeing me for who I was!

I hesitated. My mouth opened but nothing came out.

“It’s ok,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me. We don’t know each other, and people think it’s weird for a twenty-something guy to chat with a young-ish girl who isn’t in his family.” He looked away, annoyed maybe, but also…I don’t know…a little sad.

“I’m twenty-five!” I blurted. Something about his sadness connected to my soul in a way I can’t explain. Not in a boy-band, heartthrob kind of way, just so you know. I’ve never felt woozy about him. (You know what I mean by woozy, right?) It’s more like he’s an older, not-related, twin brother who hangs out with me because he doesn’t seem to have much else to do, if that makes any sense.

~~~

Back in Quickening park, I said, “Ok. Could you say that again?” I shifted my feet in the grass.

“You wanted me to teach you all the things that adults don’t teach kids your age but that everyone wishes they knew when they were in fact your age. Right?” Brendan was smirking. Not in a look-down-on-you kind of way like teachers do sometimes, but in a playful, mysterious kind of way.

“Yeah…”

“Well, then, the better part of maturity is knowing when to let things slide.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Like small grammar mistakes. Or little imperfections. Or those million tiny, incorrect things that people do everyday. Unless they ask you for help, or unless you know them really, really well, or unless you’re their parent, people don’t want to hear about what they’re doing wrong. Or wrongly, as you may say.”

“But weren’t you just telling me that I don’t talk normal…ly? Isn’t that what you were just doing to me?” I objected.

“You didn’t let me get to the point I was making, which was this: You don’t talk…normally,” he emphasized the word and gave me a significant look, “for someone who is ten years old. That can be off-putting for adults and kids alike.”

I waited to make sure he didn’t have any more to say. A couple of sparrows flitted around the branches of the leafy elm whose shade we were enjoying. This was the spot we had decided to come to every Friday afternoon at three to chat about life as an adult.

“So your point is that I’m weird and people don’t like me?”

Brendan laughed hard at that, a high-pitched giggle that sounded funny coming from a man as big as he was.

“You laugh like a girl but have the nerve to tell me that I’m weird?!” I said.

“No, no, that’s not what I meant,” he said, holding out his hands as if to calm me down. Laugh-tears had formed at the corners of his face, but he gathered himself up, swiping at each eye. “It’s just that when you talk, people won’t expect you to be all grown up. And that means that you have to let them see only a part of who you are, a little bit at a time, so that they can slowly come to that realization on their own. People do not like change. And they do not like to be surprised, especially by children. So let them figure it out themselves.”

“How about we dance?” Eva said.

“What, like you and me?”

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t that, like, a little silly?” I said.

“So?”

“I’m too old to dance,” I announced. We were having a weekend sleepover, so some silliness was to be expected. But dancing? Nah.

“Oh,” said Eva sadly.

“Who’s too old to dance?” my mom asked, walking into the room.

“I am,” I said.

“Why? I’m forty, and I like to dance. Does that mean I’m too old, too?”

“Um…” I stalled. “Well, I guess not. If you’re not too old then I’m definitely not either. But if you were, then maybe I would be, too, but not necessarily, because it could be that you are but I’m not or that you aren’t and I am, so it could go either way.”

“What?” Eva and Mom said together.

“So you wanna dance?” asked Eva.

“Ok.”

Eva pressed play, the room filled with the irresistible sound of the nasal wailing of a teeny-bopper and the beat that makes you want to throw your hands up and around.

And we danced, we cavorted, we jumped and giggled and wiggled and slid and dived. Then mom joined in and we sashayed, hopped, skipped, and boogied our hearts out. I didn’t know it was ok to dance like that when you’re a grown-up. But, god, it feels good. Do non-dancing grown-ups get that?

“Hey.”

“Hey,” I said.

“You wanna go with me?” It was Henry, the new kid. He was nice and cute, but kinda weird. He had caught up with me on our second Friday afternoon since the start of school, just as I was unlocking my bike to ride home.

This is off-topic, but have you ever noticed how kid bikes are way meatier than adult bikes? And awesomer? (Yeah, I know awesomer isn’t a word. It should be.) Mine was dark blue with hints of deep purple and pink and splattered with glittery sparkles. It was fast and sturdy, and it looked it. No kickstand (I mean, come on), no tassels, no goofy flag on the back. Just pure girl-power, take-over-the-world, pedaled transportation. With the right tires I could storm the beach heads of a Milan fashion show on this baby. On a sunny weekend morning, a leisurely whip around the block could turn heads and stop traffic. No adult bike could do that.

Back to Henry.

“Go where?” I asked, not quite out of It’s the weekend! mode and into Stop and talk to people mode.

“Um…well…you know, just…like, go with me.” He paused, expectantly.

“Oh.” I think my face looked like one of those old pictures I saw in a movie once where you’d snap the shot and the camera would spit out a little square and slowly, slowly an image would appear. “Do we have to kiss?” I asked.

“Huh? No, I don’t think so…unless, I guess, if you want to.” Henry was ten, much too young for me. But I felt sorry for him because his parents named him Henry. But he was cute.

“I dunno. If I feel like it I’ll let you know.”

We stood there uncomfortably for a moment. Then, “So…is that a yes?”

“Ok.”

Henry smiled. It was the awkward smile of an innocent boy. Our relationship lasted three days. I saw him exactly three times, all of them at recess on the Monday after he had asked me out. It was hard to break his heart. I mean, he’s a nice guy and, as I mentioned, pretty cute, but I just could not live with the…um…charade. It was like I was robbing the cradle and it was awfully awkward. Would you want to be going with somebody that seemed like he was still a child to you? (My mom said she’s married to just such a person, but I don’t know if she was serious.) It’s weird, right?

I learned something, though. It was our third recess as a couple (after the morning break and lunch period). We had avoided each other for most of it, but now it was time to go to the door and line up to go inside. Henry caught me just as I getting off the swing. He tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“So…um…how was recess?”

“Good,” I replied.

“I guess it’s time to go in,” he said in that goofy way that really means I don’t know what to say.

“Yeah.”

We both paused. I wasn’t sure what he wanted, but I figured it was probably a kiss.

“Are you hoping for a smooch?”

“What?!” he nearly yelled.

“You’re hanging around thinking that you can kiss me because I’m your girlfriend but you’re too inexperienced to know how to go about it so you’re just standing there looking like you’ve had a brain cloud and displaying the conversational wittiness of a tree stump. Am I right?”

“You are…so, like…”

“‘Right.’ The word you are looking for is ‘right.’”

“Ok.”

“So do you want to kiss me?” I demanded.

“Um…ok.”

“All right, then. Give it your best shot.”

“Ok, I will.”

“Whenever you’re ready.” He leaned in a little. “Closer. A little closer.”

“You’re distracting me,” he complained.

“I’m sorry. You’re right. Try not to think about how this is the first time either of us is going to get kissed and how we’ll always remember the awkwardness and sweetness and fleeting innocence of it. Just pucker up and-”

He kissed me. Well, “kiss” is a bit optimistic. He sort of head-butted me. Don’t get me wrong; I liked it. But it wasn’t the most comfortable thing I’ve ever felt.

“You call that a kiss?” I said.

“Well, what do you call it?” he demanded.

“I say that was pretty weak. Let me show you how it’s done.”

Then I kissed him. Well, again, “kissed” may not be the right word. You see, even though I am not a kid anymore, that doesn’t mean that I know everything that grown-ups know, and that includes kissing.

So I slobbered. I’ve seen movies, and I thought I knew how it was done.

“That wasn’t right” he said.

I nodded. “Maybe we should break up,” I suggested. “You know they say that if the chemistry isn’t right, it’s just not right.”

“Ok.”

“Thanks for trying. And for the kisses.”

“Sure.” He paused. “Emma?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s chemitsry?”

And so I learned: Don’t go with boys that have small vocabularies and don’t know how to kiss. One or the other is fine, but both is a deal-breaker.