Why We Don't Talk Anymore

Why we don’t talk anymore
By Marc Sollinger

My friendship with Ally ended badly. It was the end of my final year at Walsingham academy, and the school dance was so close I could taste it. I had only been to one dance in my entire life; I was nine and it was a friend’s birthday party. About five minutes into the dance I tripped on a table, hit my eye, and had to be rushed to the hospital. I still have the scar. As this was six years ago, and the dance would be the last time I saw my friends from Walsingham. I thought I should go.

It was a couples dance, so I had to ask someone. I had been best friends with Ally for two years, and since she probably wanted to go to, I decided to ask her. To make this clearer, this was NOT a date, I just wanted to go to the dance. I brought up the subject at lunch.

“So Ally, want to go to the dance with me?”

“Oh,” her faced widened into a mask of surprise. “Marc, I thought you were gay.”

After Ally told me she thought I was gay, there was a long silence. A silence neither of us has broken to this day.

I don’t know exactly when I first met Ally, I probably saw her at the beginning of eighth grade, but my first memory of her is from math class. The teacher was boring, and had a dull monotone voice that had the same effect as a pack of Lunesta. Ally and I might have been the only two awake. We were sitting next to each other, and I was about to go to sleep when I heard a voice.

“Dude, this class is soooooo boring!”

A bit of an understatement, but I replied “Yeah, I know. Doesn’t Mr. Jones remind you of that teacher from Ferris Bueler?”

She laughed. Whenever Ally laughed, she laughed loudly. It didn’t matter what the joke or situation was, her laugh was high pitched, and drew everyone’s attention. The teacher glared at us, and Ally brought her hands to her mouth, in a desperate attempt to stifle her laughter. Mr. Jones kept glaring at us, but Ally kept laughing. After Ally had finally quieted down, Mr. Jones turned away, and continued teaching to an unresponsive room.

We began passing notes, and started to establish a rapport. Every day in math class, we’d pass notes, and gradually stopped paying attention to Mr. Jones, I don’t know how, but we both got A’s in that stupid class. Ally was ridiculously smart, and some of it must have rubbed off on me.

Around this time, I was beginning to make friends and adjust to my new school. Moving from South Korea to America was hard for me, especially since I was really close to my group of friends at my old school. This was about a month, a month and a half into the new school year, and as I said, I was beginning to make friends. At lunch, I sat with Ben Isgur, (but we called him Bisgur because he hated it) and Conner, who, in truth, with his disturbing fascination with knives and guns, scared me a little.

At Walsingham, cliques were pretty well defined, and once a group had staked claim to a lunch table, it sat there. Thus it was with some surprise that I, Ben, and Conner found our table taken over by some jocks. Of course, they had every right to do this, sitting at other tables was encouraged by the faculty, but it was unwritten law that students never did what the faculty encouraged.

We looked for other tables, but none of them were empty. So we walked through the small, loud cafeteria, like headless chickens, looking for a table. It was then that Ally noticed me, and motioned for me and my friends to come over to their table. Ally was sitting with four other people: Fletcher, Katie, Simone (who we all hated, but she resisted all our hints to leave), and Melanie. We sat there, and that was our seat for the next two years.

Ally was one of those people that stood out. She was small, a head shorter than me, and was pretty in an unassuming way. She had shoulder length dark brown hair that changed to fire engine red halfway into our freshman year, a bad dye job she decided to keep. Her music and film taste were the complete opposite. I liked the Velvet Underground and Modest Mouse, obsessed about lyrics, and looked up obscure bands for challenging CDs. She had a mild crush on Justin Timberlake. My favorite director was Ingmar Bergman. Ally liked anything; as long as it was fun and cute. The only place our interests intersected was books. We had the same favorite book, (“The Grapes of Wrath”) and debated which author died too early (she said it was Oscar Wilde, I said it was J.D. Salinger since he was effectively dead, but Ally thought I was being an idiot). We both thought the Harry Potter books were overrated. We swapped books we had read, and turned each other on to books and authors we just had to read. She told me about Vonnegut and “Slaughterhouse Five,” I told her about Truman Capote and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Our friendship wasn’t all literature related. I have more anecdotes about Ally, myself, and the rest of the group than I can count. There was the time we made Adam (a nice guy, but as big as a fridge and about as smart) think there was a huge test at the end of the day. We even got a couple of the teachers to tell him there was. I remember how our lunch table conversations nearly always degenerated to insult competitions. (Don’t ask. You wouldn’t want to know, and I could write a piece twice as long as this one describing it) I remember how we tried to make Ally laugh when her parents were getting a divorce. I remember how I, Bisgur, Katie, and Melanie got Ally to break up with Rob, who we all agreed was bad news. There are more of these, and I remember most of them. Looking back on it, I realize how incredibly stupid I was to not appreciate it.

It’s idiotic that we haven’t talked because she thought I was gay. I mean, her assumption was pretty well founded; I did recommend “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” to her, and I can be a bit effeminate in my mannerisms. Sometimes I don’t have the slightest clue why we stopped talking. Was it just that she thought I was gay? Was it more than that? I don’t know. I assumed, and still assume, she was serious. If it was all just a very bad joke, then why didn’t she just tell me? I left the lunchroom after she said it, more pissed off than sad. There were still two, three weeks left in school. We didn’t have any more classes together that day, and we didn’t email each other after school. The next time I saw her was the next day, in math class. Where before we joked constantly, we just avoided each other. I remember her glancing at me, and she looked at me as if she had been betrayed, like I had violated an unspoken trust. I probably gave her the same look.

At lunch that day, we didn’t talk to each other, at least not directly. If I had anything to say, I asked Bisgur to say it. If she wanted to say anything, she borrowed Katie’s voice box. We spent the remaining two weeks of school like that. I spent the last two weeks of the school year, before I left Walsingham forever, not speaking to my best friend in the world. I didn’t even say goodbye. I don’t know about Ally, but I’m still pretty angry about that.