My Best Enemy

My Best Enemy

I was an eggbeater in a former life. At least, it would seem so, because the role of an eggbeater is the only thing I’m able to do with any type of skill at all. For the longest time I was convinced that there could never be a talent that was mine, and it was a moment of unspeakable ecstasy and surprise when I realized I could bake. Not only bake, but bake well. In seventh grade I was placed in a cooking class with fourteen girls, and it was there that my prowess in the kitchen truly began to show. I could whip up unimaginable mixtures with unparalleled dexterity, and my creations were the smoothest, creamiest, most mouth-watering concoctions ever dreamed up by mankind. I was the unrivaled champion of all things edible, the pride of the classroom.

“Oh, Henry,” the girls would gush every time I created a new dish, “what did you make this time?” Yes, I was King, and times were good.

Then along came Ethan Ridesdale.

I knew old Ethan was trouble from the start. He walked in with that innocent, perfect grin plastered all over his perfect face. He was attractive and friendly and intelligent, and he had just the right blend of urbane confidence and easy-going manner to make him irresistibly popular; and he happened to be the newest addition to MY cooking class.

Even that wouldn’t have been so bad, if the guy hadn’t also turned out to be just as much of a magician in the kitchen as I credited myself to be, and without my klutziness. Before I knew it, all my loyal followers had turned, and were instead raving ceaselessly about “Ethan’s muffins,” “Ethan’s pies,” “Ethan’s revolutionary chocolate-raspberry streusel”. Ethan charged ahead into fame, and I was left behind in the remnants of my shattered empire, washed down the drain like so much leftover broccoli soup. It soon became clear that if my utter ruin was to be avoided, Ethan would have to go, and I would have to be the one to take him down. I convinced myself that my future depended on it, and it was therefore a noble and necessary course of action. Thus, I began to plot out ways to discredit my enemy.

My first plan was one of sabotage. How I ever convinced myself that I, the King of Klutz, could pull off a covert operation, I can’t say; Heaven knows I’ve witnessed myself in action more than enough times that I should have known better. However, I was supremely determined, and my success in slipping out of lunch, getting to the Home Ec. room unseen and finding it empty and dark may have encouraged me to a point of false confidence. Even more reassuring, there in plain view was Ethan’s flawlessly fashioned bowl of dough, sitting out to rise on the counter-top between Kitchens 1 and 2. I slithered into the room and scurried to the back, anticipating my plan with evil glee; a little vinegar ought to make quite a stimulating addition to Ethan’s mixture. I uncovered the bowl, sneering in disgust at how perfectly the dough had already begun to rise. Then I hoisted myself up on top of the counter to reach the upper cabinets and quickly located the bottle I was looking for.

I took a step backwards to swing the cabinet door shut, but my foot came down on Ethan’s bowl, sinking squishily into its contents and sliding out from under me. I flew backwards, arms flailing, and suddenly found myself hanging up-side down half-on and half-off the counter- top, my foot in Ethan’s bowl and my hands clutching desperately at two drawer handles, the only things holding my head off the floor. The bottle of vinegar rolled past my eyebrows, and then my inverted field of vision became filled with the head and shoulders of Ethan Ridesdale.

“Hi,” he said, after a pause. “I’m Ethan.”

“I know,” I gasped. “You’re the new guy.” His gaze shifted to the counter, then back to me.

“Your foot’s in my bread batter.”

“Um, yeah,” I stammered. “I, uh, had a little accident.” He raised an eyebrow incredulously, but to my extreme relief, let the matter pass.
“Would you like some help?”
“Certainly.” He helped me remove my foot from the bowl and get myself turned right-side up again. I then extracted myself from the situation as quickly as possible and made a hasty retreat from the room, dragging my spasming dignity behind me every step of the way.

I avoided all contact with Ethan for the next several days, still bruised from the disastrous results of my first attempt to remove the threat he posed. Yet, despite the humiliation that failure had caused, I could not ignore the way my own reputation was so utterly out-shined by his luster, and remained doggedly determined to try again. When the time came for the field trip to Mt. Frazier for the annual state carnival, it provided the opportunity I needed.
The get-up at Mt. Frazier was a typical fair; rides and prizes and cotton-candy and a twenty-foot semi-solid peanut butter sculpture of Abraham Lincoln. There was also the traditional pie-baking, pie-eating contest, in which the members of my cooking class were required to participate, and it was there that I plotted my next stratagem. In preparation I had brought along a container of two-hundred black ants, borrowed from my sister’s ant farm. At the table where the pies were laid out waiting for the contest to begin, I located the one I had seen Ethan carry from the bus area, a fluffy white Boston Creme. When no one was looking, I emptied the container of ants onto the pie and discreetly slipped away.
The time for judging neared and participants began to congregate into the contest area. I noted Ethan’s arrival and milled about inconspicuously, waiting to see how my plan would unfold. Finally the contestants were called to bring their pies before the judges, and as we all moved toward the table I heard someone say,
“Oh, Ethan, thanks for bringing my pie up for me – I wouldn’t have had time after setting up the tables.”
I glanced around wildly for the speaker and saw that it was Charlotte, one of the girls in my cooking class, and was suddenly filled with a horrible sense of uncertainty. Had the pie that I’d sabotaged been Ethan’s, or....uh-oh.
I saw Charlotte approach the table and pick up the Boston Creme, not yet aware of how it had changed. I started pushing through towards the table, hoping to still avoid disaster, but before I reached it there was a ghastly scream. The Boston Creme flew straight up, and not quite straight down, because it missed Charlotte and landed, instead, on me.
It only took me a second after the initial shock of being pied to realize that my hair was crawling – and not just my hair, but my face and ears and – ants!
I started flailing around like I was on fire, yelling and clawing at the sticky mess on my head. In my panic I crashed into those around me, causing them to drop their pies as well, and in the end wound up sitting on the ground with a chocolate-mousse dish added to the mixture on my head and a criss-cross-top peach in my lap. The ants still tickled but I ignored them, too distraught at how miserably this second plan had backfired. Now everyone, from the judges to the contestants, were staring in slack-jawed stupor as Charlotte helped me up, and the worst part of it was the look on Ethan’s innocent face. There was no anger, no disgust, no animosity; only a mix of pity and confusion that was unbearable. I glared at him from behind the Boston Creme and stomped off under my little black cloud.
On the way to the bathrooms I passed Abraham Lincoln, seated on his throne of peanut butter, and thought grimly to myself that there was one advantage to being a clumsy nobody: I could go to my grave with the assurance that no one would ever immortalize my image in semi-solid peanut butter.
I dunked my head under the bathroom sinks and began to rinse, while the issue of Ethan gnawed at my soul. I couldn’t foil him, and couldn’t frustrate him. I couldn’t even make him hate me. He was Superman.
After cleaning up as best I could, I realized it was nearly eleven o’ clock – the time set for the famous soap-box car race. Of all the events at the fair, the race was the single most anticipated one of all, and to miss that on top of everything else would only make the day worse. I rushed across the fair and up to the tippy-top of Mt. Frazier, where the race was set to begin. There was a large contingent of excited, babbling kids already gathered there, and lined up at the start of the track was a varied assortment of cars. I selected a blazing blue one for myself and stood by it, resolving to put Ethan out of my mind.
Then the unthinkable occurred. There were so many participants that everyone had to double up per car, and through some eerie twist of fate, I found myself paired with none other than Ethan himself.
I took the driver’s seat moodily, feeling maltreated, as Ethan climbed in beside me. I didn’t say a word. When the signal was given and the cars started rolling, I refused to look at him and stared straight ahead.
Ethan, however, was watching me, and there was no doubt that he could sense my tension. Finally he asked, “Did I do something I’m not aware of?”
I clenched my fingers on the steering wheel and feigned ignorance. “...What do you mean?”
“I was just wondering why you keep trying to prank me.”
I reddened with embarrassment, the truth of my actions exposed, and as a result of that embarrassment became uncharacteristically furious. “Why?” I yelped. “You mean you’re seriously unaware of the way you breezed in and completely took over everything that was once mine? For once in my life I thought I had actually found a talent I was capable of, you know, besides tying my shoes without getting a finger stuck in the knot – and then you had to come along and ruin everything! As soon as you arrived, nobody cared about me anymore. What was I supposed to do? Submit to being a loser for the rest of my life?”
“Uh...Henry-”
“I was desperate – but I should have known better. Everything I tried only backfired, and made everything worse than before!”
“Henry-
“And you! You won’t even hold it against me! You’re so perfect it’s disgusting!”
“Henry!”
“What!”
“Look out!”
I looked forward for the first time since the beginning of my outburst and saw the danger too late – a sharp curve in the track ahead, with nothing but a weather-beaten fence and a short grass-covered ledge beyond it. I tried to stop, to turn, but soap-box cars are not known for their anti-lock brakes or power steering, and so I diverted most of my attention to screaming as the car skidded past the turn and burst through the brittle wood fence. We soared out over the precipice, hit the steeply sloping ground once and bounced, becoming airborne again, and crashed down into the branches of an old dead tree that lay askew on the cliff side. The car had tilted as it fell, landing crookedly, and I had an odd hallucination of Ethan flying through the air upon impact. It was only after I heard him shouting and opened my eyes that I realized it was no hallucination.
The car had become ensnared at a harsh angle, the back end higher than the front, leaning slightly on the left side toward open space. The ground dropped away beneath us on that side, providing an unimpeded view of the fairgrounds laid out below. I would have found it kind of awe-inspiring on any other occasion, but at the moment the concept of death was weighing rather eminently on my brain. It was probably even worse for Ethan, who had been tossed out of the car completely and was hanging from the front.
“Henry!” he hollered again.
“Just – hold on!” I yelled back feebly. “I’ll...get you...somehow.” Every molecule in my body was petrified,, but I forced myself to move and reach out for Ethan across the front of the car. I was so scared my pulse was pounding in my fingertips, but I managed to grasp one of his hands and then the other, and started to pull. Pebbles tumbled away underneath us and I fought continuous surges of panic that flared up within me, focusing on getting Ethan out of his precarious position. The car rocked alarmingly as we fell back into our seats again, gradually subsiding into stillness, and we both sat there with our nerves short-circuiting, too intensely rattled to speak.
Just as I was beginning to feel blood flow through my veins again, there was a snap and a horrifying lurch and the right side of the car dropped several inches. There was a moment’s pause of extreme tension, and then a second snap, and suddenly the car was rolling free and careening down the very WRONG side of the mountain.
It was like an amusement park ride gone nightmarishly wrong. We barreled down a near-vertical slope, the only soap-box car ever to travel at twice the speed of sound. It was almost glorifying, but the ride itself wasn’t what bothered me. I was waiting for the tree, the rock, the briar-bottomed ravine to appear suddenly in our path and end our ride of glory in grisly, gruesome horror, making us tomorrow’s front page news.
But such an obstacle never came. Instead, we found ourselves racing toward a dip, followed by an abrupt piece of large, jutting rock that pointed to the sky like a natural ski slope.
I screamed.
We raced through the dip without dropping an ounce of speed and were jettisoned off the ledge like a blazing blue missile, soaring over the gaily-dressed fairgrounds with the wind in our hair and people on the ground staring up at us in wordless shock. I allowed myself a moment of exhilaration at being the driver of the only soap-box car ever to fly, and then – then we reached the crest of our upward arc. Slowly and steadily the nose of the car tilted downward, and gravity took hold once more. Doom was imminent.
The last thing I saw before squeezing my eyes shut and succumbing to my fate was Abraham Lincoln.

Unbelievably, my prediction proved true – we did make the front page. The next morning all the newspapers had the same picture: Ethan and I and our blazing blue soap-box car, buried to the back wheels in Abraham Lincoln’s semi-solid peanut butter lap. The gooey substance absorbed the impact of our crash and allowed us to walk away virtually unharmed, though it took a little time getting us unstuck.
At first the sculptor of the ruined masterpiece was upset at us for wrecking his work, but the incident earned him publicity and an entire side article on the subject of his sculptures, so he didn’t complain for long.
As for Ethan and me – well, I like to say we called a truce. Actually, I had decided to forget my spiteful envy, content to slip back into the shadowed corners of life and let Ethan have the spotlight. I didn’t expect him to ever interact with me again, but he surprised me. Back at school Monday morning I was spending my study hall in the Home-Ec. Room, working to perfect my pudding recipes, when Ethan arrived. He walked in with a purposeful stride, but I only glanced at him and concentrated on stirring.
He sat and watched me for a moment, then said, “I wanted to find out if you’ve forgiven me.”
I looked up in surprise. “Forgiven you? But you didn’t do anything.”
“Not purposely, no. But I made you feel worthless, and for that I’m regretful.”
I sighed. “Well, you won’t have to worry about me haunting you anymore. I’ve given up jealousy. It’s too dangerous. I nearly cracked my head open by stepping into your bowl of dough, got repeatedly pied and nearly eaten alive by my own sister’s ants, and almost killed myself flying off a cliff into a giant chunk of peanut butter shaped like the Lincoln memorial. Good grief, if I ever tried it again I’d probably end up drowning myself in molasses, or-”
Suddenly Ethan erupted into a burst of insane laughter. I froze, stunned, and stared at him in bewilderment.
“What?”
“You!” he exclaimed mirthfully. “-You’re so funny!”
He rose from his chair to dip a finger in my bowl, licking it sumptuously. “-And you make really good pudding.” He shook his head. “I’ll tell you, Henry, you amaze me.”
“I do?”
“Absolutely. You saved my life, after all. Not everyone would have been able to do what you did.”
“Better be careful,” I warned, “or you’ll make me start to like you.”
He laughed again, and I took a couple of bowls and began scooping out pudding for two.

For the short time that we were together after that, Ethan and I developed a solid friendship. After only a year his family moved again, and I was left with the memory of him and the imprint he had made on me. I think in some strange way he helped me realize my own true value, something which I didn’t realize until much later. I still find it ironic that my biggest rival became my greatest ally, and in that sense I can say he was the best enemy I ever had.