Chapter Text
Eugene
It was late November 1935, only a few weeks after I had turned twelve. I’d gone to Sidney Phillip’s house that evening for dinner and to see his new model aeroplane, and had been about halfway home when I’d fallen. It always got dark early around this time of year. Sidney’s father worked late, and his mother couldn’t drive, so I had to walk home, but I lived close by, and it was a safe neighbourhood, so no one ever batted an eye.
Back then I had always worn shorts regardless of the season - I had been ignorant of the cold, as many boys are at that age. But I regretted the decision not to wear trousers the moment I tripped, scraping my right knee to pieces. There were hardly ever any cars around at this time, so I had had no choice but to continue limping along the side of the road, a thin line of scarlet blood dribbling down my shin and staining the rim of my sock.
Street lamps were sparse out here, and at this time of night always crowded with irritable little moths that fluttered past my face and made me flinch and stumble. I had made for a sorry sight that night, hobbling painfully down the empty road towards home, and would’ve passed by the next house without a thought as I had all the others, had it not been for a voice calling out to me.
“You look dreadful,” A little Alabaman accent rang from the porch at the top of the driveway. I faltered, turning to face the girl who had spoken, her face bathed in golden light from the porchlight, yellow pigtails resting on her shoulders, a book in her hands. I knew Anna March - our mothers had been friends for as long as I remembered - but she’d never uttered a word to me before now.
I had been fully aware of the state I was in, but as soon as it was pointed out to me, I became suddenly defensive. “I’m fine, it’s barely a scratch.”
“You’re limpin’ like a dog that got hit by a car,” Anna pointed out.
“Well,” I started awkwardly, gradually building confidence as I went on. “Fine or not, it’s not your business either way.”
She had raised her brow then, in a way that made me feel judged. It was a look I would grow to know well
I hesitated at the end of the driveway for a moment before speaking up again. “Is your brother Charlie in?”
Charlie was the youngest of Anna’s brothers, only eleven months her senior, which had provided Mrs March with a very uncomfortable year and a half, and made her swear off ever having children again. By now Anna had gone back to her book, but replied nonetheless. “Yeah, he’s upstairs.”
I briefly considered this. “Can I say hi?”
She looked over at me, peering at my bloody knee, which I had been avoiding putting pressure on by awkwardly hovering on one leg. “You can’t come in, you’re gonsta get blood on the carpet. It’s new.” I could see through the window behind her when she leant forward - her father’s silhouette sat with his back to us, her mother visible in the sitting room, seemingly admiring one of her crystal wine glasses.
“‘Gonsta’ isn’t a word,” I replied. Her brow creased in a look half indignant, half embarrassed. I regretted it almost instantly upon realising this would not help my case. “Sorry. Could you help me out?”
Anna thought this over for a moment before slamming her book shut and sliding off the porch railing. “Mama!” She called. “Eugene Sledge is out here, he’s bleedin’ all over himself!”
“Oh, deary me, come up here Eugene,” Mrs March huffed, untying her apron hastily as she made her way to the door. “Come on in, sweetheart, take a seat at the table. Anna, honey, can you go fetch Charlie?”
Anna shrugged nonchalantly, and before I could say another word to her, she ducked inside in a flurry of blonde, skirt rippling around her legs as she disappeared up the stairs.
-
It was a long time after that before we ever really spoke to each other again. We were in the same year at school, but classes had been divided by gender, so I usually only saw Anna when either Sidney or I attempted to make awkward conversation with Mary Houston - a habit that neither of us dropped for several years, and in turn caused us much embarrassment in our youth.
I’d always liked her brothers. She had four in total - Charlie, John, Bobby and Richard. The March brothers were distinctly cool - they had a rich dad, a pretty mom, they wore expensive clothes and were good at sports, and were the kind of boys who could have a laugh and mess around without ever getting into any real trouble. The boys were well-liked for who they were, and when I had first met her I had naively thought that Anna was only interesting to me by association. She was a gateway to the boys I wanted to be friends with and the girl I fancied, nothing more.
Oh, how wrong I had been.
It was late July of the following year - only a few days away from Anna’s twelfth birthday - when the March family invited my parents and I over for dinner. My mother had brought her a necklace as a gift - a delicate gold chain with a single teardrop pearl - and I routinely caught her admiring herself in the hallway mirror through the doorway over my shoulder.
As dinner progressed, it became more and more obvious that the get-together was no longer about her. My father asked her brothers all about their school lives - their favourite subjects, how many games Richard had won in the last football season, how many Bobby expected to win next time. My mother was deep in conversation with Anna’s parents, discussing wine with her mother and the newspaper business with her father. It didn’t seem fair to me. My last birthday had been all about me from start to finish, every celebration showering me with attention. But now no one even seemed to notice when Anna finished her dinner and sat there in silence, fiddling with her new necklace as she waited for everyone else.
“So,” I piped up loudly, other conversations faltering at the sudden intrusion, her attention pulled to me with wide eyes, as if it surprised her that anyone had bothered speak to her. I faltered for a moment, realising that I’d spoken up without deciding what it was I was actually going to say. “Sidney says you were top of your class at the end of this year.”
Anna’s cheeks began to flush pink, and her hand fell from her necklace to her lap as she straightened her posture. “Um, yeah, I was the only one to get a hundred on my math test in June,” She began to smile. “Oh! And I got a 95 on the reading test.”
“Good job, Annie,” Her brother Joseph beamed from the other end of the table. Everyone else took it as a cue then to congratulate her, and by the time dessert was served she seemed as merry as ever. I smiled.
When everyone finished and our plates were taken away, our parents stayed sat in the dining hall, drinking, talking and smoking, and the March brothers all went their separate ways, Richard heading out to visit his girlfriend. I was about to follow Charlie up to his room when I caught sight of Anna - laying on her stomach beside the burning hearth, her ankles crossed over and swinging back and forth in the air, her hair hanging in her face as she turned to the next page of her book. There’s something so unique about being a young boy and realising a girl you’d never noticed in such a way before is actually pretty special. I don’t think such descriptors actually came to me at the time, but I felt it even if I didn’t think it. It was as if some invisible force was dragging me into the sitting room, and I threw myself back into the nearest armchair, bouncing slightly upon the springs when she glanced up at me, tugging her hair away from her face with one hand.
Her eyes were a nice green, not as bright as they are now, and she peered at me expectantly, seemingly confused at my sudden appearance. “Happy birthday,” I said dumbly.
“’S'not yet,” Anna shrugged. “Three days to go, but thanks anyway. The necklace is real pretty, you should tell your Mama I said so.”
I nodded absently for a moment. I barely knew Anna yet, but by this time she was already probably the girl I’d spoken to the most, and I was still at that age where talking to a girl in any context - friendly or not - was a rather nerve-wracking affair.
“Hey, uh, me and Sidney Phillips are gonna go to the pictures on Thursday, d'you wanna come? You know Sidney?”
A smile slowly made its way across her face. “Yeah, I know Sidney. Thursday sounds good, I’ll walk down to your house. Should I bring Mary?”
“I- uh - I guess you can, sure,” I stammered, half surprised that she’d even accepted my offer, half wary of the prospect of going to the movies with Mary Houston, and trying to play off both of these feelings at once.
“Alright,” Anna grinned. “See ya Thursday.”
I don’t remember much of the day we went to the pictures - the movie we saw wasn’t very good, and I spent half the time trying not to appear too awkward whilst sitting beside Mary, as Anna whispered to Sidney on her other side. But I do remember coming out of it and thinking of her with much greater esteem than I had before. I had found a friend in Anna March, a good friend indeed.
-
Anna
In the Spring of 1938, my father died. He had been driving home from his office one night, and in the dark had accidentally flipped his car against the guardrail on the side of the road. He was dead before the police arrived on the scene. The situation was devastating, but we were safe. The inheritance money was no small sum, and both Bobby and Richard both had jobs by then, although Richard was thinking of getting married. Nevertheless, our lifestyle was not diminished by his passing, even if my mother was. She never dealt with grief well, even back then, and left the house less and less often in the subsequent months.
That winter, however, saw my very first white Christmas at the age of fourteen, with snow deeper than anything I’d ever seen before in Alabama. It happened almost overnight, and I was awoken one morning in mid-December by a snowball, which splattered across my bedroom window with a mighty thud. I had thrown off my covers then and ran to the window, throwing it open and squinting as the freezing air hit my face and the morning sun reflected upon the blanket of snow outside, effectively blinding me.
“It’s eight in the morning!” I yelled out into the yard, and by the time my eyes adjusted, Eugene and Sidney were both standing below, grinning up at me.
“Dunno how long the snow’s gonna last, you gotta come out before it melts!” Eugene called as Sidney balled up another fistful of snow. “Otherwise Sid’s gonna have to chuck another one up there, and it’ll probably hit your face.”
“Alright, alright, I’m comin’, I’m comin’! Can I at least have breakfast?”
“Not unless we can have some,” Sidney chirped.
“Jesus,” I muttered. “Alright, fine, just… leave your boots out on the porch.”
My brothers and I - along with Eugene and Sid - wolfed down plates of bacon and pancakes, and by the time I was dressed, I still had a slice of warm buttered toast hanging out of my mouth as I bolted out the door.
I dressed in one of my mother’s winter coats, the fur collar reaching up to my chin, with a matching wool hat and mittens, and within five minutes my fingers were numb and my nose was red with the cold. But I didn’t mind. Even when Charlie pushed me face-first into a snowbank, or when I lost my hat halfway through the proceedings, I didn’t really mind. I was with friends, and I was having fun.
“I swear, I’m gonna get you!” I yelled to Sidney, creating a mighty snowball in my hands, then squealing as Eugene pelted my back with one of his, causing me to accidentally drop it. I let out a cry of rage, before tackling him, making us both collapse onto one of the neighbour’s snowmen as Sid stood back and cackled. I’d only paused for a second, but something about Eugene’s red face, his cheeks creased with a grin and his hair full of snow, had made everything stop for the briefest of moments. I let out a huff of air, creating a cloud of fog between us, before pushing myself up off the ground with a chuckle.
A little while after lunch, I decided to head over to Mary’s house alone, the snow crunching loudly into perfect footprints beneath me, my scarf flapping wildly in the cold wind. Some snow had gotten stuck in my boot earlier that day, and by that point, it had melted through my wool socks and chilled me to the bone, but Mary’s house always came with the promise of a warm fire and a cup of hot cocoa.
I worry sometimes in my writing of this story that Mary’s role in my life goes by unappreciated. This story isn’t about my friendship with her, but back then my whole life was, really. She was my favourite person in the world - the person I trusted more than anyone else, the person I loved as if she were my own sister. It truly felt like she was. Neither Eugene nor Sidney ever caught on back then, but when we first became friends, I knew they were using me to get through to her. Maybe it hurt a little back then, but she had that effect on people. She’d been gorgeous her whole life - she was smart, funny, kind - and next to her I was plain. But Mary was the first person in my life who made me okay with that. I never had a friend I loved so much as her. I would choose Mary over anyone else, every time.
Her mother always let me in without question, and I quietly sat down on the sitting room floor, stripping off my boots to bare my feet before the hearth, the flames drying my sodden socks. A series of hurried thuds came pattering down from the stairs and Mary swept into the room, smiling cheerily, her cheeks still pink from having been outside earlier that day. She flopped into the nearest armchair, fiddling with the hem of her cardigan sleeve.
“I saw Eugene and Sidney go past on the way up to your place before breakfast,” Mary grinned.
“Yeah,” I huffed. “They woke me up with a snowball to the window.”
“They like you,” She sang, grinning teasingly as her mother came to place two cups of hot cocoa on the coffee table.
I reached for my mug. “Oh, they like you, they’re absolutely smitten.”
Mary shrugged. “Yeah, I know.”
I laughed then, almost snorting cocoa up my nose. She never cared what other people thought of her. That was why I loved her so.
-
Eugene
I was sixteen the day of my first school dance in June of 1940. Sidney and I headed over to Anna’s house before it began, having been promised a lift from her eldest brother, Richard. The two of us sat awkwardly on the couch downstairs for almost twenty minutes, listening to the muffled sounds of teenage girls chattering away as they readied themselves upstairs. Anna and Mary weren’t the only girls there - there was Penelope Bright (a small redheaded girl I always found rather irritating), and Katherine Murphy (whom I only recently discovered had been harbouring a crush on me at the time, but is now married and living in Pennsylvania), and in the downstairs bathroom Grace Andre was finishing her makeup as she hummed along to the radio playing in the kitchen.
“Why does it take them so long?” I mused to myself.
Sid shrugged. “Pretty sure girls are just like that.” I nodded. Sidney was in the year below us at school, but since neither of us had any success with women, he was my plus one for the night.
I was about to speak again when a yelp came from upstairs, shrill and irritated, shortly followed by a few muffled yells that seemed to come from Mary. Sidney looked over at me, his face contorted in confusion and concern. “Should we-?”
At that moment a vicious rumbling shook the ceiling above us, and a second later Anna appeared at the top of the stairs - her hair and makeup done, but still not changed into her dress - closely followed by Mary, who appeared in a similar fashion. Anna ran down the stairs as fast she could, squealing with Mary on her tail, their hands hovering over the bannister should they happen to trip on their way down. When she reached the bottom, Anna darted left, sprinting right across in front of me towards one of the side doors that had been propped open due to the heat, bolting straight out into the dimly lit garden, Mary scrambling to grab at her skirts behind her.
Sidney and I leant forward in our seats, quietly watching the scene unfold, neither of us knowing enough about what was actually happening to make a comment. The chaos only lasted a few seconds, ending when Mary finally caught up, seizing Anna by the waist in a half-accidental tackle that sent them both tumbling over into the grass. “The hell-?” Grace’s voice came from the hall where she’d watched everything play out, her lipstick in one hand, a curler still pinned into her fringe.
“Anna accidentally broke Mary’s pearls,” Penelope’s voice rang dully from the top of the stairs. “It’s not really her fault though, they were really old.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it, I have plenty for her to borrow,” Mrs March tutted as she watched Anna and Mary compose themselves outside, her expression contorted in a scornful frown. “Anna Louise March, if there are grass stains on that skirt you’re cleaning them yourself, young lady! I’ll tell the maid!”
“Yes, Mama!” Anna called, and even in the dark I could tell she was trying not to laugh, could picture the way her jaw clenched the way it did when she restrained a chuckle.
Anna’s dress had been simple - knee-length, made of dark green velvet. Green has always been her colour, it suits her marvellously. Mary’s was longer, pale pink with puffed sleeves and a bunch of false flowers at the waist. Ten years later she would recall it to me as being tacky, but I had been a sixteen-year-old boy back then, and crushes tended to outlast a tacky dress.
I struggle to look back on that night without wanting to kick myself. Mary was always bound to be a hit that night, and she was - within five minutes of arriving she’d received enough requests for a dance that she practically had a waitlist, and danced with a different boy for each and every song. By the time I’d worked up the courage to ask her myself the night was halfway over, and she’d had too many requests already, so had to refuse me as gently and kindly as possible.
It was only after my rejection that I danced with Anna - I offered myself up for only one song, during which I idiotically confessed that I was only dancing with her because I could not with Mary, which soured the mood instantly. She was asked to dance by one other boy, who got distracted by one of his friends halfway through the dance and never came back. I can’t think about that night without picturing Anna standing alone at the side of the dancefloor, hands clasped shyly at her front, as I drank punch with Sidney on the other side of the room like a complete ass.
I don’t know how Anna never resented me for that night. I suppose she was just a better person than I was. Better than I deserved, anyway.
Anna
I can’t remember being angry for the way I was neglected that night, left to stand alone as I watched my girlfriends find themselves dance partners and Eugene and Sid chat to each other without me. Someone is always going to be that girl. I wasn’t pretty enough to keep up with the girls, and I wasn’t forward enough to give the boys any impression that I didn’t enjoy being left alone like that. I think I cried when I got home that night - when all of my friends had headed home, when my mother and brothers had gone to bed. It doesn’t make me sad anymore, though. That kind of sadness is for people who care about what others think of them.
I gave up on that kind of sadness a long time ago.