Learn the Hard Way

by Meriadoc
 
 
 

It’s snowing again.

Flakes of snow with intricate patterns are visible through the misted window. It looks lovely outside, and I feel an urge to go
there and ‘be young again’, as my mother called it. I consider it, knowing that playing in the snow would bring back plenty of
bittersweet memories. But I wave it away and slip on my boots, a jacket, a wool scarf, and a single, faded, slightly small, green
mitten.

I step out of the door and walk in the chilly winter snow. I can feel the spongy white-as-a-swan’s-wing material squish under
my heavy boots. I put my hands in my pockets and look back at the log cabin, walking the path backwards. It’s a delightful
scene, the house looking like the frosted gingerbread houses she used to make, complete with twinkling Christmas lights and an
enormous trimmed tree at the side. It was the kind of setting one would see at the back of a December postcard, lacking only
the words ‘Wish You Were Here’ stamped in luminescent letters across the background.

I walk the normal way again. I can see a small group of pink-faced children, all bundled in scarves and muffs, flinging snow balls
at one another from behind unstable-looking snow forts.

I was right – going out here did bring memories.
 
 

~It was the first snow of the season, and the kids who lived in the school, and those who were staying home for Christmas
break in the nearby towns (which I was), set out to the large field beside the building, to enjoy the snowy grace. A group of girls
from school, the most popular one, are situated in the field when the boys and I get there. As they look our way, they start
giggling immediately and throwing fresh snowballs. The other guys joined them, and pretty soon they are building forts with the
newly fallen snow. I hang back to watch them. I relished times like these, when everyone could just mingle with everyone else
and we actually enjoy it.

Someone else is doing the same. Hanging back and relishing the moment, I mean. It’s her. She’s hugging her body, visibly cold.
From where I am I can see a bit of her face, and it’s pink with the wintry weather. Her hair flutters lazily by her wrapped
shoulders in the light wind.

I don’t know how I know it, but from the way she’s standing I can sense she is forlorn. She is staring distractedly at her friends.

I feel an urge to make her smile. I’m not used to seeing her sad, because the emotions her eyes and face usually portrayed were
pretended annoyance (which I, from mornings spent arguing with her, always register as nervousness) and glee. I get an idea,
and drop to the ground to make a snowball to throw at her.

When it hits her back, she falls face-forward to the snow. Strange, I think, usually she’s on her ground and ready for anything.
She seems very, very distracted. I feel sorry that I may have hurt her, and that I should be the one to break her concentration.
But I wave it away.

She lies on the ground for a few seconds. Then, as if remembering where she was and what just happened, stands up in that
bird-like way of hers. As she turns around to look for the criminal, I strike a cocky pose. I didn’t want her to think anything was
wrong; we always behaved this way towards each other, smug and teasing, both acting to ‘hide’ what each was really like, but
somehow showing our real selves in the process.

Her face registered faint surprise. I scrutinize her face, trying to see a semblance of something amiss, but I couldn’t read her
emotions through her eyes in the distance. There is snow in her hair and on her wool cap and eyelashes. She blinks, her
expression blank except for a small blush, which starts to slowly appear above her cheekbones. Then, as if coming to her
senses and thinking I expected her to retaliate (which I do) she bends over and starts to roll a snow ball to hit me with.

While she was bent over, her curtain of smooth hair covered her face. She took longer than usual to make a snowball, still in her
weird trance. I wait, tapping my foot against the ground. I’ve seen her in a snow fight before, and she fought like hell then,
knocking out everyone whose snowball made contact with her. She’s being odd, really.

When she has formed a snowball half the size of her head and looked about to stand up, I get ready to throw my clump of snow
(it was already partly melted from the waiting). She, seeing this, raises her hand to throw hers.

They meet the air at the same time, and collided, spraying us and the already white ground with bits of ice. Like the snowballs
our eyes meet. When she smiles, I laugh and head towards her.

Her face is still pink from the cold. At least, I think it’s because of the cold. I notice her hands, and hold them up. They were
clammy and pink and some parts were turning blue with the chill.

By instinct – I’m not really thinking – I drop her hands and slip my mittens out of mine. This is my favorite pair, green and warm
and hand-knitted by my mother for this winter. I slip her shaking hands into them. She smiles and looks down at them. Taking
advantage of her inattentiveness, I drop to the snow and hit her with a clump of snow.

This time, to my relief, she smiles and laughs. That impish glint is back in her eyes. Thinking she’s back to normal, I run away,
feigning fright of her well-known aggressiveness. She hurls one plod at me and I fall to the ground in surprise like she did; only
my back was the part getting soaked in the lightly melted ice.

She runs over to help me. She doesn’t look sorry, but is widely grinning. She offers a hand and I take it and grin too. She closes
her own mouth, I don’t know why. Then she looks at my hands. I observe they’re blue. Noticing this, she takes off the left
mitten and slips my hand into it in a sisterly fashion.

I shudder; the air has suddenly grown much chillier. We look behind her and see our friends are gone. She follows them (she
lives that way), without so much as a good-bye. But it’s OK, because that’s not how we treat each other.

Following her lead, I turn wordlessly away. I head home, which is opposite of where hers is. Suddenly I hear my name, and I
turn around to see her calling me, holding up my green mitten. She motions as if asking whether she should throw it, but the
distance is too great, and we are both in a hurry to get home because of the cold. I yell at her:

‘Just give it back to me some other time.’

She calls back, ‘OK’, nods, waves, and hurries off to her friends, going as fast as her legs would take her.~
 
 

Our last moment of talking.

OK, so not really, it wasn’t our last moment of speech, or even acknowledgement (for a few months afterward we still talked,
but only when irrevocably necessary in classes), but it was the last casual, real one. All because someone had babbled and said
I had a crush on her. I think. I often heard kids saying she liked me, but I had thought, at the time, that it couldn’t be true.

Even when we weren’t talking, and it was almost illegal for me to be seen with her, I always watched her from afar. From our
separate lunch tables I could see her propping her book up against the milk jug (I remember she hated milk) and read, twirling a
strand of hair in her fingers as she concentrated on her tome. She had such a lovely voice that she was sometimes asked to sing
onstage with her pals, and I would be her most avid listener. And I would snicker surreptitiously at the rude remarks I
overheard regularly that she would make about our Professor, enjoying every minute of her critique.

But still, it wasn’t the same.

Before those excruciating months of refusing to acknowledge one another, and fear of walking in the hallways and seeing each
other, I had looked on her, not really as a friend, as it was at the time in some sense ‘forbidden’, but someone to talk to behind
the teacher’s back. Someone to tell a secret, even if it was something about her best friends, some of which I liked-liked, and
knowing she wouldn’t laugh or tattle. Someone to advise when you feel your help isn’t worth anything to others. Someone to
ask what’s right or wrong, as she had the most just mind I had ever seen. Someone to ask for the right word to use when I
can’t find it by myself and am too lazy to consult the dictionary. Someone to go to when I needed help with girls, when I hadn’t
yet realized she was one.

But a while after our winter exploits, I eventually did. She was a girl. I didn’t know what to make of the discovery, and all I
knew was I didn’t know how I felt. I was confused.

I remember once when she got mad at me, before the horrendous days of the Silent Treatment. I had said something, a remark,
when she had her hand in the air and the teacher didn’t call on her. She sat right in front of me and I could hear her grumbling. I
mumbled under my breath something about her being smart enough, and – my mistake – she had heard me. But even then I
didn’t think she’d get so mad, as people constantly teased her about that anyway, but she did get angry. And hurt, her eyes told
me. She turned around in her seat and refused to talk to me for the next week.

Lonesome seven days, those were. No one to ask for homemade cookies and to lend spare pencils to. When I began to miss
her company I decided to apologize, even though I knew I hadn’t meant to offend her in any way.

That day, I was reciting an answer in response to the teacher’s question. When I was almost done with the response I
accidentally mispronounced a word. As I sat down in my seat she turned to look at me and hissed the right diction of the said
term. She had a tendency of doing that. Then she realized whom she had just spoken to and her eyes widened. She turned
swiftly in her seat and sat stiff. It’s now or never, I remember thinking. So I reached across my desk for the back of her chair,
shook it slightly, and whispered, so the teacher couldn’t hear, an apology. Now that I think about it, it sounded quite pathetic.
But I didn’t care much at the time. Before I’d even finished she’d waved it off, as if to keep herself from getting a reprimand
from the Professor, and hissed ‘It’s OK’ through her teeth. I grinned at her, waiting for her to smile back. It took a few seconds
for her to get the scowl off her face and smile. I felt my shoulders sag in relief, and fervently hoped she hadn’t noticed.

Later, when she was checking an essay I wrote, she told me that she had thought I had said something about her friend, whom
was left to answer that question a week from then, being smarter. I assured her I hadn’t, and she apologized as well. As she
hurried off, I heard her whisper something to herself, something I wasn’t meant to hear:

‘It’s as if I haven’t enough reasons to be envious of them.’

My heart went out to her. I know from the I-wish-I-could-be-them glances she sometimes shot their way that she was
immensely jealous of her friends. I don’t know why she should be, because I thought she was a very good person already, but
she was anyway. But even though she was envious, she never resented those girls for anything. She loved them like nobody’s
business, though thinking all the time that they were prettier and nicer and essentially better.

I privately disagree. After ten years I can still remember her face. She had a pleasant countenance, her eyes being the sort of
‘point of concentration’. She had a band of freckles across her nose, from the tip of which her reading glasses (those she used
nearly every moment of her life, as she was always reading) usually are balanced, in a way that makes you want to push it
further up. Her little imperfections made her really… I don’t know. It’s indescribable. It’s like she’s perfect because she isn’t
perfect. It’s strange, really.

I recall a bit of an encounter in the snowy grounds before Christmas. I was building a snowman, unaware that someone was
looking at me. I looked up, and I dropped the snow I was holding in my left hand. It was she, of course. She was wearing a
heavy jacket, huge boots, and my green mitten on her right hand. A warm feeling came over my stomach at the sight of it, seeing
she had kept it with her for the past year and had even brought it along. We stared at each other for a few seconds, unable to
look away. But then she did. Then she ran away.

I tried to call her name to say good-bye and to ask for my mitten, but no sound loud enough would come out.  I could only
whisper her name in pure remorse.

Thoughts of never seeing her again, and never having another chance to rekindle our friendship, or whatever it had been, again,
replaced thoughts of my bright green mitten.

I know my last memory of her – it was the time she was leaving the school for that all-girls’ one up north, and I was heading for
Christmas vacation at home. I knew she was going away because word traveled fast at that school (and because I was always
desperate for little snippets of her life away from me). I don’t think she knew I was standing there, outside the glass window, for
if she did, she wouldn’t have cried in her compartment. She never cried around me unless it was for show, and this one wasn’t.
I didn’t know what she was crying about, but I suspected it was because of her leaving. I felt a pang of sadness in my chest,
remembering I would never get to watch her read books during lunchtimes, or hear her lovely voice sing onstage, or overhear
her make a snide remark about our meanest professor, ever, ever again. I contemplated going inside her compartment and
apologizing for whatever it was I’d done to keep her away, and telling her good-bye, or I’ll-miss-you, because I certainly
would –

And telling her I loved her.

But I couldn’t. I was afraid of rejection, I guess. Or maybe I was afraid she was mad at me for something I did. Or maybe it’s
because she was known for hating pity, especially from boys. Or maybe I was just chicken. Whatever it was, because of it, I
never got to say good-bye.

I sigh wearily and look at the kids on top of the hill. Their snow forts were down and everyone was knocking everyone out. I
walk back to the log cabin I’d rented for the winter.

I can only wonder now what would have happened if I had gone inside her compartment to comfort her, even though I know it
wouldn’t do any good, and wouldn’t change a thing. And I could hope that, if I ever see her again, I would have the courage to
tell her I was sorry I never bid her farewell, and that I missed her every day of my existence, and the will to say I loved her like
nobody’s business…

And the voice to ask for my glove back.
 
 
 

Oooh, very short and fluffy. If they had just told each other… Well anyway, this was just my take on what the guy could be
thinking if he did like her. Don’t look at me like that, Remmi…  ~Same drill – it’s not really HP, but if you slip in names it could
be. It’s just so hard to come up with a romance fic without upsetting any `shipper… ~I was surprised that my other PoV fic
was so well received, since I thought no names were confusing, and everything was fluffy, and all that stuff. So I wrote another
one. I’ll just remind you that this is from a boy’s point of view, so a few things, like how he remembers stuff, could be a bit
different. And I’m afraid all my eloquence was kind of poured into that other fic, so this one may have sounded a tad stupid.
And sorry if the years confused anyone: I put in ‘after 10 years’ in Never Took a Chance and ‘after five years’ in here. Oh, and
if you’re wondering, that fight with the wrong-pronunciation thing at the end really did happen. ::grins foolishly:: It was so silly I
wanted to put it here.

Note to those waiting for chapter two’s of my other series: De Rerum Natura is almost wholly written, but I’m hesitant as to
whether I should put it up yet. And A Way Words two is on the way, do wait.

Thank you, thank you for those who read and reviewed ‘Never Took a Chance’. I was only writing it to let others have a look
at what unrequited love was like, and also to rid myself of another surge of depression coming my way.

And I want to console Remmirath – don’t worry, Gin, I don’t really feel that way, you know, that insecure, in the other fic, and
if I ever did it wasn’t your fault. And I don’t think I’m head-over-heels on love with old Pasia. It just seemed a good idea for a
ficcie.

~Schnoogles, from the author who was just proclaimed 115% obsessed with Harry Potter,

Meriadoc