from my creative writing class: 500 words of fiction i wrote....

Lola looked down at her new shoes under the restaurant table, beneath the neatly folded napkin in her lap, over her knees itching through wool tights, down to her scuffed left toe. She had been stood up. How embarrassing.

The last time Lola had inspected her feet out of embarrassment, she had been “the new girl,” at a new school. She had been in second grade. The night before, she was so excited that she picked out her clothes and double-checked the contents of her lunchbox. Her brother had been so excited that he ran into the wall.

But school was lonely. If you don’t have a best friend by age 4 in a small town, you can safely call yourself a loser. When Lola took her cold wooden seat in Miss Lindsey’s second grade class, everyone who was anyone already had a BFF. The girls already knew which boys to chase, and everyone already knew what they were doing at recess the way some adults book their Saturday nights months in advance.

After lunch, Lola eyed the chilly playground: athletic girls chasing athletic boys; clumpy sandbox with two or three undesirables; shy but smart girls on the swings; dirty boys digging in the fudgy ground. Rules were posted by the door: NO running on pavement, NO pushing OR shoving, NO horseplay. Two steely-eyed middle aged women surveyed the yard for infractions. She touched her cold hands to warm cheeks, looked at her feet, and approached the shy smart girls first. Then the athletic girls; once the undesirables; almost once the dirty boys. Every recess for a week, Lola’s plan went like this:

Step 1: Make Contact. Awkwardly insert herself into a new group of second graders.
Step 2: Establish credibility. Talk about homework.
Step 3: Invest in the relationship. Hang out with them for 15 minutes. Conversation topics may include: homework (again), the weather, pets. Go with the flow, she reminded herself.
Step 4: Before the bell rings, seal the deal. “Do you want to be my friend?” She asked, urgently. Each time, her breath was a cloud of frosty desperation.

It was important to take them by surprise, she learned. When she finally popped the question, hardly anyone ever said “no,” more out of shock than real agreement. It was also important to keep moving. They might pick up and leave the swings, so she had to be fearless in her pursuit of friendship. Lola learned how to hang upside-down on the monkey bars, to climb to the top of Joe’s Rock and balance on one foot, to catch the boys careening around the yard. She bounced from group to group collecting verbal contracts for friendship the way all kids collect things that they value – greedily and without an eye for detail or long-term planning. Most of them were non-binding. You can ask someone to be your friend but you can’t make them play with you.

She learned that one the hard way, twice. You can plan a date with someone but you can’t make them show up, she thought. Or call to say they can’t make it. Or even freaking text to say that they’re lying in a ditch somewhere underneath something heavy, preventing them from getting to the restaurant, where you sit, like a loser, with your new shoes and your goody-goody lap napkin. Lola looked up. She touched her cold hands to warm cheeks, and moved toward the bar.