Day Twenty-eight - Papillon

The fifth grade, continued. That girl whose bits I partially saw, she was named Helena. And she was best friends with another classmate of ours, a tiny but ferocious girl called Sandra. Eventuallly, I came to give her my phone number, and though I was living in the city and staying there during the week at my grandparent's, I still went home during the weekends. And me and this girl, I don't know that we really got along very well : she could be very aggressive towards me, even to the point of physical confrontation, which ended up with her and a bunch of other girls ganging up on me to beat me up. But be that as it may, my home phone number indeed she had. And eventually she started calling me home around dinner time to bug me for money. See, she was from a very poor family - I never knew may details, but she was onf of the very many students in that school whose families lived almost exclusively from the welfare state, which meant that they didn't live very well at all. When she called, she wanted me to explicitly ask my dad for money - which he always refused. And trust me, many faults my parents no doubt had, but to those in need? They could be very generous. My mother did grocery shopping for a family who lived in the street near where she worked, and if anyone asked her for food, they would not go wanting. But they wouldn't give money away, no, not to anyone.

This year also marked my first true attempts at more meaningful friendships : there was a kid in my class called Carlos, he was loud and brash and for some reason I really wanted to make friends with him. If I remember it correctly, he was also a bit older than the rest of us, and he was smoking already, so he had all the makings of a bad influence. Still, for maybe a few weeks this kid Carlos tolerated my presence, and I mistook that for friendship. It all ended when one afternoon, out of the blue he headbutted me in front of a bunch of other kids, and left me in tears. There was another kid I met that year, he was in a different class than mine, but one lunch hour I went to a nearby mall to go check the toy store. Back then I was in full swing of my collecting G.I. Joe action figures, and he saw me there and struck a conversation with me. He knew me from school and it turned out that both he and his brother also collected the action figures. And yet, I wouldn't say that this was a real friendship. It was more of a communion of some mutual interests. 

One thing I will always remember about this school year was this teacher I had who smoked his pipe during class and stunk up the entire place. I've always disliked the smell of tobacco smoke - my parents smoke all the time - and pipe smoke I especially loathe.