P

Kindergarten, the little girl looked up at the woman who would be her teacher and wondered what it would be like. Her family had moved here in time to have Thanksgiving dinner in their new home and celebrate her fifth birthday. They had come here so she could be in Kindergarten, because there wasn’t one in their old town.

Her mother left and the teacher took her to a table where other children were painting with bright red paint on huge sheets of paper. Bricks, the teacher said. They were painting bricks to make a Santa house. Taking the long brush in her hand, she watched the paint drip off of it and fall in big red splashes before she could pull it across the paper. She watched the puddles of paint, thinking how much they looked like the drops in the bathroom sink when she had a nosebleed. Red was her favorite color, her red blood, her red toothbrush and now her very first lesson in the big kids school. Painting red bricks requires all of your concentration when you are five years old and in your first hour of kindergarten.

After they finished painting, the teacher took her to a table where she sat with two little boys and one other little girl. The little girl wouldn’t talk to her, but the boys smiled. The one with reddish blonde hair handed her a napkin and the one with brown hair passed her a bottle of chocolate milk with a straw in it.

At recess she walked around the big tree, balancing on the roots that stuck out of the ground, trying to see who could go the fastest. At rest time she put her red rug with the red and black fringe in between the two boys’ rugs. The other little girl fell asleep, but they all lay there together looking up at the long rows of lights above their heads. She sat between them in the circle while she listened to the story their teacher told and when it was lunchtime she walked the one short block to her house with the little brown haired boy.

The next day her mother invited him over to play at her house and she won all his marbles, but he didn’t cry and she gave them back. A few days later he invited her over to his house and the little red haired boy was there too. He showed them how to put the chessmen on the board.

Three small children whose last name began with P. At first it was a strange and tenuous connection. Later on, it would be so much more, but beginnings are often deceptively simple.