the love life of joel hoagland (page 128)

“Joel, I think we should break up.”

I looked at my dearest friend, and tried to fathom what she meant. “Break what up?”

But she didn’t know, any more than I did. She talked for a while about what other people think, and very little about us. And I listened to her heart while she spoke, and her heart said I am afraid. You don’t know what it’s like to be afraid.

And then came the moment, as we walked along beside the water, when there was nothing more I could say. After an awkward pause, she turned and walked another direction, and I walked on in numbness and confusion. And that is how I came into the second grade with no friends.

Pamela had been my only classmate in kindergarten and the first grade. Both our parents taught in the tiny private school which we attended, and so even as kindergarteners, we stayed at school the whole day until well after the other students had left. After our schoolwork was done (very often by midmorning) we would play all day long.

I suppose the older students were jealous, though I couldn’t sympathize with such an emotion myself today; children are meant to be happy, and anyone who resents their happiness is still a child himself. But it was reported to my father that I had kissed Pamela, and on the mouth, no less. If I did, I dearly wish I could remember it. But I have no recollection of any such thing ever happening. In any case, I was punished, but before my father punished me, he talked to me about girls. He told me that girls were to be protected and honored. And he recited a nursery rhyme to me: “Georgie, porgie, pudding pie, kissed the girls and made them cry.”

I don’t remember if I ever made Pamela cry, but I do remember that she seemed to hate me, right up to the eight grade, the last year we attended the same school. She became firmly attached to Cheryl, a girl who first appeared on the scene in second grade, and who could beat up two boys her age at the same time. Pamela would sit next to Cheryl in our eighth grade Greek class, and ridicule me with the vitriol that none of my other classmates ever showed. And Cheryl would laugh.

It hurts to be left behind on the shore of Mona Lake, to be cast aside as a social liability by a pretty girl afraid I could not help her in the pecking order of the second grade. Such pain is a cruel headmaster teaching us to fear. But there is a truth bigger than all the heartache in the world: “Perfect love casts out fear.” [1 John 4:18] I do know what it’s like to be afraid. But I also know what it’s like to fly heedless of the fear into the teeth of the storm; for to love at the risk of pain is the only love worthy of the name. I hope, wherever she is, that Pamela is not afraid.