***
It was another payday at TacoTown. I stood by the staff table, waiting for Jeff, and ranting about how the lofty concept of “no taxation without representation” applied to people like me who start paying income tax when they’re still too young to vote. Sandy was sitting, smoking, at the table beside me. She didn’t seem at all interested in joining me in railing against the ageism inherent in our supposedly democratic government. A long, white jet of smoke shot out of her lungs as she shrugged her shoulders.
“Sure, Mack. Unfair taxes stink. But whatcha gonna do?” she remarked. But then she sat up straight, shook the nicotine out of her head, and leaned forward in her chair. She was gaping at something she could see through the glass front doors of the restaurant. “What the...”
I turned to look myself. “Oh — my — heck.”
A young man was just stepping inside the restaurant. He was dressed in a perfectly pressed, black pin-striped suit, and shiny leather shoes. His posture was impeccable and he was strutting into the dining room looking like lion with its mane combed down.
“Bert!” Sandy greeted him. “What’s with the get-up?”
Bert sauntered over to the staff table in his new suit. I fanned the air in front of him with the stub of my paycheque, trying to divert the fumes of Sandy’s cigarette. “Don’t let the smoke get into the wool,” I warned him. “You’ll get all smelly.”
Bert stopped and raised his sleeve to his nose. “Nah, it still smells like the store where I got it. See?”
He thrust his arm into my face. I yelped and shoved it away. “Fine, I believe you.”
“So are you going to a funeral or what?” Sandy persisted.
“No, I’m taking a girl from the Beef Club to her senior prom out in Regent this weekend. Our moms set it up.”
“Aw, that’s sweet of you,” Sandy congratulated him.
Bert shrugged. “Not really. She’s a nice girl. It’ll probably be kind of fun. And I wrangled cash for a suit out of my mom as part of the deal.” He raised his chin and stood up even straighter. “How do I look?”
“Smart,” I said.
“Hot,” Sandy added. She was so creepy sometimes.
“And check this out,” Bert said, turning his profile toward us and pointing to his own face. “It’s the very best part.” He opened his eyes as wide as he could.
I squinted. “What? What am I looking at?”
But Sandy understood immediately. “You got contact lenses? I didn’t even know you wore glasses.”
He laughed. “That’s because I didn’t.”
“Even though he’s blind as a bat,” I finished, slapping Bert’s arm through his new jacket. “Well, good. Now you might survive in traffic long enough to live to see your own senior prom.”
He hadn’t just come to TacoTown to show off. Like me, Bert had come for his paycheque. Sandy rose from the table to get it out of the cash register drawer for him.
“So now you can see properly. That is so awesome, Bert. Hey, how many fingers am I holding up?” I demanded, showing him all five of the fingers on my hand.
“Seven,” he answered.
I laughed. Sandy still hadn’t come back so I lowered my voice and took a step closer to Bert. “Well, now that you can see what I really look like,” I began, “you’re probably shocked.”
“What? Why?”
“I mean, you must think your buddies here are crazy to like me so much when I look like this.” I pointed a finger at my face.
Bert looked down at me through the almost invisible lenses on his blue eyes. “Now that I can see, I think,” he said, “that I should have tried a lot harder to quit smoking.”
I laughed again and thumped him on the back. “You know, you’ve been a good friend to me this year. And I really needed it. Thanks.”
The soles of Bert’s new shoes clicked against the floor tiles as he stepped right up to me. He bent his neck and pecked a quick, dry kiss onto the crown of my head.
I ducked. “Hey!”
Bert stepped back, grinning as he buried his rough, farm-boy hands in the smooth, nylon linings of his suit pockets. “Don’t worry about me. That’s enough for me. But what are you going to do about the twin brothers?”
I rubbed the top of my head. “Huh? Darren’s with Shelley so —”
“So what about the other brother? What’re you going to do?”
I stopped rubbing my head. “Nothing.”
“What do you mean by that?” Bert prodded.
“I really don’t know.”
Bert looked over my shoulder, into the kitchen. Sandy had been detained at the cash register by a particularly petulant customer. He dropped his voice. “Mack, you shouldn’t feel like you have to settle for something less than ideal when you’re only sixteen. Don’t do it. Even if you think you’re lonely – I mean, especially if you think you’re lonely.”
Sandy pushed through the door behind me, apologizing to Bert for taking so long to get his cheque.
“You working tonight?” he asked me as he turned to leave.
I let out my breath, relieved to hear him talking in his usual light tone again. “Nah, I’m going on a social call in Upton.”
“Mack’s got a new friend?” he grinned. “An Upton friend?”
I smiled back at him. “Yup.”
Through the glass doors I saw Jeff parking against the curb outside. It was time for me to leave the city and make my way to Tannis Morgan’s farm.
“Are you sure you know where to find this place?” Jeff growled as we headed toward the highway back to Upton.
“I think so,” I said. “Tannis said to turn south at the Report-A-Poacher sign and take the dirt road until we see a big gray silo...”
Jeff growled again but we did manage to find the neat little farmyard where Tannis stood waving at our car with both arms like she was hailing an aircraft.
“Good,” she said as I stepped out of the car and onto the hard-packed dirt driveway. “I thought we were going to have to get started without you.”
“Started? What are we doing?” I asked, trotting after her.
“It’s nothing much. We’ve just got some cows to move,” she announced.
“What?!”
“It’s fine. They’re nice cows.”
“You mean, like pets?” I ventured.
Tannis laughed, a little darkly. “No,” she answered. “Like meat.”
I followed her to where her dad stood leaning against a corral in his mucky gumboots. “This must be Heather here,” he greeted me. Tannis’ brothers milled around their dad with bored but pleasant faces. I waved at everyone. A loud moo blasted somewhere behind the fence and I hoped no one noticed how high it made me jump.
“We just need to get the gals across the railroad tracks and into the next pasture,” Tannis’s dad said as he creaked back the latch on the fence. Without another word of explanation, the cows were crowding out of the gate, coming toward us. They were a lot bigger up close than they looked when I’d seen them from inside a car driving down the highway between their pastures.
I stood in a near-panic as Tannis and her brothers spread out in firm, slow steps along the roadsides. “Come on,” she beckoned me.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked, linking my arm through hers.
“Get on the tracks,” she instructed. “Just stand there on the train tracks so the cows don’t think they can get on them and walk all the way to the Pacific Ocean.”
I felt my face turn white. “How do I stop them from doing that?”
She shrugged. “Just stand there. They’ll get it.”
“O-okay,” I said, trying to strike what I desperately hoped was an authoritative stance between two railroad ties. “Okay now.”
Tannis and her family walked alongside the cattle, quiet and calm, and the huge beasts strolled down the road toward the green meadow. And then the unthinkable happened. One of t
he cows stopped as her forefeet stepped over the first rail. She raised her enormous brown head and looked west, right through me. I gasped and spread out my arms, taking two high, hard steps in her direction, as if there was something I could have done to stop her. But the bluff worked and the cow swung her head back into line and followed her sisters through the gate.
“Tannis!” I called, running down the railroad toward her. “Did you see that? Did you see how I stopped that cow?”
She scanned the road. “What cow?”
“Uh, the spotted one with the big eyes.”
Tannis started to laugh at me. I looked into the pasture and realized what all the cows looked like.
“Oh, she’s in the pasture now,” I said. “But she was seriously thinking about coming down the tracks. I know she was. She looked right at me.”
“She looked right at you?” Tannis was still laughing.
“Yeah. And I stopped her,” I said again.
She laughed harder and patted my hand as if I was five years old. “Of course you did,” Tannis said, “because you’re so awesome – and terrifying, just like everyone at school says you are. And I never want to move cows without you ever again.”
Maybe that was when I knew that I finally had a real friend in Upton – not someone I’d poached from my brother’s social circle and not someone who secretly had being nice to me written down as a goal to accomplish in her journal. Together, Tannis wasn’t boring and I wasn’t a snob. We were simply, genuinely, finally friends.