Lauren Lewis is a thinker.
She thinks before she talks, before she moves. She ponders the composition of her toothpaste before she squeezes it onto her toothbrush, the origins of the vegetarian pizza at lunch, and the history of the famous scientists she reads about in textbooks. Sometimes she can't go to sleep at night because while her body is tired, her mind is still at work, thinking and thinking and thinking.
The first time she sees Bo Dennis, every rational thought goes out of her head.
Her mind empties.
Nothing else registers but the sight of a slightly dazed, smiling-too-big little girl standing at the front of the classroom, and a deep internal voice telling Lauren to PAY ATTENTION, because right here is something important.
She is ten.
Bo is Lauren's age, just moved from New Brunswick, a place Lauren's heard about but never seen. On the class map, it's almost on the other side of Canada, which makes Bo an alien as far as Lauren is concerned. But she looks pretty normal, with a Wonder Woman lunchbox in her hand and a plaid bow in her hair, so Lauren figures that she can get used to it.
Lauren's also the smartest person in their class, probably the smartest person in the entire grade, and the teacher doesn't hesitate to assign Bo to the desk next to her. They come closer, and closer, and then Bo is right in front of her, still smiling, and Lauren smiles back.
"Help her," the teacher had said, Bo's little hand clasped tightly around her larger one. "She's just moved here and it's probably going to be a little bit hard for her to get used to our class. I know I can trust you to be her friend."
Lauren nods (mission accepted) and tries hard to breathe normally as Bo plunks her lunchbox down on the desk and almost immediately scoots herself closer to Lauren, until their arms are brushing and Lauren can see the blue of her eyes, clear and nearly pupil-less in the bright sunlight.
"Hi, I'm Bo!"
###
Bo is everyone's friend before lunchtime.
She's smart but not focused, looking out the window or tapping new classmates on the shoulder to ask them their name or what their favorite color is. Of course, they're ten, they're in the fifth grade, nothing really matters yet- but looking back, Lauren sees it, how the friendliness could someday change into something more significant. The wild abandon that Bo makes friends with, that she loves with. Or faux-loves, in a ten year old's mind.
Bo is also reckless and fun, she discovers. At playtime, when Lauren is usually sneaking off to the library or choosing to sit quietly on one of the benches, she grabs Lauren's hand and practically drags her to the swings, urging her to sit and then pushing her out with an uncommon strength that has Lauren clinging to the metal chains on either side of her with terrified excitement, her stomach clenching each time she goes back up against the blue sky.
The first day Lauren Lewis meets Bo Dennis, her grip slips from the swings and she falls to earth with a thud, face-down in the wood chips and feeling nothing for a moment until the most excruciating pain begins to radiate from her wrist.
Bo runs to her, yelling at someone to go get the teacher.
She never leaves Lauren's side.
Her wrist isn't broken, just sprained, but she has to wear a brace for two weeks and to her dismay, can no longer write properly or even feed herself. So Bo becomes her unofficial caretaker, frantically scribbling down notes into Lauren's notebook and then copying them back down in her own, writing so messily that Lauren can't make out the words when she tries to study them later on. Bo feeds her at lunch with equal nervousness, shoving bites of sandwich into Lauren's mouth before she's finished chewing, giving Lauren her strawberry milk every day because Lauren doesn't have the heart to tell her she hates strawberry milk.
Lauren gets her first and only B that year in English, and a strange aching pang in her chest whenever Bo looks at her with eyes that say, "I'm here. I'm taking care of you, and I'm not gonna stop."
###
It is summer, and they are lying together in the grass of Lauren's backyard. The grass is prickly against Lauren's bare legs and there's probably bugs in her hair, but Bo doesn't care so Lauren doesn't either. To her mind this is bliss,
Her best friend.
In the past school year, Bo has somehow pulled Lauren effortlessly into her orbit, drawing the little blonde into her world. She defends Lauren when the other kids tease her for being small and nerdy, getting Lauren's books back when they hide them in places too hard for her to reach. Bo convinces Lauren to hold a birthday party for herself, her first one with people other than her family, and Lauren discovers later that Bo bullied half a dozen of their classmates to show up. Bo is her protector, her friend. Lauren trusts her implicitly.
Bo is perfect, in a lot of ways, and for all her knowledge of the impossibility of that fact, Lauren believes it.
They look for things in the clouds. Bo sees a pirate ship, and Lauren sees Albert Einstein.
###
A year later, Bo moves away.
It's because of her father's job, she says to Lauren, on the night of their last sleepover. Tears pouring down her face, she explains that she's not coming back to school when it begins again in the fall, and please, please not to forget about her. Lauren can barely hear her through the roaring in her own ears, sees Bo only as a black-and-gray blur from the tears clouding her vision. She can barely tell Bo that it's impossible to forget her, and that's what scares Lauren the most. Impossible.
They are wrapped up together in Lauren's bed, Bo's sleeping bag abandoned on the floor, and Lauren feels like she's going to die from the pain in her chest when Bo tells her they're returning to New Brunswick, that place on the other side of the world. They don't sleep for hours, until they're cried out and exhausted and Lauren's arms ache so much from clutching Bo tightly to her that they simply drop away from the other girl's body.
She lets go, is horrified when she wakes and Bo has retreated to the other side of the bed, and quickly replaces her arms like nothing has happened.
When Bo leaves the next morning, after needing to be physically separated from Lauren, she looks down at the scrap of paper with Bo's new address in her hand and runs to ask her mother if she can look something up on the computer.
New Brunswick is over seven hours away from Toronto.
###
Bo writes first – this detail means everything. It's on printer paper, green crayon, rambling and excited like Bo has never left. The neighbor family has a puppy and her new teacher is nice but no one is as smart as Lauren. The bottom of the letter is sticky, like Bo was eating a popsicle and didn't bother to wash her hands before setting crayon to paper.
Lauren writes back- a letter three times as long as Bo's, neat and on her best stationery. The letter gets to three drafts before she gets the nerve to slip it into their mailbox, and Lauren begins to wait every day by the window for the mailman.
Bo doesn't write back, so Lauren sends another one, this time only two times as long.
The postal service has been facing budget cuts lately, she hears from her mother, and so her letters must not have been reaching Bo. Maybe they've been collecting in some dusty abandoned bin because Bo's neighborhood forgot to pay taxes or something. She doesn't know what taxes are, exactly, just that her parents don't like them, and apparently they're keeping her from Bo. So Lauren sends two letters that day, one to New Brunswick and one to the Prime Minister of Canada, angrily demanding a return to quality.
Neither one receives a reply.
She waits a month and sends another letter, and another, and Bo never returns the favor.
###
In Lauren's mind, Bo never really disappears, just fades into the background, always present but never center stage. She grows up with Lauren through middle school, shouting silent insults to the bullies that tease her for (still) being small and nerdy, holding Lauren's hand through braces and wisdom tooth extraction. When Lauren makes A's in all the highest classes Bo is clapping right next to her parents at assembly. Entering high school is a little easier because Bo is there beside her, effortlessly breaking down the cliques with her inherent friendliness.
Lauren can envision every move that Bo makes, and it comforts her to know that even if she isn't fully accepted, Bo is.
Okay, it's a little creepy, having an imaginary friend when you're in high school, but at least Bo exists, Lauren thinks. She keeps that sole letter in her dresser. She still pulls it out sometimes, just to make sure it's still there, that she's not going crazy.
That Bo really came into her life.
It's not like she doesn't have other friends. There are the kids in her science classes who share all her geekery and with whom she goes, in a large group, to see the Star Trek movies. There's Kenzi, the slightly-delinquent but mostly mischievous girl who takes a liking to Lauren after she socks a particularly persistent bully in the eye, a girl who is tiny and crass and loyal. Lauren gets to know Hale and Dyson, two of the loners who mostly hang around the outside of the school like guardians or something, because Kenzi has a crush on the former and she's in no position to turn down allies. They're alright, just like school is alright and life is alright, but as Lauren works furiously through her classes, she knows there's something more. Something special waiting for her.
There has to be.
AN: Just an introduction, more to come.