the girl who taught me to braid was named rachel i think or that is the name i have given her she was my age or maybe older than me and we went to the same summer camp at the community college where my dad worked and one day when we were sitting on the cork risers in the cafeteria waiting for pick up at the end of the day her and some other girls i think were talking about the practice and i do not think i had been talking to them but i told them anyway that i didn’t know how to braid because i didn’t this was not for lack of trying my mother had shown me many times but i could never grasp it couldn’t understand the pattern of the weave but rachel(?) said it was easy and she separated the strings of her drawstring bag, blue with a white illustration of the sun on it from the art camp hosted at the same community college i didn’t like drawstring bags i didn’t like how they cut into your shoulders once you put any weight in them and there was no way of adjusting them so that they didn’t hurt i had all kinds of sensory issues as a child i still do but it’s not as bad and it’s not the same i wore my socks inside out because i did not like to feel the seam against my toes i refused to wear jeans for years once i broke down in tears on the dining room floor because i did not like the feeling of the loose tension created by the braid my hair had been put into my mother did it for me this was years before i would meet rachel(?) she took three of the four strings and showed me how to fold them one over the next and under the other and then unraveled them and gave them to me and for the first time i did it and it made sense and it was easy and it was like clouds parting when i picture rachel(?) i picture her in a blue t shirt i think it is from the same art camp with the sun on it primary blue like the drawstring bag i think i still have mine or at least i did for a very long time it might have developed a slit at the seam i went one year when i think when i was eight it might have been that same year rachel(?) taught me how to braid but i don’t think so and anyway i didn’t like it when i was still in middle school there was talk in my school district about the high school banning backpacks because of the stress of the weight of all those textbooks on the students shoulders they wanted to encourage them to use their lockers more and drawstring bags were proposed as a viable alternative and i thought there’s no way to adjust the strings so they don’t cut into your shoulders especially with the weight of textbooks in them they have to go somewhere when they come home and back to school with you i don’t want to do that and i’ll have to use the drawstring bag i don’t like from the summer camp i didn’t like they didn’t implement it but i remembered at my high school orientation when i found the locker they’d assigned to me and it was not more than four inches wide i thought if they wanted to encourage us to use our lockers they should give us lockers we can use freshman year i stored books in it sometimes but there were only a few minutes between classes not enough time to stop in a completely different wing from where you had to go and once after lunch i had to go get my english text book but then there was an upperclassmen couple kissing against my locker and i was too shy to ask them to move so i went in a circle around the hallway and when i came back they were gone and i got my book but i was late to class and my teacher was mad at me but she didn’t say anything when i told her i had to get my book and then she asked me if the lunchbox that had been left in her classroom the day before was mine and i said yes it was i stopped using my locker after that and i bore the weight of all my books for four years and my shoulders still slump forward when i picture rachel(?) i picture her hair it is dark darker than mine almost black it is very curly and only her bangs are free from the ponytail she’s tied it back into and and we are walking back to the air conditioned school building from the field where we were playing capture the flag under the shade of a smattering of trees and she is asking me not to judge her before she tells me a secret and i did not judge her then and i do not now so i will not say it here rachel(?) and i were friends every year at camp we did not live in the same town or go to the same schools one year she stopped coming and i never learned why because i haven’t seen her since and i think even if i did now i would not recognize her
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