Ten

I don't remember being ten. I keep thinking of things and realizing that no, that was when I was nine, or eleven, or eight, or twelve. When I was ten I was in fifth grade. In one year I would realize that I was growing breasts and this sudden push towards adulthood would traumatize me so completely that I would never quite recover, but at ten I was still blissfully disconnected from temporal reality.

My two best friends and I played Star Wars constantly, reenacting scenes from the movies sometimes, but mostly making up elaborate stories of our own. Because I was best at slouching and drawling and being sarcastic, I was Han Solo, but my secondary role was Everyone Else because Katie had a monopoly on the role of Princess Leia. Sometimes you might convince her to do a Chewie roar or a stormtrooper, but she always reverted quickly. I never minded: playing every single character gave me almost full control over the plots of our games. I was the sole mastermind of political intrigues and kidnappings! At the time I was very proud of my plots, but in retrospect a lot of our games consisted of gossiping about Luke and when he was going to find a good woman and settle down.

When our third friend played with us she had to be Luke, which she didn't like. We tried to invent a new jedi for her, but Katie and I had so finely honed our interactive storytelling that there wasn't much room for a third mind. Instead, we tried games for three people: Redwall, The Golden Compass, and our famous original, Crazy Tour Guide. Jessica got the role of the Crazy Tour Guide, and she did it amazingly. Katie and I invented an ever-rotating cast of six to ten characters who were taking an exotic tour to the amazon or the sahara or the moons of Jupiter. We always played several characters each to allow room for knocking some off. Travel with the Crazy Tour Guide was dangerous, after all.

(The Tour Guide was crazy mostly because she believed herself to be an alien from Jupiter. She also had a zeal for dangerous sports and a criminal apathy towards the safety of her charges. Also? She could time travel. Jess played her as deliciously spacey and eccentric, somewhere between new-age koogy and obsessively scientifcic.)

The only other thing I can remember is the boy who sat between Katie and me for half a year, and only because on Valentine's day he presented us each with a Reese's Peanut butter Cup and asked us out, both at once. We took the candy, but rejected him. His name was Tommy, but we called him Monkey Boy. He really did have remarkably simian features, almost like a neanderthal. I saw him in August at Wal-Mart or something and it's just gotten worse over time. Poor kid.