I remember the day they told me Gino was dead. I’d never really been close friends with him. I don’t remember if we’d ever even talked. But I knew him, was familiar with him, because Helen loved him. And I loved Helen dearly, in the way only little children do. To be honest, I was surprised about the news, and confused, but maybe not as much as I should have been. My mother told me Gino was dead - and that was why he wouldn’t be in class with me anymore. Later on, I overheard her saying how tragic it was that Gino had been killed by his uncle.
Helen knew about it, when I saw her the next time, and I was glad, because I hadn’t been sure how to break the news to her. “Is it really true?” she asked me when we were alone in her room.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “His uncle killed him. My mom said so.” I paused and then added, “Sorry”, right before she burst into tears. That’s the only time, I think, that I’ve ever seen Helen cry. I held her, smoothed her hair, and felt helpless. When she stopped, she shuffled over to her closet silently and began to look through the clothes hanging up.
I shifted on her bed, uncomfortable, because I didn’t know what to do. Phrases like “his uncle killed him” meant little to me, because I didn’t know what they meant. Killing someone wasn’t a foreign concept, exactly; I’d read Harry Potter. I knew it meant someone ended up dead. But I still didn’t really know it, or understand it. “Do you want me to leave you alone?” I finally asked, tentatively. Helen’s back was turned to me, and while she wasn’t ignoring me, she wasn’t talking.
“Yeah. Just for a little bit,” Helen told me.
“Okay. I’ll go downstairs.” I slid off her bed and gently closed the door behind me.
I’ve never been particularly good with social etiquette, and especially not when I was a child. That night was one of the only times when I knew exactly what I needed to do and what Helen wanted me to do.
Because Helen and I were best friends, because we were so close, it was odd to see me without her. Especially during a Valentine’s Day party at her house. Some adults asked me where she was. The other children there wanted to know when we could all play a game together, or do something fun. I told them Helen had spilled juice on her shirt and went up to change, that she was in the bathroom, that she was just getting a game from her room for us to play. Anything that would give my friend some time alone to start grieving, and then to pull herself together. People bought what I said.
Helen’s mother, Lisa, seemed a bit concerned, at one point, saying that Helen had been gone for a little bit. Lisa wanted to know where Helen was. I told her very firmly that my best friend was going to come down really soon because she’d wanted something from her room. Even she seemed to accept my explanation, however readily.
In the meantime, I went around gathering snacks for us, and whatever drinks I thought Helen would like. Since nobody was really in the living room - adults drifted in and out of it - and we couldn’t stay in her room, I decided she and I could stay in there. We could just nibble at snacks.
When Helen came down, eventually, people asked her if she was okay. The other children wanted to know why her eyes looked so red. She shrugged them off and said she was just fine. But she spent the rest of the evening with me in a corner of the living room. By unspoken agreement, we never discussed Gino again.
