A Friend for Billy

Brought to you by junior high.

Once upon a time, there was this boy named Billy. Billy had some sort of physical impairment and possibly learning disabilities as well; I don't recall for sure. Despite his special needs, Billy had been mainstreamed into our fifth-grade class. Now I wonder how, with his bowed spine and leg braces, he was able to negotiate the endless stairs in that building, because as far as I know it didn’t have an elevator. I suppose it just took him longer than the rest of us, and we just streamed around him without paying much attention.

It's not that we didn't notice. It was impossible not to notice this kid who was so different from the rest of us, especially since we hadn't known him since preschool as we had everyone else. He wasn't gross-different like Marvin, who made a show of eating his boogers, and he wasn't obnoxious-different like Curtis, who always had his name on the board for talking in class. Billy was just physically different, which was actually a refreshing change from the annoying-different boys. So nobody minded Billy, and I don't remember anyone picking on him.

But no one included him much, either. Unable to run around, he didn't join in the games of basketball, tag, or pigtail pulling at recess. His balance wasn't good enough for tetherball nor his coordination for playing catch, either, so mostly he just stood by the wall.

This brought him to the attention of the cool girls, who also stood around a lot because they were too cool to run around pretending to be horses like some of the rest of us. Becky, the chief cool girl, took particular notice. (Becky liked to pretend-brag that the Kenny Rogers song "Coward of the County," very popular around that time, was about her because it mentioned a girl named Becky, and we all agreed that was pretty neat. None of us understood what it meant that in the song, Becky was a rape victim.) Becky decided she would do a good deed and find a friend for Billy.

She must have asked every boy in the fifth grade if he'd be Billy's friend. (She did not ask the sixth graders, of course; we fifth graders were the youngest class in the school, and sixth graders were too far above us on the social ladder.) Naturally she started with the cool boys since they were already her friends, and while they all agreed it was a good idea to be nice to Billy, none was willing to give up game time to stand around with him like a girl. So Becky moved on down the food chain, getting the same response every time, until she'd struck out with even Marvin and Curtis.

I was secretly glad that her plan failed, not because I didn't want Billy to have a friend, but because I was jealous that I hadn't thought of the project myself. If I had been a truly good person, I reasoned, the idea it would have occurred to me immediately. But it occurred to Becky instead, whom I disliked because she was usually snotty to horse-girls like my friends and me and clearly thought she was better than us. We'd spent considerable time reassuring ourselves that Becky was not, in fact, better than us, but now I wasn't so sure, because she was trying to do something nice for the poor crippled kid and I wasn't.

Before I could develop a complex about it, however, the question became moot. One week Billy was no longer in our class. We didn't know where he disappeared to, but we figured his family must have moved, because no one saw him lurching around town with his distinctive, disjointed gait any more. We didn’t miss him, because he'd never really felt like part of the class, but we didn't entirely forget him, either.

It didn't occur to me until years later that finding a friend for Billy was not what I should have done. I should have been a friend for him. Thinking "somebody ought to do something for that kid" wasn't enough; I was somebody, and I did nothing. I did develop habits of being nice to my less popular classmates and of generally rooting for the underdog, and that's a start. I don't know how much of that behavior came from fifth grade and how much from my parents' good example. But whether he ever knew it or not, Billy was a friend for me.

Today around the world: June 10 is the Queen's birthday in Papua New Guinea. A college friend of mine, Lisa-la, served in PNG in the Peace Corps in the mid-90s. She told stories of centipedes as big as relay batons and of the lagoon you didn't swim in no matter how hot the weather because (A) there was an outhouse perched above the open water and (B) it was full of crocodiles. (The lagoon, not the outhouse. I think.)