juniper and matty

matty moved to juniper's town when they were both in the eighth grade. she was kind of nerdy and on the heavy side, and she had some friends when he got there, but a few months later she didn't have any. things like that will happen to a person in the eighth grade. there's no good reason for it and it's tough to convince anyone that it's all right, but there you are. matty was small and delicate and fascinated by magic and natalie merchant and comic book super heroes. he had become friends with some girls who didn't mind juniper, and sometimes they ate lunch together. when juniper's friends not only refused to reaccept her but also began being openly and publicly cruel to her, she stopped eating lunch, and everything else. this, too, will happen, for equally poor reasons and with as little justification, but you continue to be right there. matty didn't know juniper well enough to say much about it, but he did tell her one day that a girl he had gone to school with before had stopped eating anything but lettuce, and she usually threw that up, and after a while her face had gone sort of blue around her mouth, and he figured if that happened to juniper it probably wouldn't help her social standing.

juniper didn't have any sort of comeback for that. in fact, for about a year she and matty didn't really say anything at all. in that time she reconciled with solid food and made some more reliable friends, and she stopped giving a damn about everybody else, and towards the end of ninth grade she was feeling better about things. matty was not. kids, you know... they're mean. especially to delicate boys who wear ankhs and adore michael stipe. things at home weren't always great for matty, either, and one day he came to school with both of his wrists bandaged. there was a lot of whispering and giggling and eye-rolling in their home room. juniper looked around and thought about it, and then she walked over to matty and asked if she could see. he peeled away the gauze and showed her the twin horizontal slices. she asked him what he had used, and he told her. she examined them silently for a minute or two, and then she leaned back and said,

"you did it wrong."
"i did?"
"yeah. to hit all the really important veins you have to cut up your arm, like this."
"oh. okay."

there was a brief, not uncomfortable pause, after which they agreed it had been stupid one way or the other.