The night before my last day of grade four. I had a strange, comforting dream. I was sitting at the back of the class, drawing in my notebook, and I heard my teacher say, “Class, I’d like to introduce you to someone.” I lifted my head, and there was a girl standing at the front of the class. She had brown hair just a little lighter than mine, a big warm wide smile, and she was my best friend.
To be clear, I had never seen her before; I didn’t know her at all. But in the way that dreams sometimes have, I knew she was my best friend. The warmth1 of that stayed with me for hours after the dream stopped.
Things weren’t easy for me back then. I was a little different—I didn’t have many friends.
I definitely didn’t have a best friend, one of those people you can talk to about anything at all. So that dream felt like a promise.
Je n'avais jamais eu de meilleure amie, une de ces personnes avec laquelle on peut discuter de tout et de rien. Donc ce rêve m'apparaissait comme une promesse.
It made me smile while my mother brushed my long, tangled hair; it kept me grinning in the back of the car while my brother pinched and poked me; it even made me laugh out loud at lunch, while I sat alone in the library reading a book. Imagine if she was real, I thought. Imagine the games that we could play! Imagine...Imagine my surprise—my shock, my excitement—when, later that day, my teacher said, “Class, I’d like to introduce you to someone.” I lifted my head, and...there she was. The girl I had dreamed about. The same brown hair. The same colour shirt!! The wide smile wasn’t there—she was shy, I think, and staring at her shoes—but I knew she was the girl from my dream. The teacher told us the street where she lived and asked if anyone lived nearby.
I raised my hand and our eyes met across the desks.
Je levais la main et nos regards se croisèrent au-dessus des bureaux.
It was really her!She had just moved to Ottawa from British Columbia, all the way across the country, and her name was Amy. It was only a few days until the Christmas holidays so she had come in to meet the teacher. In January, she would join our class for real. She only stayed for a minute and then she was gone. I hadn’t said anything more than hello. I hadn’t told her where I lived, or gotten her phone number. I didn’t even know her address! And I had let her leave.
I thought about it all day, and all night too. I wasn’t used to making friends. I didn’t really think I needed any. I was fine on my own, with my books and my imagination. But there was the dream. It had to mean something, didn’t it? Fate seemed too big to ignore.
J'y pensai toute la journée et toute la nuit aussi. Je n'avais pas l'habitude de me faire des amis. Je ne pensais vraiment pas en avoir besoin. J'étais très bien toute seule avec mes livres et mon imagination. Mais il y avait ce rêve. Il devait bien vouloir dire quelque chose, n'est-ce-pas ? Les signes du destin étaient trop importants pour être ignorés.
So the next morning, I poured myself a bowl of cereal and sat down at the kitchen table with my mother and my brother. My father usually got up earlier than us, and he was already gone to work. Mom poured me a big glass of orange juice.
