It was three days after Cindy’s ninth birthday that she realized her life could never be complete until Jonny loved her as much as she loved him.
It happened in school assembly. Jonny was four rows down and three and a half seats to the right of Cindy (it would have been only three seats, but he was sitting next to Bearbutt Bronson, who was so fat that his butt took up one and a half of the painted marks on the gym bleachers). Cindy was bored out of her mind as the principal droned on. She was watching a column of dust motes spin patterns through a stray beam of afternoon sunlight some fifteen feet above Jonny’ head, when one of the motes took on a sudden independence and dived toward the bleachers. It was, Cindy realized, a wasp, and it’s current trajectory would land it directly on the side of Bearbutt’s fat neck. Would have stung the poor boy, too, if he hadn’t been sitting next to the stuff heroes are made of.
Jonny saw the wasp coming, correctly evaluated the creature’s target, and with the smooth fluidity of a savage warrior, the easy grace of a natural athlete, and the wry humor of a ten-year-old boy, he raised his math book to an intercepting position, opened it quickly, then slammed it shut on the wasp.
Cindy gasped at the precision of his movements. And in that moment, she fell in love.
She moped around the house for almost a week before she decided to ask Joanie for advice.
Now sister Joanie was almost sixteen and had been dating for almost a year. (Actually, she’d been dating a lot longer, but her parents only knew about the more recent stuff and Cindy was sworn to secrecy.) Besides being older, Joanie was sophisticated, experienced, and, knew everything there was to know about the opposite sex. At least that’s what she was always telling her girlfriends.
“I’ve got a problem, Joanie,” Cindy confided.
“What’s the problem, baby?” Joanie asked.
“I’m in love. And he doesn’t even know I’m alive.”
“Oh.” Bored dismissal. “I thought it was something serious, like you were developing breasts or starting your period.”
“I’m only nine, okay?” Cindy said, looking down at her still perfectly flat chest defensively.
“So forget about him. Boys never notice you until there’s something worth noticing,” she said, pulling her shoulders back to emphasize what she had that was worth noticing, “and until they notice you, there’s not much point in noticing them.”
Cindy sighed. “Isn’t there any better advice you can give me than that? I thought you knew everything about boys and love.”
Joanie thought a moment, then her eyes gleamed wickedly. “I can give you one more piece of advice, but it’s gonna cost you.”
“How much?” Cindy asked as she followed Joanie to the bathroom mirror.
“How much you got?” Joanie asked.
“Is it about wearing makeup?”
“Don’t be silly,” Joanie answered, building her mascara in layers thick enough to intrigue an archeologist. “You don’t wear makeup for the boys, you wear it because your girlfriends would think you were weird if you didn’t.” Joanie carefully covered her lips with a pale pink tint light enough to make her look thoroughly anemic.
Cindy followed her back into their bedroom. “So how much money you got?” she asked as she shimmied into a very tight little T-shirt, then cinched in her very loose and baggy jeans.
“Is it about wearing cool clothes?” Cindy asked.
Joanie gave her a look of utter disdain. “You don’t know anything. Clothes are important, but I’m talking something much more conceptual. I’m talking poetry and moonlight and romance and passion and glamour and being worshipped and adored by the man you want. I’m talking magic and mystery and movie stars and,” her voice dropped to a whisper, “sex.”
Cindy was on the edge of the bed, her mouth open. “Fifteen dollars and twenty-three cents.”
“One word, little sister. Just one word sums it all up.” A tense silence until Cindy realized she wouldn’t get the lyrics without first paying the piper. Business concluded, Joanie breathed her wisdom.
“Essence.”
“Essence?” Cindy fell back on the bed, thoroughly disappointed. “Essence?” she asked again. “Fifteen dollars and change, and all I get is ‘essence’?”
“Gotta go.” And Joanie was out the door.
Cindy had just been handed the secret of the universe in a neat, one-word package, and she didn’t have a clue what the word meant.
But while Cindy might not have tits yet, she did know how to use a dictionary.
She found the family’s American Heritage on the shelf in the living room. She could have used a more elementary dictionary, and normally would have, but she had an idea that the definition she needed was going to be a very grown-up one. She scanned her options, until she came to 4c: a perfume or scent. She flashed on the memory of her father wrapping his arms around her mother, rubbing his nose lovingly in her hair and telling her what a womanly smell she had. She also remembered her mother’s delighted laughter.
If she wanted to capture Jonny’s heart, she just had to smell good!
Monday at school, she went to the rest room just before lunch, where she laboriously plied herself with an ample amount of scent smuggled from her mother’s bedroom. That was the easy part. The hard part was finding a seat in the lunch room close enough to Jonny for him to notice, but she managed that as well by squeezing herself in on the end of the geek row. Jonny was only four feet away, his back turned toward hers.
Unfortunately, the result was less than romantic. “What’s the odorama?” Bearbutt asked loudly to no one in particular.
“Pee-yew city!” Jonny answered. The other boys around the table added similar comments with references to dead animals and bodily waste.
Cindy was surprisingly calm. She didn’t fall apart until she was safely back in the rest room and scrubbing at her arms and neck where she’d sprinkled the perfume with a damp, rough brown paper towel.
That night, she went back to the dictionary, looking for a less obvious answer. This time she settled on definition 2, the most important ingredient; crucial element. But what might that be? she wondered.
“Mom,” she asked over dinner, “what’s the most important thing between you and daddy?”
“We love each other,” her mother answered.
“Yeah, but what’s the most important ingredient in your love, the thing that, if you took it out, would make it fall apart?”
Mom and dad looked at each other. “Honesty,” dad finally said.
“I’d have to agree,” mom agreed.
Honesty. The essence was honesty. Cool, she’d try it!
When she told Jonny she loved him, though, she would have appreciated a less honest response. “Yukkkkkkk! You’re a girl! Don’t you ever say that again!”
The rest of the afternoon for Cindy was a tedious climb upward from complete and abject humiliation through well-founded apprehension that she would never be able to show her face at school again without being laughed at, to a stark and hard-edged fury that focused on her older sister’s amiss, albeit costly advice.
By the time Joanie got home from high school, Cindy had been parked for some time on the living room sofa, staring holes through the front door while waiting patiently for her return.
As the door opened, Cindy said, “What is the essence, Joanie?”
Joanie and two of her girlfriends stopped to look at Cindy like she was nuts. “What is the essence?” Cindy repeated.
What are you talking about?” Joanie said, mocking Cindy’s tone of voice.
“The essence. The essence! The thing that makes love grow, that makes the world turn, that makes lovers love and kissers kiss! Essence, essence, ESSENCE! WHAT IS IT?!”
Joanie’s girlfriends had to pull all forty-eight pounds of Cindy’s fury off her older but terrified sister when Cindy got her answer. What happened was, Joanie said I don’t know, and Cindy said, but you told me it was the secret to love, and Joanie, realizing suddenly the context, started laughing and admitted that she’d just thrown out the word because it sounded good and she didn’t have a clue as to what it meant.
Cindy eventually realized that trying to kill her sister would not bring forth an answer she didn’t have.
But Cindy did learn one very important thing: Don’t believe what somebody says just because they say it’s true.
And that is the essence of this story.
