missing pieces

Wendy was a little girl that lived at the end of my street. She had dark brown hair and bright black eyes. Sometimes when you looked at her, she'd look a tad scary because her eyes appeared unusually dark and piercing. Andy said that that was because of the blackness of her eyes- her pupils, to be more specifically. Aunty Joe who owns the bread shop at the junction of the the cobbled street and the wide open road always said, being specific was important. Black was a colour that, according to Miss Hanes, my science teacher, that absorbed all the light. So that's why Wendy's eyes looked so weird and scary. But only sometimes.

Wendy was a rather small sized girl, she was much shorter than all the other girls in my class. Maybe its because she was so skinny; mummy always wondered out loud if her mum was starving her. But I think Wendy's skinny simply because she runs about a lot. Well, just in case you think she runs about like other kids during break, playing tag and the likes, she does not. Wendy was funny that way, she simply ran about, all by herself. Well, ok, most of the time. Sometimes the bigger kids would run about with her, just to poke fun at her. But she never minded, she simply kept on running.

I liked Wendy. Not in a lovey-dovey sort of the way, but I simply liked her. She never got in anyone's way, she did pretty good in class and she'd always be polite to me. Wendy used to sit in the seat just in front of me, and when she bobbed her head or moved about her pony tail would bounce, which I thought was really funny. One time, she had pinned a butterfly on her hair and when she moved, the wings of the butterfly flapped! It looked almost real. But it was not a really pretty butterfly, honestly, it looked alot like a moth, but I never told Wendy that.

About two months ago, Wendy came to school looking rather sullen. Her eyes were red and swollen from what must have been a huge crying stint. She looked positively morose (I like using the word 'morose", it was in my english spelling list last week). Throughout class she sat with her head down, she didn't even celebrate or feel better when Miss Hanes announced that she had topped the class in the recent class test. During break, she didn't run either. Finally, just after the last bell rang, as she turned around to pass me my latest homework (I got an A+, but mainly because I got mum to help me with it) I asked her what was wrong.

"I lost my tooth today. It must not want to be in my mouth anymore. I bet its because I went to eat so much ice-cream." Wendy said quietly. "I think my teeth don't like me much, they are starting to get shaky and they all want to move out." With that she burst into tears and turned tail and ran off, bumping into many people along the way.

Wendy stayed sad for a few days. Or maybe it was a few weeks, I can't really rememeber. I'm not very good with telling time, you see. But one day- and I remember that it was a Thursday because they were serving marcaroni and cheese that day at the canteen and I had eaten two portions- Wendy came and she was positively glowing. She beamed and grinned her little toothless smile and bounced about like that tiger in Winnie the Pooh.

"What's up?" I asked her. "How come you're so happy today?"

"Oh," she cried out. "Remember my tooth that went away? It came back!"

"It did? Where?" I asked, positively puzzled.

"Yeah!" She exclaimed, "In my baby sister's mouth!"