The Sixth Grade: Part Two

I dragged my mom across the street and knocked on the door. A woman who was about my mom’s age opened the door. She was a little shorter and heavier than my mother and was wearing a white tank top. Her long hair was in a half ponytail. My mom introduced us and we quickly learned that she had a daughter who was my age. Her name was Hailey. We were quickly introduced and we went up to Hailey’s room. Hailey had wavy dirty blonde hair and dark brown eyes. Hailey’s room was filled with boxes, their contents spilling out over the room.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Alaska”
“Wow! What brought you to Utah?”
“My step-dad is in the air force and got transferred to Hill Air Force Base.”
“Are you Mormon?” I blurted out excitedly. Hailey gave me a weird, confused look.
“Umm… no…” She hesitated.
“Yes!” The strange look continued so I asked “Do you know what Mormon’s are?”
“No.”
I was practically jumping up and down with excitement and Hailey was looking at me like I was crazy. “Really? Oh ok, let me explain. I’m a Mormon. It’s a religion.”
“Oh ok. I’m a Catholic.” She continued to look at me like she was a little confused as to why we were talking about our religions.
“Awesome!” My first catholic friend and my first conversion! Hailey and I continued to chat about her home back in Alaska, school that was starting up again in a few weeks, and other topics that eleven year olds like to talk about. Eventually my mom called me to go home.

Hailey and I became fast friends. We ended up in the same class at school and we spent a lot of time hanging out after school. Sometimes we would hang out at my house, sometimes at her house, and sometimes we would walk down the street, around the corner, past the elementary school, to the gas station. We would walk the aisles talking before selecting the perfect pack of gum to buy. We would sit outside of my house listening to Avril Lavigne and sit on the curb, picking the tar off the road. Hailey told me about how her family was from Colorado, her dad was out of the picture, her step dad was in the Air Force which is why she had moved to Alaska and Utah and she couldn’t wait until her family could move back to Colorado. She also told me about how her family, generations back were from Czechoslovakia and she wanted to learn Czech, and she was convinced that someday she would someday move back to her homeland. She had been told that her great-great-great-grandparents were royalty, the King and Queen of Czechoslovakia, and she was sure that someday she would be able to unite the land and take her royal right as a princess of the land.
In school we became friends with Janessa, Faith, and Thaina. Janessa was an African American who had converted from Mormonism to Jehovah’s Witness, Faith who was a white Mormon like me, and Thaina who had moved from Brazil and was also Mormon. Considering we were living in Utah it was a pretty diverse group of friends. We would hang out every recess, past the soccer field but not quite to the baseball diamonds, by the “three trees”, the only trees in the whole field, that seemed to stretch into the sky forever. The trees were almost directly across from my backyard, which was against the school field. We would “hang out” by those trees, because we were eleven and twelve years old, much too old to “play”. We hung out through the fall and winter.