Dawn and I sealed our eternal friendship when we both were six, fatherless and bored. A neighbor prying from a window could have suggested that we bore irreconcilable differences, that our cultures were incongruous, and that my half-orphan status was not even permanent. But the lens of childhood is blind to discrepancies and the need for connection is exponentially greater. Moreover, our only neighbor across the street, Mr. Samuel Sokerin, was always behind his register surveilling his shop. He had neither time nor curiosity to waste on little girls who could only exchange pennies for chewing gum in his store.  

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It was a hot afternoon distorted by tears. I was sobbing, trying to placate the spasms in my chest. My daddy was far away, my mother had scolded me and I just wanted to hug anything in possession of a beating heart, human or animal. My beloved blond Chatty Kathy, lying face down next to my foot, was infuriatingly incapable of soothing her owner. My world was immensely sad. I was a sailor abandoned by her crew on the tip of an iceberg navigating into oblivion.  

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Like an apparition from a magic lamp, Dawn, the girl I had spied from my bedroom  window for so many nights, came up the peeling steps of our porch and sat next to me with a smile that portrayed all the sun hidden in her name.  

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“What’s up, Sarah?” 

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How did she know my name? Her voice was a novelty to me. So far, the only sounds that I had heard from the house next door had been her frantic rope jumping and the suffocated arguments that her mother had with her boyfriend. These two actions tended to happen at the same time. Dawn jumped in her bedroom while her mother spewed insults that I did not understand in all their meaningful hues. I stopped crying, composed myself, and tried to produce a decent grin of gratitude. 

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“I dropped the challah. My mom got mad at me.” 

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“The what?” 

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“The bread. Our bread. My mom bakes it every Friday. I wanted to save a piece for my father in case he comes back tomorrow. Who knows?” 

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Dawn looked up. She seemed to be contemplating a wasp nest in the corner of our screen frame. She gave a big sigh and rummaged in the front pocket of her yellow dress. She opened the red package with her thumb and offered me a cigarette, one of those King chocolate cigarettes that my mom would have never bought for me and Mr. Sokerin did not sell. 

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“So, you don't have no daddy either?” 

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I peeled just the tip of my candy and drew on the dark cylinder before biting it. Drying off my last tears with the back of my hand, I blew an imaginary cloud of smoke into Dawn’s many intertwined braids. Some of them were beaded, red, brown, and light orange pellets, all wood sparks that populated her black hair like fireflies. 

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“My daddy teaches in Brooklyn. He's a professor.” 

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“Can’t he teach close by? In our school, at the church?” 

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“He doesn’t teach church-y stuff. We don’t go to church. No, he’s very important. He doesn’t teach any children. He teaches history to smart people, grownups in New York City. He wants to buy us a new house in another part of the city. That's what my mom says. That the house is old and shabby. ‘This place is not what it used to be when you were young, Daniel.’ That’s what she says.” 

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Dawn shrugged. “Ha! My mamma loves it here. She says it’s good for us. The church is one block away. She sings there, y'know. I like it here too. At least, I don’t have no daddy so I don’t have to wait for him. My gramma says he died in a war. Do you know of any wars lately? Maybe we should ask your dad.” Now it was Dawn's turn to let some invisible smoke float in the soggy air and admire my silly freckles and my hair as flat and dull as snail drool. 

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“I don’t know. Maybe. My daddy teaches old history, I think.” I put my doll in between my legs and started braiding her blond curls. 

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“Do you want us to be friends? That way you won’t need to cry when your mamma yells at you and I will come here when my mom is busy with her friends.” She emphasized the last word with two quotation marks made with her dark eyebrows. 

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“Okay,” I muttered as I swallowed my cigarette butt. At the circus, I had seen a magician doing the same thing with a real cigarette, a real all-lit-up cigarette. 

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“Sooo… we have to make this official. But smart. I’m not cutting nothing, okay?”

 

Dawn sprung up and started scouring our street with her hand on her forehead like a visor.  As if she were the captain of a boat devoted to rescuing sad pale girls in distress.

 

“There it is! Good, I’m glad it’s still there!” 

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I did not know what she had found but did not ask. I concentrated on the impossible hairstyle of my doll while she ran down the steps and crossed the street. She came back with her hands forming a tray and a grayish object on them.

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“A bus ran over it this morning. Give me your hand.” 

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I extended my right hand before revulsion and astonishment settled at the back of my throat. She set the dead bunny on the ground, rubbed her finger on the coagulated blood tainting the stump of a hind leg, and pressed her fingertip onto mine. 

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“To eternal friendship,” she uttered looking me in the eye. “Don’t worry about the bunny. I think his heart exploded before the wheels even touched him.”

 

“To friendship… eternal…,” I whispered. And then, without thinking, I hugged her very, very tight, leaped to my feet, and went inside without a word.  

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Years saw me passing by like the trees at the sides of a highway. In the course of a decade, Dawn and I grew up, clung to our friendship, and then drew irreversibly apart. I learned how to sing negro spirituals, she was able to recite the hadlakat neirot. My dad came back from Brooklyn, my mom got a better house. And sometimes, when I cry much older tears, I know that in a humid rivulet of time, in a nook of seconds that the gods forgot to take into account, there is a girl called Dawn, a half-braided doll, and the corpse of a rabbit that remained immobile on a porch waiting for a scared me to return under a cloud of chocolate smoke. 

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