Two Dozen Red Balloons - A Short Story

Photo by jcomp on Freepik

Author's Note: Childhood friendships drifting apart happens to everyone. It’s natural and inevitable. But the pain of losing someone who was your whole world can still haunt you years later. It’s the responsibility of an adult to find a healthy way to move on into newer, meaningful relationships. My character comes to accept that a formative chapter of her life is over, but that doesn’t mean she still can’t remember it with great fondness.

My brother’s seventh birthday party was a responsibility that fell squarely on my shoulders that year. Mine and Faye-Marie’s. Mom had started a new job and she was desperate for help, so could Faye-Marie and I please take charge of the decorations and games, for twenty bucks each, while she provided the cake and Jell-O?

She didn’t have to say please. Of course Faye-Marie and I would do it... for twenty bucks each. Twenty bucks was, at the time, a trip to the movies, or three or four new Archie comic books, or a week’s worth of Slush Puppies at the convenience store. And not to mention the money that would be left over from the decorations budget, since Mom never bothered to ask for change. Faye-Marie and I were going to be rich!

Faye-Marie was my best friend in the whole wide world, back then. Back when my whole wide world was smaller. But she was special to me, nevertheless. We had been in the same class together since first grade and were each other’s go-to partner for every project. Together we had studied the behavioural habits of polar bears, devised a new recipe for grilled cheese, built a paper mâché volcano, rewrote our city’s history in the form of an epic poem, and reconstructed the CN Tower out of tin foil. Putting together my brother’s birthday party was nothing to us, the super team. The most inseparable pair that ever was: Faye-Marie and me. Back then.

My brother’s favourite colour was red, so we chose the decorations accordingly. Red streamers. Red ribbons. Red candies. Red plastic cups and paper plates. Red balloons. We dumped anything the colour of apples and cherries into the cart at the party store, and then some people stared at us as we pushed past them with our cart of red everything. I remember the look the cashier gave us as she rang up the ten twenty-pack bags of balloons. It’s all in the budget, we explained, expecting her to understand, but she only rolled her eyes as she accepted the wad of bills crumbled from being stuffed in my pocket. At the time, Faye-Marie and I turned our noses up at the older girl, whose lack of imagination was to be pitied. But now, looking back, I figure she saw right through our overambition. Our big, badly-thought-out plans. Her eyeroll was that of an older sister who had seen it all crumble before.

She was right. We were too ambitious. Our plans for this party far exceeded what was doable, or even logical. Faye-Marie and I envisioned my house’s living room overflowing with balloons, like the ball pit in a McDonald’s playroom. We imagined the party guests swimming through balloons. But we grossly miscalculated how much our young lungs, the only tool for this venture at our disposal, could handle.

Imagine, if you will, two small girls, neither particularly experienced in the art of balloon-blowing, sitting cross-legged on the floor, huffing and puffing away with the Big Bad Wolf’s confidence yet not so much his vigor or skill. Faye-Marie sprayed spittle everywhere when her wet, clumsy mouth contacted the rubbery tail-end of the balloon. With only a smidgen more grace, I worked and wheezed on my own share. I panted and persevered. I wondered where the heck the bicycle pump was, and remembered with a deep, sinking feeling that Mom had sold it in our last garage sale.

Alright, alright, I’ll admit it. Faye-Marie and I should have planned ahead more carefully, but how many great ideas in history never made it past the drawing board? Take Leonardo Da Vinci, for example. A lot of his great ideas, like that giant horse sculpture we learned about in history class, never manifested into anything other than a handful of sketches. I’m even pretty sure one of those sketches involved balloons. If a genius could be forgiven one or two failed projects, two elementary school-aged girls could be too.

Between the two of us, Faye-Marie could only manage about two dozen red balloons, big and shiny and smooth to the touch. Eight packets of limp, unblown balloons remained unopened. The flimsy scraps of the few balloons that had burst on us while we were blowing were the less savory remains of our efforts, along with the angry red marks on our fingers, from struggling to twist and tie up the balloon ends. They matched the party’s theme, at least.

We stuck the balloons to the walls with squares of tapes, decided that they were not symmetrically positioned, took them down, disliked the new pattern we came up with, took them down again, and then arranged them in the shape of an arch above the spot where my brother was going to open his presents. Afterwards, we ripped open the packets of streamers and wrapped them around every inch of furniture we could. We, the super team, got the job done, and were left with more than enough time to set up the plates, cups, snacks, and games.

When we were finished at last, the party room resembled what I can now only describe as a hotel suite for clowns. But my brother would be happy and that was what mattered. Faye-Marie and I thought that we deserved an A for our work, but then we remembered that this wasn’t school. It was a birthday party, in my house. Disappointment slightly dampened our delight in our success.

“Maybe we could take a picture and show it to Ms. Gretchen,” I suggested.

“What for?” Faye-Marie answered. “She’s not gonna give us extra credit or anything. The school year’s almost over.”

“Maybe she’ll stick it on the cork board, then.” The cork board was the classroom’s art gallery, where our sixth-grade teacher, the well-loved Ms. Gretchen, exhibited all the artistic achievements by students that didn’t particularly fit into the class curriculum. She was a true art lover and cherished all her students’ endeavors. I remember there was this one girl in our class who drew a bee so well that our principal, while observing our class one day, rolled up a newspaper and tried to squish it with a loud, firm whack against the cork board. The whole class screamed with laughter, it was just too funny. Mr. Denne had laughed too, and congratulated the artist on her realism.

Mom took a picture of us for Ms. Gretchen’s cork board, on one of those old mustard-coloured disposable cameras, since none of us had cell phones yet (hard to imagine, I know). Faye-Marie put her arm around my shoulders, and I put mine on her waist. We stood proudly like this in the centre of our party room, beneath the one-colour rainbow of two dozen red balloons.

My little brother darted in. Having just eaten two Fudgsicles, he was so sugar-high and so ecstatic about his approaching birthday celebration that it was everything we could do to stop him from wrecking havoc on our hard work. He wanted to play with the streamers, like a hyper kitten hungry for ribbons. Luckily, we had some unrolled streamers left over to placate him with until the party started.

Compared to the planning and preparation that went into the party, the party itself was almost a blur. It went by so fast that it left us all dizzy. Two and a half hours felt like twenty minutes. My brother’s school friends, a lively gaggle of second-graders who blasted their way into our house like a storm, were a handful. Faye-Marie and I almost couldn’t handle them. But we did. We had to, because we wanted those twenty dollar bills. We had to see the end of this project through, as we’d seen the end of all our projects through.

So Faye-Marie and I plowed our way through the party games. Two and a half hours of musical chairs and charades and telephone and Pictionary. Of Simon Says and button-button and pin the tail on the donkey. Then cake and Jell-O and presents at the end because every kid had to wait until the end of the party to open the presents. That was the rule, as I had to remind my brother, who by this time was off his rocket and ready to tear through everything. He pounced on his gifts and left a disaster zone of wrapping paper and bows around him. And then there were still ten minutes of party time left.

The little kids wanted to rip the balloons off the wall and play volleyball with them, but Faye-Marie and I were reluctant to obstruct our glorious arch. I compromised, taking down only one balloon, because I remembered a trick I saw on a TV show once. The host put a piece of tape on a balloon and was able to stick a sewing needle through without popping it. I remembered how all the kids in the studio audience held their breath in anticipation, and I was hoping to recreate that reaction with my brothers’ friends. However, I forgot a crucial detail during my demonstration, which was that the sewing needle had to be pushed through slowly. In my haste to impress, I pricked the balloon too fast, and it exploded in my hands.

I got the reaction I wanted, at least. While I stood there, stunned by my spectacular failure, the littler kids laughed themselves hoarse, like my class did when Mr. Denne tried to swat a sketch.  

Faye-Marie laughed with them, clutching her sides, unable to stop, as if she were being tickled. To this day I have not forgotten Faye-Marie’s laugh. She never giggled daintily. She never tittered. When she laughed, she howled, and it shook you, like a pair of hands on your shoulders. I heard her, looked at her, as tears and snot streamed down her face and neck onto her shirt collar. I let the balloon shards fall from my hands and I laughed too.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have laughed that day if I had known that my brother’s party was one of the last projects Faye-Marie and I would partner up for. But kids can’t foresee these things. They simply expect things to go as planned. They expect a room to fill up with balloons like the ball pit of their dreams. They expected a balloon not to blow up in their face after having watched a magic trick performed once. They wanted things to go well, they plea in their heads. And when a birthday party does, in the end, despite the odds, go well, everything else is meant to go well too. Everything else, to me in that moment, meant a lifetime of birthday parties, and many more years of school projects faced with gusto by me and Faye-Marie, my best friend in the whole wide world…

When I started teaching at my old elementary school, they assigned me the grade sixth class, Ms. Gretchen’s grade. She was Mrs. Farrell now, and due to retire soon, but she stuck around long enough to help me clear out the classroom. I imagined it was hard for her to let go and hand over the reigns of her grade to my less experienced hands. But she and her husband had a new cottage up north waiting for them. He would spend his remaining days fishing and reading books. She would spend hers painting watercolors. That would be me someday, I hoped. I wondered if, when I reached that age, I would still be thinking of Faye-Marie.

“I remember you and Faye-Marie very well,” Mrs. Farrell said as we were stripping the walls of frayed posters, to be replaced with fresh ones of the exact same theme: inspirational quotes under cutesy animals in people clothes. “Inseparable, the two of you. You always did every project together. You were very productive.”

“Thank you!” It had been nearly two decades since Faye-Marie and I had been her students. Two decades since the bee drawing, and our CN Tower sculpture, and my little brother’s seventh birthday party. He was an apprentice cook in a busy hotel now. No time for parties.

“Are you still friends?” Mrs. Farrell asked.

I shook my head. “We haven’t seen each other in years.”

My former teacher’s face fell. She was hoping that I would say yes, we were roommates, we had gone to the same college, and we would be bridesmaids at each other’s weddings. I was sorry to disappoint her.

“That’s too bad. Did you have a fight?”

“We…drifted apart.”

More specifically, Faye-Marie drifted away from me, towards other kids who could play soccer when she decided she wanted her entire life to revolve around that sport. I could barely kick a ball, and when I did manage it, I sent it flying over a fence. My lack of athleticism ultimately cost me my project partner and my best friend. My best friend now is Kirsten, a bookworm like me, who shares my taste in fantasy novels. We met in high school. Faye-Marie friend-dumped me at the end of seventh grade.

The last year of elementary school, the eighth grade, had been rough. Knees-on-gravel rough. I cried all the time and thought loneliness would eat me alive like a Venus flytrap, on which I had to do a science class project alone, because Faye-Marie had partnered up with a teammate for a project on how soccer balls were made. She told me she and her new partner were researching how those things were filled with air, as if she and I hadn’t already studied something similar for my brother’s party already.

It broke my heart. Something exploded inside of me, and I couldn’t laugh to ease the pain. My teacher pulled me aside when my face was wet with tears and reminded me that I was entering ninth grade soon, and with a new school came a new batch of people to bond with. Faye-Marie had been my best friend in the whole wide world, but my whole wide world was about to expand.

So I waited the year out, praying that the universe would take pity on me and send me someone new. Someone up there must have heard me, because I met Kirsten in my grade nine art history class. We partnered up to do a project on Picasso, on which we got an A-. I was saved, but I still saw Faye-Marie almost every day, hanging out with other jocks, almost always wearing a team uniform. I waited for her to notice me, to remember my existence, our history, our shared accomplishments. But she never did. I will be morbid and say that her indifference to me was the sewing needle being pushed into me slowly, through a piece of tape. Not popping me, not again, as she’d done before, but just…hanging there. Just hanging there like a splinter sticking out of an open wound.

“Look at this.” Mrs. Farrell took my hand and led me to the cork board, still hanging and displaying the creative glories of her students.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but pinned to the top left corner was the photo Faye-Marie and I had presented to her and our classmates the Monday after my brother’s birthday party. It was crinkled and faded now, but there we were. Faye-Marie and me. The super team. And there were the two dozen red balloons hanging above our heads, crowning us, celebrating us. We’d spent those twenty dollars bills my Mom gave us on a trip to the movies. We saw The Incredibles. We didn’t have much money left over from the shopping trip, though. We’d spent it all on balloons.

Suddenly, that red arch looked to me like a miserable frown. I missed her, I realised then. I missed her so much. Why did she have to choose soccer over me? My eyes swelled with tears.  

Mrs. Farrell patted my shoulder consolingly and handed me a tissue from the box still sitting on her cluttered desk.

“It happens,” she told me, her smile warm, her tone wise. “People move on. There are some old students I miss, and old friends. Boyfriends too. Do you think Mr. Farrell was my first love?”

She’d kept the photo there because, apparently, our beaming faces had made her students happy. But it didn’t make me happy. I took it anyway, and when I folded it up and slipped it into my jacket pocket, I felt it sitting there, weighing me down. Photos by themselves weighed nothing, but a memory like that weighed more than anybody should be expected to carry.

I went with Kirsten to her niece’s birthday party. There were balloons of every colour, filled with helium, as they should be, and I selected a red. I almost expected the balloon not to take off when I tied the rolled-up photo to the string and released it into the sky. But it did, and I watched it disappear, into the clouds that gulped it up like a cube of Jell-O.

I imagine someone found it, when the balloon eventually deflated and descended. They probably picked it up, scratched their head, and wondered who the heck were these two oddball girls, posed like that under a whole bunch of balloons. Maybe it was Faye-Marie herself, wherever she is now, and she finally remembers me. Maybe sometime soon, I can expect a phone call from her, asking me to meet for a coffee and a catch-up, as old friends are supposed to do.

But to be perfectly honest, I prefer the thought of it being found by a stranger. If the balloon was still inflated a bit, I hope they took it inside with them, to hang up somewhere special where they lived before all the air escaped. Before it was just a piece of cheap, cherry-red, disposable rubber again.