The Table Story

At age 12 I met a new girl that just arrived at the school in the village. Her name was Eliya. She was very confident for a 12 year old girl. She was already flirting with the school's security guard in order to get a cigarette out of him, and sometimes she stole from the kiosk. My other friends exclaimed that she thinks she deserves everything because her dad was a hero that died in the first Lebanon war while her mom was still pregnant with her. Her dad's name was Eli. She was his remains. The remains that they added 'ya' to.

She walked around as if with every step she took, things would fall into place just the way she wanted. And I admired her for that. In 7th grade we were always together. Because of her I started to smoke, to wear belly shirts and to hitchhike to Haifa.
I stayed at her house a lot. We could do whatever we wanted there. We watched the Woodstock films over and over, we planned trips to Tel Aviv and we smoked. One time Eliya tried to stick a kitchen knife into her heart, I don't know why, she seemed happy. Maybe she was influenced by the films. Afterwards she was left with a small scar on her chest and it actually looked good.

In the mean time her mom married again, smoked a lot and always gave orders at home. She said to Eliya about me that "quiet water penetrates deep," even though I wasn't that cool. Her new dad had a construction worker's truck and pretty blue eyes, and he was also a hero from some battle. Eliya said that he was like a real father. I remember that he was always solving crossword puzzles and never once said hi to me.

At home they had a boxer that was a bit aggressive, who I was very afraid of. She would always sit underneath the brown table in the entranceway, guarding. Three things I remember from that table –
that there was always a mess on it, I think crosswords and newspapers, that it once belonged to Eliya's dead father, and that besides her new father, nobody was allowed near it, because of the boxer.

My contact with Eliya completely ended. Two years ago I sent her a friend request on Facebook and a few months ago a post she wrote appeared on my news feed. She wrote that she was giving away some belongings since she was moving abroad. Among the belongings that she was giving away I saw the brown table.