Chapter Text
Miriam Wexler moved to Toronto, Canada from an itty bitty town in Montana . Kind of a big difference, if you ask her. She really didn’t know what to expect from this new town and new people. She’d lived in that same house in Montana her entire life. She’d gone to school with the same 20 kids in her grade, had the same order at the local burger joint, had the same tiny skate park where the only people there were her and two boys that were almost twice her age.
So, yeah. Big difference.
On the bright side, every other sixth grader (the people here called it grade six , and Miriam can’t help but think that’s the dumbest thing just about ever ) looks just as lost as she does. No one knows where their classes are, all of them studying schedules and maps printed on green cardstock paper, hoping to make sense out of the nonsense printed there.
The teachers don’t look that much better, honestly, all of them trying to help about 10 different kids at once. Yikes. Miriam looks around, hoping to see someone that might know what they’re doing, at least a little bit, and spots a girl who is confidently cutting through the mass of eleven-year-old kids.
Miriam follows her, apologizing as she tries to shove kids away as gently as possible. When she finally catches up to the girl, she taps her shoulder, only to go unnoticed. After two more gentle pokes, Miriam grabs the other girl’s shoulder, startling her into stopping.
She turns around, looking ready to tell Miriam off, but she falls short when Miriam holds her hands up in surrender and yelps, “Sorry! I just- well. You looked like you knew where you were going, and I've never been here before, and I just moved here, like, a week ago, and I was just hoping you could point me—“ Miriam stops when she sees the shorter girl hold up a hand, signaling for her to hush.
“Let me see your schedule,” she offers, holding out an expectant hand. Miriam breathed out a grateful thanks and handed her the paper.
As the girl studied Miriam’s schedule, Miriam studied the girl. She had short black hair, pinned back with a green hair clip, and thin wire-framed glasses perched on her nose. She wore a pink dress, the top layered with a red cardigan, with white leggings and red shoes. She kind of looked like Valentine’s day threw up on her, but it worked for the short girl.
“Okay! So, lucky for you, your homeroom class is with me! So is your third, gym, and your fourth and eighth, reading and social studies. Stick with me, kid, and you’ll go far.” The girl said with a nod, handing the schedule back to Miriam before setting off towards their class.
Once they sat down, Miriam kept opening and closing her mouth. To ask for the girl’s name, maybe, or literally anything. Her first chance at a friend in Toronto and Miriam was blowing it !
Just as she had gathered up the resolve to ask this girl for any scrap of information, the teacher clapped her hands together and asked them to quiet down.
Then she started to call roll.
This is perfect, really, because now she can learn the girl’s name, and Miriam doesn’t even have to pay attention to the first several names. Having a last name that started with a ‘W’ had very, very few perks.
So when the girl promptly raises her hand in response to “My-Lynn Lee?” Miriam is a little confused. My-Lynn did not seem to suit the girl next to her—nor did it sound like a real name.
“It’s pronounced ‘May-Lynn’, actually, ma’am. And you can call me ‘Mei’, if that’s easier,” the girl— Mei— corrects their teacher.
“Mei, okay, got it,” the teacher scribbles something on the roll sheet before moving on to the next kid.
Their teacher either needs glasses or can’t read very well, neither of which fill Miriam with confidence for the upcoming school year. The teacher fumbles over several names, mispronouncing them or just messing them up in general.
Unfortunately for Miriam, she fell into the second category.
“Miriam Webster?” she felt her cheeks flush— Miriam Webster, like the dictionary ? No way!
Mei, next to her, snorts out a giggle, biting her cheek to try and stay quiet.
“Uh. It’s actually Wexler? With a ‘X’,” Miriam tries to explain, Mei snorting again in response to Miriam’s never-ending awkwardness. Like she had with Mei and almost every other student, the teacher jots something onto the roll sheet and moves on to the last few kids.
She leads them through their icebreaker (each partner talks for about 2 minutes, and then your partner has to tell the whole class all of the things they remember) and sets the timer for them to start.
“So, Miss Webster, tell me about yourself,” Mei says, leaning back in her chair and crossing her legs, as if this was a business interview.
“You’re never gonna drop the dictionary thing, are you?”
“Yeah, no, I’ll still be talking about it in high school. And in college. And at your wedding. Then I’ll tell your kids. You will never escape the curse of Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, I’m afraid,”
Now, theoretically, Miriam should be at least a little bit upset by this. She should be begging Mei to never bring it up again, or offering her Cosmic Brownies in exchange for Mei’s silence, but all she can do is grin. Everything Mei said meant that they were friends !
In the end, the only things that they can share with the class is each other’s names, favorite colors, and that Miriam is from the States. Funnily enough, that’s still more than what the rest of the class was able to share.
——
Miriam’s seventeenth birthday comes around in August of 2006 (“You have the same birthday as Percy Jackson,” Priya had commented when she’d gotten her hands on the newest New York Times bestseller) and Miriam is thrilled.
Her birthday falls on a Saturday, which is perfect, because all of her friends could come over to her house for pizza and games and movies, and then her Besties could sleep over afterwards.
The party goes off without a hitch, and Miriam is so grateful for all of her friends. Stacy gets her a red flannel, and Tyler had gotten her a pink one, and Priya’s goth girlfriend had gotten her a yellow one. “Now you have the whole set!” Abby jokes, squeezing her in a hug.
Speaking of her friends, Abby, Priya, and Mei had all pitched in and got Miriam an iPod with a ton of her favorite songs already uploaded.
“O-M-G, you guys! You so did not have to do this! How will I ever top this? You guys are the best !” She grabs her friends into a group hug, all of them squeezing tight. Mei’s fluffy red ears flick up and down in affection, making the other girls swat playfully at them.
Later (a lot later), after everyone else had gone home, and Priya and Abby had crashed on Miriam’s bedroom floor, Mei and Miriam were laying on the roof. Mei’s bag sat next to her, and Miriam was having trouble not pushing her best friends for answers.
Normally, she would, but right now, Mei looked nervous. Miriam was afraid to move too fast or breathe too loudly, at risk of spooking the shorter girl. So both of them lay silently, staring up at the night sky above them.
Finally, after the longest silence of Miriam’s life, Mei speaks up.
“I, um. I have another gift for you,” Mei said, grabbing a strap of her overnight bag. “No one else knows about it. Not even Priya and Abby.” and, crud, Mei looks serious.
“You didn’t have to. The iPod was more than plenty—!”
“Oh, this one was only like, $7, but I just. Well, it’s cheesy, but um—“ she unzips her bag and grabs something out of it, hanging the object to Miriam.
“Mei, wha— is this a dictionary ? A Merriam-Webster dictionary?”
“Yeah, the, um, there are tabbed pages? Yellow tab first, then pink, then green. The words are highlighted on the page, too,” Mei explains, holding and twisting her tail in anxiety, her ears flat on her head with nerves, and her cheeks flushed pink with embarrassment.
Miriam smiles reassuringly at Mei, and she sees the smaller girl relax (only a little) before she cracks open the dictionary.
The first highlighted word was just ‘I’.
Miriam’s brow furrows, confusion twisting her features.
The second highlighted word was ‘love’.
The confusion seeps away in favor of soft eyes and lips parted in an ‘O’ shape.
The third highlighted word was ‘you’.
Miriam’s face turned up in a smile, and she finally looked back at Mei, who met her with a hesitant smile of her own.
“I love you, too,” Miriam says.
So, yeah. Toronto is a big difference from that itty bitty town in Montana.