The Truth About Cats and Dogs

So we've come to the time where I explain Christopher Schutte. All through my middle school and high school years, people would ask me: "What is the deal with you guys?" And I would say, "There is no deal." Which was true. Because the kind of "deal" people were wondering about, well, it just didn't exist between Christopher and me.

We moved to Thompson Drive in Lewisville, Texas when I was in sixth grade. (Leaving behind a sadistic and bad-tempered rental house on Pinewood, but that's another story.) Go ahead. Fly to Dallas and drive out to Lewisville and have a look. I myself have not seen that house in almost 10 years. Haven't been back to Lewisville in all that time.

There were two kids my age living on Thompson Drive when we moved there. Both across the street. We were all in the same grade. Mandy Schindler--she and I actually had the same first and middle name and became known as "Mandy S." and "Mandy L."--lived with her parents and younger brother Jason. I remember in Mandy's family, all the girls were named with that -ee sound at the end. Her mother was Kitty, her cousin in Wichita Falls was Wendy. . . There were others, but I've forgotten them now. Like, Kitty's sister was something like Sandy or what-have-you.

And then there was Christopher and his mother. He went by Christopher or sometimes Chris. Always Christopher in my mind, though. But that may just be because I have a cousin Christopher, too.

I didn't take any special notice of Christopher for the longest time. He was just sort of there, sometimes mowing the lawn for his mother. But then his mother and my mother got to being friendly, and so sometimes there were shared meals, or we'd find ourselves coloring Easter eggs together. That kind of thing. It was all very pedantic. (Sorry folks! Around school, I know, there were such expectations that something havey-cavey was going on, but nothing was!) It was sort of like having an annoying brother who, lucky for you, didn't actually share the house.

I guess Christopher and I got along because we were both only children, with that peculiar tie to our parents that only singular kids can have. In bigger families, it often seems to be the case of "the kids" and "the parents/adults" but Christopher and I had been raised in a way where, in our families, it was just "us." We were comfortable with adults in ways other kids our age sometimes weren't. Adults were what we knew best, knew them even better than our peers. Adults made sense to us in ways our classmates sometimes didn't.

Oh, we weren't socially awkward. Well, Christopher wasn't. He made a niche for himself in drama and exercised great strength there. I was a wallflower. I could interact well, and did if and when I had to, but I didn't seek it out. I stuck to journalism: the newspaper and the yearbook.

After our freshman year of high school, Mandy Schindler moved away--her family felt the need to be taken into the larger fold in Wichita Falls--so Christopher and I were the only ones left on our street. But there were other kids our age in the neighborhood. Topher Roach lived just around the corner. Angela Limpede lived at the far end of the subdivision. One of our teachers, too, lived around the bend from us.

But that's neither here nor there for this post. I call only clearly recall a handful of interactions with Christopher. Going over to house to watch movies--sometimes other people were there, sometimes it was just us. (We went to see Raising Cain at the movie theater, too, that being the only time we went out to a movie.) Him coming over once to have me record something on a cassette tape for him. . . I remember this because, when I advanced the tape with my finger to make sure it started when the recording did, Christopher said to me (as if surprised), "You know what you're doing!" Another time he came over while I was at the height of a ridiculous crush on someone a grade above us, and he found me cleaning my room furiously. At one point I snatched up my Swiss Army knife--a gift from friends acknowledging my love of MacGyver--and I must've looked pretty wild, because Christopher was nicer to me in that moment than he'd ever been. He got the knife away, and we ended up stretched out on my bed, coloring in a Beauty and the Beast coloring book. (What was I doing with that, I wonder?) He colored Gaston in all black and joked that it was Jessica Tedder (a girl at our school who was very pale and prone to wearing black, though I wouldn't call her an all-out Goth).

I remember a night in which Christopher and I stood on his front lawn and looked at the stars. We talked. . . But I don't remember now what about.

I remember him once telling me that he didn't like his friends knowing his mother. . . I didn't really understand it, but when I think back, maybe he meant that, really, I knew more about him and his family than he was comfortable with, at least at that point in his life.

I remember a night in which my mother and I were over at Christopher's house for dinner with him and his mother, and he and I got into a heated argument. His and my mother just watched, heads turning one way then another as if at a tennis match. (The argument was, of course, about our respective choices in friends--neither one of us approved of the others'.)

And I vividly recall a night in which, after we'd been at Denny's with a group of friend, we got home and Christopher slapped me--hard--because he felt I'd been too forward with one of our mutual [male] friends. That stunned me because, really, I was years away yet from a conscious ability to flirt (at least without being ridiculous), and had zero understanding of boys at that point to boot. I honestly had not known that anything I'd done that night could have been perceived as, er, a come-on?

Well, and no one had struck me in years. (My mother had been inclined to slap me when I was younger, but the last time she did it I'd been maybe 12 or 13.)

So that was "the deal." We graduated and went our separate ways, me to the state university, and he to an acting school of some kind. He eventually went to California, did some acting work and then fell into. . . real estate, I think? He's married, has a kid a few months younger than our son, last I heard. But aside from the one or two holiday cards, I've neither seen nor heard from him. But I wish him well. And maybe we'll cross paths again some day, at a reunion or some such. I haven't yet bothered to attend one, but my nostalgia may yet get the better of me and cause me to go one of these years.