Sam

From: Robert L. Temple
20 Jan 2000

Samantha liked having a boy’s name, sometimes the letters she got in her e-mail were boys writing to her as if she were another boy to whom they could spill their guts. The letters from boys intrigued her greatly and she had started an advice column, an anonymous one, in the school paper and the letters came directly to her with an invitation to write to the column privately without wanting the letter published. She had solicited these letters, and she loved it.

Now however she had a problem, for a young girl had written the most pathetic letter about a young boy she adored but who paid her no attention, she felt that telling the child to wait was cruel downright heartless, so she had written to a real ‘Ann Landers ” type of” person and had received that very answer, that the young girl must wait, the boy was simply too young to be interested in a girl as a girlfriend, perhaps in any girl at all beyond his mother. Heartless, thought Sam (Samantha) and thought about what she could do to help the young couple.

She had their names and knew them both in the halls of the six-year school which she attended. The boy was cute, active, popular and the girl also cute, but not in the same class as the boy. How could she bring them together, though to learn each others’ qualities, to know each other as friends. The wrenching letter of the young girl would not leave Sam’s heart. After a month of letting it stew in her, she decided the one thing she needed to do was organize a party … a very simple in-school party for those interested in … that would be the trick, how in the world could she think up a topic that would interest the two of them, such worlds apart.

At last she decided to simply tell the girl what she was doing, why and how and let the girl decide for herself if she wanted this opportunity, which she did. Then she had only to announce a meeting in her homeroom after school with her homeroom teacher’s consent and presence, on a topic that would cinch the boy’s interest. She asked the girl and sure enough, a meeting about forming a club on the topic of the solar system would be sure to draw the boy and not too many others.

She was right, it worked.