Free Confectionately Yours #3: Sugar and Spice by Lisa Papademetriou

back. But the crowd is thinning out, so I break into a jog. “Artie,” I say, and I touch her shoulder.
    She freezes, and I get in front of her to block her way. Artie’s face is red, and a thin blue vein in her forehead is standing out. Her eyes are red, too, and I know she’s focusing all of her will on not crying.
    “I’m sorry,” I tell her.
    Artie sucks in some air. “No big deal,” she says brightly. “Lots of people didn’t make it.” She even manages to smile, but she’s looking over my shoulder.
    She really is a good actress , I realize. “It is a big deal,” I say.
    Artie’s hazel eyes meet mine. “You don’t have to pretend to care,” she says. Then she steps around me, like I’m something in the way. A stone, maybe.
    And I can’t really tell if I do care or not.

I used to have a hamster named Fabio. He had long, golden fur and a twitchy little nose. He loved cantaloupe and going outside in the backyard. I loved the feel of his scratchy little feet as he tried to run up and down my arm.
    Anyway, I had Fabio for three and a half years, and then, two weeks after Christmas, he died. I don’t know why. I didn’t feed him anything weird, or forget about him. He just died, I guess. I still feel sad when I think about it.
    I cried for a long time after Dad buried Fabio in the backyard. Mom and Dad tried to cheer me up, but I could tell that they didn’t really think I should be so upset over a hamster.
    I told Marco about Fabio, and he said, “That’s sad. Hamsters don’t live very long.” He was nice, but I could tell he didn’t really want to talk about Fabio.
    When I told my friends Lily and Jane at school, Jane just shrugged and started talking about her fish. Lily said her parents wouldn’t let her have any pets, and that was the end of the conversation.
    Chloe was the only person who seemed to feel the way I did. She bawled her head off. But that didn’t really make me feel better.
    And then there was Artie. When I told her about Fabio, she looked … I don’t know … stricken. I think that’s the word. Like someone had just slapped her. She grabbed my hand and said, “Oh!” and then she have me a big hug. “Are you okay?” she asked.
    “I’m sad,” I said.
    “Of course you are,” Artie told me, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Like it was normal to be sad over a hamster.
    “I’m really sad,” I confessed. My voice was almost a whisper. It was hard to get the words out.
    “Fabio lived with you in your room for three years!” Artie cried. “He was there every day! You played with him, you fed him, you petted him. You spent more time with Fabio than with anyone else!”
    And then I really did start to cry, and Artie hugged me. I cried really hard until I started to hiccup, and Artie rubbed my back until I calmed down.
    I guess big deals are relative. What may be a big deal to one person isn’t a big deal to another. Or maybe some people are good at handling one kind of big deal, and bad at handling others. When my parents announced that they were splitting up, Artie didn’t want to talk about it. She wasn’t a very good friend then.
    But when Fabio died, she hugged me while I cried. Then we went outside together, into the snowy yard. I showed Artie the place where we had buried him, and she sang “Amazing Grace,” and we talked about the time Fabio got lost in the hosta plants and Marco wanted to call 911 for help. (We wouldn’t let him, and we found Fabio about three minutes later.) I remembered the funny little squeaks he would make when he was happy, and Artie remembered the time that he was crawling on my shoulder and dug his way into my shirt.
    We talked and laughed for a long time, and by the time Artie went home, I felt like the pieces of my heart had knit back together a little bit.
    Artie was the only person who knew it was a really big deal when my hamster died.
    And I know it’s a really big deal that she didn’t make the callback list