Some choose to be minor characters. There is nothing wrong in this despite your suspicion, itself most likely colored by your own understandable and ordinary desire to take a central place in someone's story. Few of us think ourselves wild iris in backwater (what was the line from the poem? something blue..., then she recalls: a violet half-hidden by a stone. There was beauty in poetry, she couldn't put it differently, she was an ordinary person, a minor character, though it made what she felt no less real).

The girl on the Pacific shore stares out looking for her mother.

Or the girl sitting on a log by the water at the deserted public boat launch waiting for him to surface. Ever there, a minor character (it had been a whole month now, the boat launch now in June alive with fishermen heading out in the Hudson after spawning stripers), waiting and watching carefully, scanning the whole surface of the broad creek, ready to help him were he in trouble, watching every second because he could not cry out.

Though that was wrong. He could cry, it was halfway between grunt and yelp really, he just couldn't hear, though she made that mistake often, before that morning, ever after: he couldn't shout. They had slipped out during third period and went to Wappingers Creek. He wanted her to swim too. He had stripped down to white undershorts, his penis and whathaveyou a little white sack in the middle. He signed the sign for swim and grunt-yelped, "Du twim doo! Du twim doo!" Though the way he talked often made it seem like he was scolding, it was so sweet too she had to smile. No, she signed, I watch. It was her period, she didn't sign that, and she wore ugly cotton panties her mother had bought "for day-to-day wear," and a bra that looked like it was designed for the Russian army. She wouldn't want to be seen so, so she sat and watched for her, saw him grin as he dove down, his back arching, white white against the dark water.