One of the faculty members was making an announcement that no one seemed to be listening to while most of the kids were chatting energetically. I was eavesdropping on their conversations while self-consciously picking at the fraying ends of my cast when a kid sat across from me.
“I like your lunchbox,” he said.
I could tell he was making fun of me, and I grew really angry; in my mind, that lunchbox was the last good thing about my day. I had used it every day at home since my mom had gotten it for me. She would make me sandwiches and put them in my lunchbox, and I would carry it to the white dining room table and eat them. It wasn’t for practice; I was just excited to use it. Lunch that day in school was the first time I had used my lunchbox out of the house, and despite everything that had happened with my cast and the group earlier that day, I was still excited to use it officially.
I didn’t look up from my arm to face my classmate because I felt a burning in my eyes from the tears that I was holding back. As I struggled to maintain my composure, I looked up to tell the kid to leave me alone. But before I could get the words out, I saw something that made me pause.
He had the exact same lunchbox.
I laughed. “I like your lunchbox too!”
“I think Michelangelo’s the coolest,” he said, while miming nun-chuck moves.
This was the first conversation I had ever had with another kid my own age that wasn’t guided or chaperoned by my mother; while I had a lot of freedom in my neighborhood, there weren’t any other kids that were my age, so when I played, I played alone. Even though this new dynamic made me slightly nervous, it was a good kind of nervous. I was speaking up to rebut his preference by saying that Raphael was my favorite, when he knocked his open carton of milk off the table and onto his lap.
“Aw. Crap!” he said, and immediately covered his mouth with both hands and reflexively shifted his eyes from side to side to see who might have heard it.
I tried very hard to stifle my laughter since I didn’t know him at all, but the struggling look on my face must have struck him as funny because he started laughing first. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so bad about my cast and thought that this person would hardly notice now anyway. As we laughed with one another, I thought to try my luck.
“Hey! Do you wanna sign my cast?”
As I worked the marker out of my pocket, he asked me how I broke my arm. I told him that I fell out of the tallest tree in my neighborhood, and he seemed impressed. I watched him laboriously draw his name on my cast — pausing before each letter to draw it in the air to make sure that it felt right. When he was done, I asked him what it said.
He told me it said “Josh.”
Josh and I had lunch together every day, and whenever we could, we partnered up for projects. We became really close very quickly, to the point that if Josh was ever absent from school, I would feel a bit lost the entire day. We worked well together both within and outside of the curriculum of our grade. I helped him with his handwriting, and when I could, his spelling, and he took the blame when I wrote “Fart!” on the wall in permanent marker. I would come to know other kids, but I think I knew even then that Josh was my only real friend.
Moving a friendship outside of school when you are five years old is actually more difficult than most remember. The Friday we launched our balloons, the atmosphere was so energetic and excited that, when I had finished transcribing my letter, I joined Josh at his desk and asked him if he wanted to come to my house after school to play and maybe even stay the night. He said he did and that he’d bring some of his toys. I said that we could also go exploring in the woods around my house.
When I got home, I asked my mom if Josh could come to our house, and she said that would be fine. My enthusiasm was boundless until I realized that I had no way of contacting Josh to tell him. I spent the whole weekend worrying that our friendship would be dissolved by Monday.
When I saw him after the weekend, I was relieved to find that he had run into the same obstacle and thought that it was funny. Later that week, we both remembered to write down our phone numbers at home and then exchange them at school. My mom spoke with Josh’s dad, and it was decided that she would pick up Josh and me from school that Friday. We alternated this basic structure nearly every weekend. If we managed to make plans far enough in advance, we would even secure permission slips from our parents so that we could just get off the bus with each other at either his or my house. The fact that we lived so close to one another made the arrangements much easier for our parents, who seemed to work constantly.
As time moved along, I found it more difficult to imagine doing things without Josh. That’s not to say I actively tried to imagine such things, but as an only child, I had never had the disposition to picture myself with anyone else, except maybe my mother. As Josh and I grew closer, however, whenever I thought of a new place to go or a new activity to try, I always reflexively inserted Josh into the scenario. We had so many adventures when I lived in my old house that I find it difficult to remember them all. The actual nature of what we were doing never really seemed to have any impact on how fun the activity was for us. As long as we were together, we had a good time.
When my mom and I moved across the city during the summer after first grade, I was sure that our friendship had seen its last day. As we drove away from the house that I had lived in my whole life, I felt a sadness that I knew wasn’t just about a house — I was saying goodbye to my friend forever.
But, to my surprise and delight, Josh and I stayed close.
Despite the fact that we spent the majority of our time apart and only saw one another on weekends, we remained remarkably similar as we grew. Our personalities coalesced, our senses of humor complimented each other’s, and we would often find that we had started liking new things independently. I would sometimes call Josh, or he would call me, to share information about some new TV show or toy, only to find that it was old news for the other. We even sounded enough alike that when I stayed with Josh he would sometimes call my mom pretending to be me; his success rate was impressive. My mom would sometimes joke that the only way she could tell us apart sometimes was by our hair — he had straight, dirty-blonde hair like his sister, while I had curly, dark brown hair like my mother.
One would think that the thing most likely to drive two young friends apart would be what’s out of their control. I’m quite sure that many friendships have stagnated when one party is forced to move away — the parents thinking that their children will just make new friends. While I feared at the time that this would be the case for us, I think the catalyst of our gradual disengagement was my insistence that we sneak out to my old house to look for Boxes.
That night, perhaps because we were old enough to reflect on it appropriately, seemed to cause a rift between us; not a striking and violent rift, but a gradual one — like two continents parting ways. The weekend after our excursion, I invited Josh over to my house, in keeping with our tradition of alternating houses, but he said that he wasn’t really feeling up to it. If I’m honest, neither was I, and so I didn’t protest. But maybe I should have.
We began seeing progressively less of one another over the next year or so. Our time together had gone from once a week, to once a month, to once every couple of months. Unlike when we were kids, we seemed to struggle to find things to do or talk about. But it was all gradual enough that perhaps we didn’t notice it, even if we might have felt it.