Jeffrey would grin.
“Figure out what?”
Mom would just smile.
“You know exactly what.”
Then Jeffrey would look at me, and I would roll my eyes.
“We’re friends, Mom.”
And technically, that was true.
The truth underneath it was something neither of us was brave enough to examine.
I think we were both more afraid of losing the friendship than we were excited by the possibility of becoming something more.
So we left things exactly as they were.
Until one summer night when we were nineteen.
We had both gone on terrible dates.
Mine had spent nearly the entire evening talking about himself.
Jeffrey’s date had left early after they argued over some movie.
Later that night, Jeffrey and I met at our old high school football field.
The gates had been left open, so we slipped beneath the bleachers and sat in the grass.
Jeffrey leaned against one of the metal supports.
“We’re terrible at this.”
I laughed.
“At dating?”
“At choosing people.”
“That might be true.”
He became quiet.
Then he asked,
“What if we never figure it out?”
“We’ll survive.”
“What if we’re both still single when we’re old?”
I looked at him.
Jeffrey held out his pinky.
“If we’re both single at sixty, we stop being idiots and find each other.”
I stared at his hand.
He wasn’t joking.
“Jeffrey.”
“I mean it.”
“Why sixty?”
“Because if we haven’t figured our lives out by then, clearly we need help.”
I laughed and wrapped my pinky around his.
“Deal.”
“Deal.”
For one strange second, neither of us moved.
I remember wanting to say something else.
Something important.
But I didn’t.
Two months later, Jeffrey left for college three states away.
—
At first, distance didn’t change much.
We wrote constantly.
Long letters.
Birthday cards.
Pages filled with ordinary details that somehow felt important simply because they came from each other.
Jeffrey complained about his roommate, who apparently believed cleaning was optional.
I told him about working at the library while studying to become a teacher.
He complained about cafeteria food.
I complained about people returning library books stained with coffee.
During that first year, I probably knew more about Jeffrey’s daily life than people who lived in his dorm.
Then slowly, the letters began arriving less often.
Every week became every two weeks.
Every two weeks became once a month.
