I Remember the Exact Second My Best Friend’s Face Changed
Noah looked at him.
“Yes I am.”
“To who?”
“I don’t know yet.”
And Roger laughed.
“Nobody’s gonna marry you.“
I watched Noah’s smile come off. He looked down at his hands on the table.
And something went hot in my chest — that first-grade version of anger, which is enormous and has no vocabulary attached to it.
“That’s mean, Roger.”
He turned on me.
“What?”
“Somebody’s going to love Noah.”
“Then you marry him.”
The table laughed. Mrs. Alvarez shut it down in about four seconds — “That is enough, all of you” — and moved on to something about counting.
But the damage was done and I could see it on Noah’s face for the rest of the afternoon.
After Class He Asked Me a Question, and I Talked Myself Into a Very Serious Situation
We were at the cubbies. He was taking a long time with his jacket zipper.
“Chrissy. Would you… would you love me?”
I thought about it. Genuinely thought about it, with the full seriousness a six-year-old brings to a binding contract.
“Maybe I will.”
He looked up fast.
“Really?”
And I immediately understood I had committed to something.
“Maybe.”
He considered that. And then I remembered something my cousin Alyssa had been talking about nonstop for a month.
“But first we have to go to prom.”
“What’s prom?”
“A dance.”
He frowned.
“We have dances now. There’s one Friday.”
“No. Prom is when we’re almost grown-ups.“
“Oh.”
He put out his pinkie.
“Promise?”
I hooked mine around it.
“Promise.”
I forgot about it before dinner that night.
Noah did not.
Twelve Years Is a Long Time for a Childhood Friendship to Survive, and I Don’t Fully Know How Ours Did
We didn’t have the same classes after fourth grade. We made other friends. Our interests split hard.
He got obsessed with baseball — not casually, obsessively, with a level of statistical recall that made adults uncomfortable.
I got obsessed with art.
He spent a summer trying to teach me what an ERA was. I retaliated by dragging him to the art museum in Columbus twice.
Neither campaign accomplished anything. He still calls Monet “the blurry guy.”
And then, when we were twelve, my parents got divorced.
That Year Changed Me in Ways I Did Not Understand Until Very Recently
The house got quiet in a specific way. Dad moved to an apartment twenty minutes out.
Mom started crying in places she thought I couldn’t hear, and I started pretending I couldn’t hear, and we did that for about eight months.
At school I stopped eating lunch. Not dramatically. I’d take the tray, sit down, and push things around and throw most of it out.
Noah noticed.
He never once asked me to explain. Not one time in the whole year.
He just sat next to me. Sometimes he talked. Sometimes he didn’t.
There’s one day I remember clearly where he spent fifteen straight minutes explaining why our team needed a new relief pitcher.
I understood roughly four words of it.
It helped anyway. I have never been able to explain why and I’ve stopped trying.
The Ice Cream Rule Started After I Failed My First Driving Test
He showed up at my house that afternoon with two ice creams.
“Why two?”
“One because you tried.”
I smiled.
“And the other?”
“Because you drove badly.”
I threw a pillow at his head.
At sixteen, when I told him I was quitting art because a girl in my class had held up one of my paintings and laughed at it, he stole the ugliest dinosaur drawing I have ever produced.
I found it the next morning taped inside his locker.
“Noah!”
“What?”
“Why is that in there?”
He looked at it critically.
“Still looks like a potato with arms.”
“Then take it down.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t quit yet, Chrissy.”
“Why not?”
“The dinosaurs haven’t improved.”
That drawing stayed in his locker for two years. It’s in a frame in his room now, which is deeply embarrassing and which I have given up fighting.
He Never Gave Speeches — He Just Stayed Around Until Whatever Hurt Became Survivable
When my first boyfriend dumped me three weeks before junior homecoming, Noah turned up on my porch with chocolate ice cream and sat down beside me while I cried.
He said nothing for about ten minutes.
Then:
“I told you he was an idiot.”
I looked up with my whole face swollen.
“No you didn’t.”
“I thought it.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“It should.”
I laughed so hard I nearly choked.
He still tells that story at every opportunity. I still threaten him every single time.
So When Senior Prom Came Around, There Was Never Actually a Question — But He Thought There Was
He found me at my locker in February looking like a man about to do something difficult.
“Chrissy.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you remember first grade?”
I pretended to think about it.
“No.”
His whole face fell.
“…Seriously?”
“Noah, I’m kidding.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It was a little funny.”
“No.”
And then he held out his pinkie.
And I was six years old again, standing at the cubbies.
Raisins. Dinosaurs. A cruel kid at a table. A promise I had forgotten before dinner and somehow spent twelve years keeping anyway without ever once thinking about it.
I hooked my pinkie around his.
“Prom?”
“Prom.”
And his entire face lit up.
“I already got the bow tie.”
“When?”
“November.”
“Noah. It was November.”
“Exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
“Stores run out of things.”
“They were not going to run out of bow ties.”
“You don’t know that.”
That is officially how I got asked to prom.
On Prom Night I Was Upstairs Fighting With an Earring When the Doorbell Rang
“Chrissy! He’s here!” my aunt called up.
“Tell him two minutes!”
And from beyond the front door, muffled:
“She said that fifteen minutes ago!”
Traitor.
I got the earring in and looked at myself. Blue dress. Hair curled. Makeup my aunt had spent almost an hour on while telling me to stop talking.
I was nervous, and not about Noah.
Prom had always been one of those things that happened to older people. My cousin Alyssa’s prom. My mom’s prom, in a photograph on the stairs.
And then suddenly I was the older person, which is a thing nobody warns you about.
Source: Unsplash
Then My Mother Opened the Front Door and the House Went Completely Silent
Not normal silence. The kind that makes you stop moving.
I came out to the landing.
Noah was standing in our entryway. Navy suit, white shirt, that ridiculous bow tie absolutely straight because he’d clearly had someone check it four times.
In one hand he had a small corsage box.
He was smiling.
My mother was not.
She was staring at him.
“Mrs. Jane?”
She blinked.
“Oh. Noah. Hi, honey.”
“You okay?”
“Yes. Yes, fine.”
She wasn’t. I know my mother.
Something changed in that woman the second she looked at him. Her eyes went to the corsage. Then up to the bow tie. Then back to his face.
For about a second and a half, she looked like a person seeing a ghost.
“Chrissy’s almost ready,” she said quickly.
“I am ready.”
She turned and saw me on the stairs. And her face did something else entirely.
“Come upstairs with me.”
He Told Me What the Flower Meant and My Mother Made a Sound Behind Me
“Mom, Noah’s been waiting.”
“I know.”
Noah lifted the box.
“I have this.”
“I can see that.”
“It’s rosemary.”
I stopped halfway down the stairs.
“…Rosemary?”
“The florist said it means remembering.” He looked enormously pleased with himself. “And I remember promises.”
Behind me, my mother made a small sound.
I turned around and her eyes were full.
“Mom?”
“Upstairs, Chrissy.”
And this time she wasn’t asking.
She Shut My Bedroom Door and Locked It, and I Got Angry Before I Got Scared
“Okay. You’re scaring me.”
She turned around.
“You can go tonight. One condition.”
And something in me went straight to the worst possibility.
“If this is about Noah having Down syndrome, I swear to God, Mom—”
