I don’t have your number. So I won’t know unless I follow the return address on your letters (because you still write paper letters, even though your own mother calls you a hundred years old for it). Letters I have not answered, because to look at you, to look at the pain in your hands, to remember the things it will take you years to have again, is to be reminded of the pain in my ankles, the wearing-down of my own tendons, and all the things I will probably never have again.

But I have kept every piece of your life those letters have given me. Your low opinion of the required summer reading list. Your sister’s rescue dog, who acts as distant and aloof as a cat. How the tree in the back of your house is heavy with lemons, how your father salts, slices, and eats them as though they’re oranges.

I won’t know unless I ask.

I won’t know unless I get out of this car.

My mother is already looking at me in a way that says, without her speaking, We came all this way y eres una gallina? I know she’s talked to your mother, warned her, though probably not you, that I’m coming, which makes me want to sink into the front seat of my mother’s four-door and vanish.

Maybe those letters mean nothing, except what you always said, Someone has to keep paper letters alive.

I won’t know unless I walk the steps to your front door, and ask you.

Prom

Prom

Danielle Paige

We were eight when we met. You offered to trade half your peanut butter sandwich for half of my turkey sandwich on the first day of school. I was all legs and curls, and you were shaggy blond bangs that hung over too big glasses.

We were twelve when we dressed up as our favorite wizards and stood in line for hours to get the last book in that series. Every new book marked a new year of our friendship.

We were thirteen when I wondered for the first time what it would be like to kiss you.

We were sixteen when you asked me to prom.

In an hour you will kiss me in front of all our friends and not-friends and teachers on the dance floor. And I will kiss you back. And it will be all the things I imagined, sweet and breathless and heart quickening.

But when the kiss is done, I will look around to see if our friends and not-friends and teachers are looking. And you won’t.

Because I know you.

I know that you like the Stones better than The Beatles. I know what your face looked like when your dad moved out. I know how it looks when he picks you up for weekends. Maybe I know you better than anyone else.

And you know me, too.