I put my mind to who I was going to go out and see. I needed to have an actual conversation with someone — some chatty shop girl or indulgent barista wasn’t going to cut it. But the only people I knew in town were people from high school and elderly relatives — and in both types of faces I would be forced to behold a reflection of my teenage self, which I felt like I’d done enough of in the past few days to last a lifetime.

Finally, after an hour or so of combing through Facebook, I remembered a person named Jessica Hendy.

Jessica was from childhood, not high school like the two or three other old acquaintances I had around town. She and I had been best friends between the ages of nine and ten, which seems like it would make for a tenuous connection, but ever since we had reconnected online, I’d been remembering her with more vividness than I did even the handful of people I’d spent every waking moment partying and studying and sleeping with at university.

This was the only friendship I ever had that I now recognize as being obsessive. I mean obsessive in the way of little girls, where one day your affinity for this kneesocked, pigtailed person, your desire to spend every waking hour with her, moving through the world as a kind of conjoined being, obliterates every other thing you may once have wanted to do. Other friends don’t just fall away — they are actively pushed. You turn tail and run off, hand in hand, if they try to approach. Everything but being together becomes an inconvenience, something to begrudge. Piano lessons, swimming. Brownies, family time. I suppose the experience acts as a kind of hormone-free sneak peek, in the pre-sex world of childhood, at what falling in love will be like.

My memories of spending time with Jessie came closest of all my childhood memories to being that clichéd thing, idyllic. It was something about that quality of obsessiveness that made it so. Leaving the house in the morning with a backpack full of Barbies, being called in for dinner after what seemed like no more than a couple of hours. The gorgeous inconsequence of time. I could remember long, mesmerizing afternoons of skipping — the hypnotic thip thip thip as the plastic rope hit the pavement, one end tied to a hydro pole so one of us could turn and the other could jump. And chalk on sidewalks. Enormous, elongated hopscotches, unfurling down the block, square after square after square, talking seriously about whether or not we should call Guinness and enter it into the Book of World Records because who would ever think to make a hopscotch this long? And going to my house and Jessica being happy to hang out with Kelli; going to her house and not liking her house and not knowing why. Her mother, I remember, just didn’t seem as good as my mother, somehow (I didn’t realize then how few mothers would). And also Jessica had men in her house — teenage brothers and a dad — who would bluster through the kitchen, sometimes shirtless, hair tufting from beneath armpits, ignoring us, barking for things, and the mother would bark back at them, and this was what I didn’t like about the mother. Because why did the mother have to be like them? I didn’t mind them being like them — they were supposed to be alien, big-voiced and intimidating. They came and went like traffic, roaring past, always on the move. But why couldn’t the mother, who stayed put (as it seemed to me that mothers should), be more like us? I remember her bare legs in the summertime, varicose veins, in a kitchen that never seemed sunny to me, no matter what the weather was doing outside.