Aug 30, 2024 4 min read

It was the first day of junior high, and I was lost and worried.

Sixth grade had been easy; I had my best friend group, and I expected to land in the new, bigger world of the new building with the ease of that social cushion. But that confidence was clobbered one summer day when the friend group decided I was not one of them – perhaps not cool enough – and cornered me to announce that I wouldn’t be in their circle any more.

And so there I stood in the junior high lunch line that first day, living up to what the mean girls had decided about me: a big nerd in pigtails, knee socks and an unfortunate pair of culottes, remember culottes? How was I going to survive this paddle wheel of early teenage misery?

And then something happened that probably changed my course for the next six years. I turned around to find a very pretty and petite girl. She had blonde hair and blue eyes; in a move that seemed brave and bold, she talked to me.

“Hi,” she said, and introduced herself. As we moved through the lunch line, we learned enough to begin a true friendship. We lived not far from each other; we were both in the band; we were both nervous about seventh grade.

What is it that opens up two strangers to connect instantly? Any other student might have joined the lunch line behind me, without the same happy result.

We were a pair all through junior high and high school, tall and awkward me and my petite, cute sidekick; she playing clarinet and I, alto saxophone; she speeding through trigonometry with ease and I, struggling to keep up. We’d talk at school, talk on the bus ride and then call each other when we got home to talk some more.

“What the heck did we talk about?” I asked her this week. She and I met for dinner, the first time we’d spoken in almost 30 years.

“You look the same,” I said as I walked into the restaurant, and I meant it. For the next four hours we talked, as the questions and answers and stories and three decades worth of backfill all came spilling out. I talked more than she did, which is the way it usually was.

She said she wasn’t sure what our reunion would be like: Would too much time have changed us so much that we could no longer find common ground?

We’ve all had reunions like that, the well-intentioned and hopeful meetings that, while pleasant enough, had somehow lacked the spark to reestablish a friendship. But this reunion was better than that. The years had brought loss and struggles, and we talked about those things.

But more than that, we remembered. How her love for Donny Osmond turned me into a Donny superfan (she got over that crush long before I did). How our trigonometry teacher wore flippy skirts. I remembered the names of her cats and dogs, and she remembered my dogs. Her mom’s delicious homemade pizza. The band trips. The time we skinny-dipped in a lake. The moment our sophomore year, when she met the senior guy she would eventually marry.

But she didn’t remember that first moment in the lunch line. Maybe that was because it was nothing remarkable for her to reach out to a strange kid and say hello, but it was remarkable for me, a defining moment of those awful teenage years. I don’t know what they would have been like without her beside me.

“Thank you for that, ” I told her as we left. She said we should stay in touch. I think we will.