“But first, I need you to hear something.”
“About what?”
For a moment, she didn’t answer.
Her eyes moved toward the closed door.
Then she looked back at me.
“About Noah.”
My stomach tightened.
And then she added, much more quietly:
“And about me.”
Suddenly, prom was the last thing on my mind.
A Friendship That Started With Raisins
Noah and I had been best friends since we were six years old.
There was no dramatic beginning to our friendship. No movie-worthy introduction. No teacher intentionally putting us together because she somehow knew we would become inseparable.
It started because we both hated raisins.
Our first-grade teacher had handed everyone a little red box of raisins during snack time.
I didn’t want to eat mine, but I was also six years old and deeply concerned about getting in trouble for wasting food. So I developed what I believed was an ingenious strategy: I quietly pushed the raisins underneath my napkin.
Then I heard a voice beside me.
“That’s smart.”
I turned.
Noah was doing exactly the same thing.
“You hate them too?” I whispered.
He nodded solemnly.
“They’re old grapes.”
I considered this.
It was flawless six-year-old logic.
And that was enough.
By lunchtime, we were sitting together.
By the end of the week, we were inseparable.
Noah had Down syndrome, although at six years old that fact meant much less to me than the things I actually cared about.
He laughed loudly at my terrible drawings.
He knew an unreasonable number of facts about dinosaurs.
He sometimes cheated during dinosaur trivia and then insisted he had merely “remembered faster.”
He hated raisins.
I liked him.
Childhood friendships can be beautifully uncomplicated that way.
We didn’t analyze why we were friends.
We simply were.
The Promise We Made at Six
One afternoon, another boy in our class said something cruel to Noah.
I don’t remember what started the conversation, but I remember the words.
“Nobody is ever going to marry you.”
Noah’s expression changed immediately.
Even at six, I understood enough to know that the comment had hurt him.
“Somebody will love him,” I snapped.
The other boy laughed.
“Then you marry him.”
The argument ended soon afterward, but Noah didn’t forget it.
Later, he found me by myself.
“Chrissy?”
“What?”
He looked unusually serious.
“Would you love me?”
