#eg's

I turned fourteen the day I last saw Nikki. It was the weekend before school began again and she'd come over to my birthday party, the year my parents thought I was still into Power Rangers and hired some college kids to dress up in costumes and traipse about in our garden. 

Had I had any kind of social life back then, I suppose I would have been more embarrassed than I was. Just imagine being this awkward, scrawny kid with a doting mother and an absentee father, surrounded by your school friends who glared and snickered at you because, in actuality, they weren't really your school friends and couldn't wait for Monday morning to come round so they could remind you while they glared and snickered at you in the hallway instead.

But they didn’t matter to me, because Nikki made anything bad feel better. We were friends. The best of friends, even though she grew up pretty and popular and I hadn’t.

My mother had gone inside to fetch her special knife to cut the cake. The other children started to tease me and Nikki hollered at them to shut it. So when the sky darkened and the rain poured down over us, over the cake and the college kids dressed in shiny spandex suits, over my presents, over everything, Nikki took my hand and we ran off. We found our special hiding place and waited out the storm.    

She would have been fourteen that November. At her funeral, the paster said, she had gone to Heaven where the good and the young ended up. 

I still have her picture in my wallet. And, yeah, that alone cost me a few girlfriends, but I owed Nikki that much because she taught me how to be a friend and how to love someone without conditions or pretense.