We meet when we are small. I have a side part. You’re growing into your smile.
Sometimes my mom drives you home from school and we do homework together on my bedroom floor: pre-algebra and five-paragraph essays. We talk about our middle school boyfriends that we acquired in tandem. You insist yours isn’t gay.
In your room, the walls are lavender and lined with old softball trophies. We read the same books; we wear the same socks. You teach me how to bake. My job is to eat the extra chocolate chips. I braid your hair before I go home so you can wear it wavy to school tomorrow. I leave your house with capri leggings covered in dog hair and cookies in my backpack.
We go to high school. We join the track team. I fall asleep on your shoulder on the way to meets, our bus chugging steadily along the I-5. I break up with my boyfriend and you buy me an ice cream and waffle fries. Our world is school and the parking lot next to school and our neighborhood and we explore every bit of it.
Summers are warm and filled with picnics and carpooling and fireworks. I start lifeguarding at the pool by your house, and you bring me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches during my lunch break. We talk about people that we don’t like and how we’re nervous to start sophomore year and about what we should do after I’m done with work. You’re loud, and I turn loud, too. My 27 minute break ends and you walk me back to the gate and bid me farewell. I see you three hours later, and the next day and the next.
I braid your hair and pluck your eyebrows before school dances and teach you how to use mascara. You teach me to stand up for myself. I didn’t do that before. We bike around the neighborhood and up into the hills and watch the sky turn orange, study the way the telephone lines shrink into the clouds.
We learn how to drive and the world is ours — the Target parking lot, the beach, the mall. We plan our purchases accordingly to double our closets. We become regulars at the sushi restaurants frequented by your ex-boyfriend’s parents and drive in circles while the sun sets in your rear view mirror, turning orange and yellow and golden. We drive with the windows down. Life gets big and life gets scary and the world is still ours — mine, and yours and nobody else’s. I stay at your house and squeeze into your twin bed and we lay with our backs pressed against each other. It is warm. Your window is open. You snore and I threaten to smother you in your sleep.
We go to college. Your new roommate braids your hair and does your nails and you finally give me the secret recipe for those chocolate chip cookies you always make me. I miss you.
The summers at home are long, and we spend them on the beach with the sky pinking up behind us as we collect rocks that will live in the cup holders of my car for the next three years. Sand sticks to our feet. We chase the sunset and I teach you how to surf and you teach me to crochet and we drive halfway across the country and back and don’t run out of things to say. You stay at my house and play with my sisters and wake up early in the mornings, when the light comes through my curtainless windows.
You feel far away, sometimes.
You visit me for the weekend. You don’t bring a suitcase. You wear my clothes and use my deodorant and walk around Baltimore smelling like me. We share my bed and you kick me early in the morning. My roommates comment on how similar we are. When I leave you at the airport, I cry. I didn’t tell you that. I go home and I look in the mirror and you look back at me.
I couldn’t separate us if I tried.
Molly Green is a senior from Orange County, Calif. studying Writing Seminars. Her column centers around beautiful moments and things in her life.
