So back in the, my sister and I had a good friend “Heather”. She and her little brother and my big sister and me started our friendship over dirt-clod wars in a construction site where we weren’t supposed to play. One winter we all piled on to a toboggan, careened down a hill and all of us bigger kids ended up in a big pile… on top of her brother’s head. He was probably out cold for barely ten seconds, but when you think you’ve killed your friend’s baby brother, it feels like HOURS.
She also went to the same summer camp as my sister and me and there the dirt-clod wars continued. And we tried to convince younger kids to eat bugs, and er little brother was really good at faking bug eating, so the other little kids might follow suit. In the tenth grade, I took her her to a high-school semi-formal. We went as frineds. She wanted to make her ex-boyfriend jealous, so we created all these outlandish tails about our “whirlwind romance”. We had a fun night and laughed, and laughed and laughed.
I switched to a different high school to take a language course that wasn’t offered at mine. (And it was dropped from the curriculum right after I enrolled) and she moved. So we didn’t keep in touch much, until I ran into her in a mall.
I ran over “Hey, Heather! How’ve you been?” She looked at me. And without a hint of irony, she said in the frostiest tone: “Do I know you?”
For a split second I was just about to naively answer “It’s me! Cellphone!” but in the nic-of-time, the Babel Fish correctly translated “Do I know you?” to “I am going to pretend that I don’t know you.” I mumbled something like we went to “Summer camp… Just thought I’d say ‘hi’… hafta go to practice.”
My sister said she saw her too, and Heather "pretended she didn’t see her ". Neither of us ever had a falling out with her, but we’d heard she’d moved up into the ranks of the Popularity Elite. My sister and I were both very social kids and got along well with everyone. So while we weren’t on the top rungs of the social ladder, we were in the upper middle with most of the other sporty riff-raff. But that didn’t cut it anymore as far as Heather was concerned, I guess.
The cool thing about being a grown-up is that high school bullshit-poltics don’t matter so much anymore. Last year I ran into a guy I actually got into fist-fights with in school. (I’ve mentioned in other threads that having a gay sister in high school meant I sometimes had to defend her honor, or mine… that was the guy!) He spotted me and said: “Hey, you went to SMC High. Cell… Cell… Cellphone!” Then he looked a little mortified and said “Oh. Yeah… Hey, how’s your sister doing? Man, I used to rag on her a lot in school. I’m really sorry, buddy. You know how it is. KId stuff.”
He looked genuinely regretful, so I said “Yeah, well that was a long time ago. My sister isn’t one to hold a grudge, so I’m sure she doesn’t hold it against you.” A half-truth. It’s true that she very rarely holds a grudge, but in his particular case, she still thinks he’s an assclown.
But we chatted a bit and that led us to suddenly going off to have a beer. We talked about our former schoolmates, our favorite activites (we have a lot in common acutally) and left it with “Yeah, we should go for a beer again sometime.” We probably won’t, but that beer was a good one. That’s what being an adult is about. You’re mature, you can get past petty childhood drama. You can get along like old friends even though you were at war in the playground.
Now back to Heather… Bored at work, I plugged in different names of long-lost friends into Myspace … and lo’ it’s Heather! She even looks almost the same in her picture! She looks like she does aerobics, has two perfect-looking kids, and her site said she “drives a Mercedes.” I sent her a quick message about dirt-clod wars with her brother and a few other funny shenangigans we all got into.
The answer I got back: “Do I know you?”
