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.
