anti:freeze

When I was a kid, my best friend lived right down the street, and he would stand outside my screen door dribbling his basketball, waiting for me to join him, or skid his bicycle to a stop at the top of our driveway. He didn't have to knock or ring the bell.

We played together every day, riding our bicycles up and down the street, or crawling close to the curbs, searching for clues to solve some imagined mystery. When we found a shoelace or paper, we placed it in a plastic bag, labeled it, and looked at it under my toy microscope - one of those shiny red, plastic models you find in gift shops or discount stores. We used tweezers to remove items from their bags, then affixed them to a slide and took turns looking through the lens.

Sometime around middle school, we stopped hanging out. His friends were picking on him for hanging out with a girl - especially a white girl - and the first traces of my punk-rebel self were emerging. By highschool, we stopped saying hello in the hallways.

But here's what gets me: There had to be a last day, and a last moment, when I walked away from his door and never went back. And I can't remember it.