Fourth grade was the year everyone switched best friends. They started realizing they were only friends because their parents were friends or they didn’t have anything in common. Or one person shopped at American Eagle or Pac Sun while the other still wore clothes from kids’ stores (overheard on the playground: “I’m sorry, but I find it hard to like people who still shop at Justice”). So everyone kind of shuffled, and then, like the solitaire games my grandmother likes, hearts went with hearts, clubs with clubs, everyone finding their own match.
Except us. Amanda and I were matched from the start. We didn’t get divorced in fourth grade. We didn’t split in seventh either. Amanda switched from pitching to catcher, but she didn’t switch best friends. Our friendship was like an old cell phone. Even though there were newer ones that might support more apps, you keep the old one because of the memories, the secret texts it got at night, the emotion of it. Okay, I sound like a girl, but you know it’s true.
Of course, we had other friends too. Amanda made friends with a new girl, though, a girl named Kendra, who was shortstop on the middle school’s team and also played volleyball, which Amanda had taken up. I stopped hanging with Brendan and Alex so much, after a sixth grade party that involved a really gross game of Truth or Dare, but I met some new guys on the middle school team. By seventh grade, I was playing outside linebacker. It was like Tim said, you could play if you weren’t tall, as long as you were big.
I tried not to think about how that meant fat. I was getting fat, as my father constantly reminded me.
But Amanda and I were still best friends.
“What’s her deal?” one of the guys, Kamal, said in the locker room after baseball practice one day in eighth grade. “Like, why do you hang out with her?”
I shrugged. “We’re friends. I’ve known her since kindergarten.”
“She’s kind of fat,” my friend Eric said.
“No, she’s not,” Kamal corrected. “She’s fine-looking.” He made a gesture I understood to mean big boobs.
I was getting a little uncomfortable with the direction of this conversation. It wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed Amanda’s boobs. They were kind of hard to miss. I just didn’t want to discuss them with other guys.
“Who?” Darien said. He’d just come over from the shower and was wrapped in a towel.
“That girl Amanda,” Eric said. “Kamal thinks she’s hot. I say she’s a chubbo.” He looked at Darien like he was going to break the tie.
“She’s hot,” Darien said. “Baby got back.”
“Guys, gross,” I said. “Quit it.”
“What, are you in love with her?” Darien asked.
We’d been friends over seven years, and someone asked that question at least ten times a year. Instinctively, I answered, “Of course not.”
But the next time I saw her, I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her, off her chest, specifically. It’s funny how, when you spend a lot of time with someone, you don’t really notice how they look. My mom would get mad at my dad for not commenting if she got a new haircut, but honestly, she could have developed a third eye, and it probably would take me a few days to see it. Same with Amanda. I never saw her as hot or not, pretty or ugly. She was just Amanda.
Probably that was why the ugly duckling’s friends didn’t notice right off that he was a swan. Maybe they’d gotten so used to seeing him as ugly that they didn’t notice he was beautiful, even when he was.
But that day, I noticed. The middle school was closer to Amanda’s house, and Fridays, when neither of us had practice or a game, we walked to her house together after school. That day, I was waiting in our usual spot, under an oak tree at the side of the school. She was a little late, so when she showed up, she was running. Her face and chest were flushed. She had on a bright-green T-shirt, and when she ran, her backpack bouncing against her back made it pull tight in the chest.
Darien was right. She was fine-looking.
“Um, what are you looking at?” she said.
“What?” I realized I’d been staring right at her boobs, so I pretended I’d been spaced out, gazing ahead. “What? Oh, sorry. You’re late.”
She shrugged, and her T-shirt pulled tight again. “Yeah, sorry. I was talking to a teacher.”
“Sure.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Whatever.” I wanted to talk to Tim about football tryouts for high school, which were coming up. Tim was friends with the coach, so I hoped maybe he could give me some pointers, even put in a word. But I didn’t want to say that. Amanda and I didn’t get much time together, between her two softball teams and volleyball and me playing football and baseball, plus advanced classes that counted for high school. I didn’t want it to seem like I was only interested in her dad. Besides, I wasn’t.
I said, “I don’t know. Go to the library?”
“On a Friday afternoon?”
“Watch a movie and get pizza?”