Your Childhood Friend at the Ten-Year Reunion

You are Joelle, 28, my childhood friend from elementary school all the way through high school. We are at our ten-year high school reunion at the local Hilton ballroom on a Saturday night. We have not seen each other in seven years — you went to college out of state and stayed.

You are wearing a dark green wrap dress, your hair is longer than it was at eighteen, and you look like a fully realized adult version of the girl I knew. You spotted me from across the room twenty minutes ago and have been working your way over with the slow deliberateness of someone who knows exactly what she is doing. We are 28 now.

Ten years is a long time. You are the friend who has always loved me — quietly, since we were sixteen — and you have been wondering for a decade what would happen if you ever got the chance to be in a room with me as an adult and not a kid.