Tuesday, 07 May 2002 | Nancy

We used to completely cover our church bulletins with ink, sitting in the back row of the balcony. We'd play hangman, or draw pictures, but mostly we'd write notes. I always liked her handwriting. It was round and just sloppy enough; the letters looped together, forming pretty sentences that would tell me about what was going on three grades above me, which, at that time, was significantly different. We'd assess whether a boy named Troy (who also sat in the balcony) had brought chewing tobacco to church that particular week, inspiring quieting hisses from the row before us.

I remember one note in particular when Nancy had written the lyrics to a song—White Horse?—that went something like this: "If you wanna be rich, you've got to be a bitch!" She wrote it just like that, with the exclamation mark, and underlined the word "bitch" a few times. I didn't want to admit that I didn't know what the word "bitch" meant, so later I tried it out on my brother, reciting the line she'd written earlier that day. I'd set off an alarm. "Mom! Lisa said a bad word!"

One day after church, she told me her brother had gotten a new car and that I should sit in it. She opened the door for me, I climbed in, and she ran away cackling, "That's not really my brother's car!" Our parents are good friends, and in the summers, our families would go camping together. We'd hike and stand under waterfalls and go snipe hunting. Spending the night at her house, we'd lie in her canopy bed with the pink flowered cover and tell jokes until our sides hurt, made funnier by our efforts to be quiet. One evening she convinced me to call Burger King and ask, "Are your buns burning?" When I was eleven, she was the one who sat beside me in the back seat of my parents' car in the parking lot of that pizza place, just after my parents told me we were moving away.

We kept in touch sporadically, mainly through our parents. The last time I saw her was at her wedding...three years ago? We've lived in the same town for two years now, and, finally, tonight, we got together for dinner. We ended up talking for three-and-a-half hours, leaving long after our waitress.