I was 12 and still hadn't found a kindred spirit, let alone a tribe. It was a Friday afternoon in mid-December, last period, Techy. As I recall, we were supposed to be making door stops. Kevin was being loud and funny, and we were watching him, not the teacher or our potential door stops. Lucy was being quiet. We both stood quietly beside each other as the other boys laughed loudly at Kevin. Bolstered by the laughter and our feminine attention, Kevin came to the bench by us and began to plane his door stop. Lucy and I stood awkwardly.
‘You going to the Christmas Dance?’ he asked, not looking up.
Neither of us knew who it was directed to, so both of us answered.
‘Maybe,’ we look at each other, a shy smile.
‘You got anyone to go with?’ Kevin asked, still not looking up, leaving his options open, but taking a pencil from behind his ear and putting it in his mouth to add a grown-up, working man air.
Lucy and I looked at each other, panicked. Kevin didn't miss a beat. To avoid any slight to his emerging masculinity, he slammed down the plane and theatrically rugby tackled his friend to the ground far away from our impending rejection.
Lucy and I giggled. It was Friday afternoon in mid-December, the end of the working week at the end of the working year. The teacher had gone to hide in the store cupboard until the bell. Rumour had it he drank whisky there. Later, the rumour would render itself true, but Lucy and I aren't there yet.
‘Do you have anyone to go with?’ I braved.
‘Not yet,’ she answered.
‘Me neither,’ I leant over to pick up the abandoned plane, ‘we could go together. If you want?’
I secured my bit of wood in the vice.
‘Yes. That'd be great.’
And it was great. Not the door stops, which I never remember finishing, but the Christmas Dance with Lucy. We got over our social anxiety by dancing, and somewhere as we spun in dizzying circles to Deacon Blue's Real Gone Kid, I knew we just got each other.
Now, we are 49. Our birthdays 3 days apart. We have spun our yarns through puberty, exams, hedonism, University, nesting, love, loss, pregnancies, births, marriages, jobs, motherhood, sisterhood, heartbreak and golden moments that twist again and again in equal tension on our bond.
We have never taken this bond for granted. Never stretched it too far. Though life has deigned to pull it tight at one end or the other, we have never let go. And sometimes we kitchen dance together, gin in hand, with all that twisted yarn between us, and it doesn't weigh us down, it holds us steady.
As for Kevin, he married a lovely girl we knew, had a child and plays guitar in a bar dressed like a rock star. Forever oblivious to the starring role he played in our lives.