In those years we lived like sisters. I almost wrote brothers—we were boys—but that doesn’t feel accurate. We slept over.We shared clothes. We competed. We knew each other’s bodies as I imagine sisters do. I saw this movie once with a hidden garden in it. I remember a group of sisters, the deep green of the garden walls, the cream of the girls’ dresses. I’m afraid this won’t make sense, but somehow in memory it mixes together—my own childhood, the garden in the movie, the girls hidden inside it—so that they’ve become somehow us; we left our sweatshirts, our T-shirts, our basketball shorts on the floors of one another’s rooms, so that years later I wore Caesar’s baseball shirt though I’d never even played, and Ryan wore David’s graduation ring, though Ryan never managed to graduate, and when as young men we saw each other again, home for Thanksgiving, one of us might recognize another’s jacket, or another’s bracelet and say, “Wasn’t that mine once?,” and none of us were really certain.

This is the story of how we became. I write those words but remain uncertain what they mean. We were friends as boys, then suddenly it was high school. Planes crashed into the World Trade Center. Ryan and Jana fell in love. We never would’ve used that word back then, but from this distance it is plain to me that there was love in what connected them.

All these years later and those two don’t even speak, where once they sat beside each other on the bus each Sunday, riding it east through Chicago from Jana’s parents’ place, following Fuller- ton Avenue all the way to the lake. The rest of us lost touch with Ryan too, though somewhere in my apartment are things he once gave me: an American flag after he enlisted; a pair of silver cuff links he asked me to hold for safekeeping, long ago. I guess that’s what this story is: Ryan’s cuff links in my drawer, when I haven’t heard his voice for years.