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Stephen
Sarah Radice

I used to have a best friend named Stephen, a skinny, elfin kid with blond hair and glasses. We
were both baby-sat by Dana while our parents were at work, doing whatever mysterious things
grown-ups did to make money. There were other kids there, but I liked Stephen the best.

I was ten and Stephen was nine, or maybe it was the other way around. For some reason, I
liked to think I was the older woman in the situation. Although we both played with the other kids, I
enjoyed playing with him the most. I think I was so fond of Stephen because he was a kindred spirit,
possessinga wildly overactive imagination and a goofy sense of humor. But he was also uninhibited
and outgoing, a pleasing contrast to my shyness and insecurity. We both liked nothing better than to
go outside on a hot summer day and play under the huge weeping willow in Dana's backyard. Hide
and seek, freeze tag, Risk; we wove stories and games from the whole cloth of our imaginations,
endowing action figures and stuffed animals with glorious life.

Stephen left one day and I never saw him again. I think Dana said that the family was moving.
At the time I didn't allow myself to feel much, a childish reaction to escape from feeling pain. For
years I did not think of Stephen at all, pushing him out of my mind as unimportant. Why think about
someone you will likely never see again?

But every once in a while and lately more and more, I do find myself thinking of him. I wonder
where he is, what his life is like, if he remembers me. The closer I get to "adulthood," the more I cast my
mind back to Stephen and the time in my life when so many patterns were set, and I was most creative
though unhappy. His squirrel-like laugh, the blueness of his eyes, and the glint of sunlight off of his
gold-rimmed glasses all come back to me. He was my first love, I realize, the skinny boy who could
always run faster than me and that I've been chasing in one way or another all my life. I still have the
stuffed frog he once gave me, buried in a box in the closet.

Forever

Robyn L. Hill