"Perhaps this verse would please you better—Sue—(2)"

Before boys, Susan drove me to work, for teriyaki takeout on Manchester past Lincoln Boulevard. Inseparable, we planned winter and Easter vacations. In the stairwell, I tried to talk. She cut me off. Her echo was loud when she said you can’t see yourself. We went to see Purple Rain. That fall, I had dinner with a boy. Susan was angry and told me I was wrong. I felt it was true. Was it that boy? That he had once dated someone Susan knew? We stopped talking. We were eighteen. A decade later, I turned a corner coming out of a bookstore and heard Susan laugh. I know that, I thought, remembering how she’d saved me from saying who I was. I circled back. She answered as she had before we fell out. She answered with shame. Do you remember how things ended, she asked, because of boys?