Best Friend’s Gone
Back in high school…. Kevin and I were inseparable. We used to skip school together, date the same girls — at the same time — and were arrested together. Good times and bad, thick and thin or any other cliche you want to fill in here. No matter what, we were there for each other. Then I went off to college and we drifted. Looking back twenty years later, that’s no big shocker. With hindsight, I think Kevin was jealous. He was always slightly ahead of me in high school — hooked up with the slightly better looking girls, was able to bench press a bit more, a little better in sports, etc. But when I was in college, none of that mattered anymore. When I went home on breaks, he would throw in jabs about how I had changed. Maybe I had, but I think it was more jealousy that I was experiencing all of these new things in college and here he was just sitting around and still working at the local pizzeria.
By my third year of college, we lost touch completely. I stopped going home on breaks and he stopped calling. (I stopped calling too.) By senior year, I didn’t even think about how we lost touch. It wasn’t until recently that that happened. About a week ago — or about twenty years later — I got real curious about what happened to Kevin so I searched Google to see if I could find any traces of him. Unfortunately, he has a very common name, so it wasn’t easy at all. I tried to put in his name and his city… Nothing. Then I put in the state. Still nothing. I knew he had a brother, so I entered the brother’s information and that worked!
I found the brother, Joe. He was a cop — makes sense since Joe was the biggest delinquent when we were younger. I saw Joe lived in a town not too far from where we grew up. So I paid the money on one of those People Finders sites to get his number and I called him. The conversation was far from stilted. He was really happy to hear from me. Being old best friends with his brother, I knew him pretty well when we were kids too. He sounded the same. He just got married recently and I congratulated him. I didn’t want it to seem like I called just to find out how Kevin was. Even though, I kinda did. Eventually, I asked him how Kevin was. Turned out Kevin was great and was working as a mechanic at a garage one of our other friends now owns.
Yesterday, I surprised Kevin at the garage and, if there was any anomysity, it’s no longer there. We were friends all over again — talking about old times and catching up each other on new times. We have plans to go to dinner next week with both our families. It’s good to have Kevin back in my life.
