When I was little, I had a friend named Noah. Noah and I attended the same daycare, though I’m not completely sure about which elementary school he attended. This time was in kindergarten, and part of the way into first grade. Now, Noah was a small, little boy, but this didn’t bother me. He had plenty of energy and loved animals like I did. We used to play on the edge of the playground, on the structure that was made of wood. The new, plastic slides were fine and dandy, but we liked the old house better. There were small trees nearby, about six or seven feet tall. These were evergreens, but I don’t remember what kind. These trees had small bunches of needles that were soft and easy to pull off. Noah used to pretend to be a panda, and I was the zookeeper. I would bring him his meal of the pine needles, which we pretended was bamboo, and he would pretend to eat them. He was really good at pretending, because it looked as though he was really consuming the needles.

Noah left daycare one day. Day, weeks, and even months passed by, but Noah wasn’t around. I still made his meal every day, but there was no panda to eat the food. Sure, I had other friends, but there was always something special about Noah. He didn’t think that I had cooties, like all of the boys thought of girls at that age. And he had such a fun imagination.

Noah came back after almost seven months. He was even skinnier and even smaller than he’d been before his disappearance. There were strange black lines in his head—stitches, he told us. He’d been gone, and in the hospital, because of something called pneumonia and something else that he couldn’t pronounce, so he called it Luka, because he said that it sounded like the name of our friend, Luke. I now realize that Noah had probably had Leukemia. Something like that didn’t impact children at that age, that their friend had a mysterious sickness. We listened to his tales about the hospital. It had been raining the day Noah came back, so we couldn’t go outside. But when the day finally came that the sky was clear, the teachers told him that he wasn’t allowed to go into the sun with his stitches. This was horrible news to the both of us. I tried to stay inside, to keep him company, but I was forced to go outside and play. So each day, I would fill my sock with pine needles, and bring them inside. He went home each day with a pocket full of our special bamboo, promising to eat it like a good panda.

When the day came that the stitches came out, neither of us could sit still. The day was dragging, and recess couldn’t seem to get to us quickly enough. But when it finally came, when the time finally came that we could go outside together and play, fate decided to stop us in our tracks. Noah wasn’t allowed to go outside. It was early November, and cold. Noah’s mom had left strict instructions about playing outside, and the teachers simply ignored these guidelines, and kept him in. When December rolled around, Noah was gone. He told us, the day before he left, that they were moving to Philadelphia, because there were good doctors there. We both cried that day. Just before he left, I slipped him one last pine needle.