Most of the time, though, it was just the three of us, and as we got closer and closer to graduation, our little circle of three seemed to involuntarily contract more and more, almost like a clenching fist. Mia was going to college in Nevada, I was staying here, and Cooper…well, he wasn’t sure yet, but the odds of him staying in-state for school were getting slim.
There was an unspoken tension between the three of us. A secret dread that said you better spend time together while you can, because come the fall, you’ll be all alone. It was silly, of course. We could still talk and visit, and we’d make new friends to keep us company while the three of us were apart. We all knew that rationally, but as the time ran down, I became acutely aware of how large my fear of losing them was. How powerful.
So we didn’t go to parties, no. But we found excuses to do stuff all the time. Not just hang out, watch t.v., play games and bullshit, but actually do activities. It had started right after Christmas, and by May we had found an impressive variety of shit to do. Parks—state, national, and amusement. Fairs—both the carny type and the medieval type. We had gone camping, hiking, fishing and swimming. There was video of me rollerblading down a hill (though Mia missed when I wiped out at the bottom) and photos of us petting goats at the world’s smallest petting zoo two counties over. It was literally just an old woman with three goats in her yard, but she’d posted an invitation on the internet to all visitors that were well-behaved and brought some food for her goats out of a voluminous list of things her babies would eat.
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