Nobody told us it was the last day.
I mean — we knew it was the last day. It was on the calendar. We had been counting down for weeks. But knowing a thing is the last day is not the same as feeling it, and we did not feel it until it was already over.
We signed each other's shirts.
We took photographs in groups that will never all be together again. We made promises — to meet every month, then every year, then at the ten-year reunion — with the absolute certainty of people who have never yet lost touch with anyone.
I remember standing at the school gate at four-thirty waiting for my father to pick me up. Everyone else had already left. The driveway was empty. A peon was sweeping the corridor.
Twelve years of school. Four thousand-odd days. And now just a gate and a sweeper and the smell of chalk dust in the air.
My father arrived late and honked twice. I got in the car.
"Done?" he said.
"Done," I said.
He drove. I looked out of the window. We didn't talk.
I didn't cry until I was home and in my room with the door closed. Not for long. I wasn't even sure what I was crying for — not sadness exactly, more the strange feeling of something that had always been there simply not being there anymore.
I see those people sometimes. Fewer and fewer as the years go on. The monthly meetings became yearly, then occasional, then birthday messages, then silence.
But the shirt is still somewhere. Folded in a box in my parents' house. Everyone's names in blue and black and one very optimistic red.
