When I was called down to the office and told my best friend had left, my first reaction was to ask them for her name. It could have waited, I suppose, but she had never told me and I had never asked. It was too late for it to matter, and yet I still asked them. I waited, hoping that they could explain her disappearance. I kept waiting, except they didn’t answer. Maybe they thought I was joking, or that it was my way of denying what they said, but their only answer was a shake of the head from my principal, and a murmured, “It’s alright, kiddo. We all have to go some time.”

I looked down at my feet. I guess they took that as a sign to leave, because by the time I looked up to ask again, there was no sign of their presence at all.
***

You might be wondering how I might be best friends with a girl without even knowing her name, but that was just the type of relationship we had. We didn’t ask questions because we didn’t need to; she always knew what I was thinking even before the thought appeared in my mind. I guess that’s what drew me to her. When I was with her, there was no need to explain myself, to defend myself from prying eyes like when I was with anyone else.

It was a wonder that the two of us ever met. After my parents decided that the local high school was unsatisfactory, my family moved into a neighborhood full of rich white kids clamoring to get into the Ivy Leagues. Unfortunately, no one had ever told them that changing schools, especially in the middle of the school year, was a terrible idea. Moving to a new school is always shown as a chance at a new life, forgetting about the problems of the past. In my case, it meant being forgotten by every friend you used to know. It didn’t when my grades took a dip either, thanks to the increased course load.

A couple of my friends had the same idea as my parents, and they arrived a few months later at the end of the year. The same people who I called my best friends didn’t seem to notice me anymore. By the time high school started they had made their own friends, leaving me behind once again. After the first few days of school, no one else really bothered with trying to see me either. I still greeted my old friends, including an ex-girlfriend, with smiles, but I couldn’t have been more disappointed. The only comfort I had was talking with the girl for the first time, though it didn’t mean much.

I had never noticed her at my old school, but when she showed up on the first day of ninth grade I recognized her as soon as she walked in. Even in August, she wore her distinctive black jacket and deep blue jeans. The teacher made a show of introducing her, and as she sat down she glanced across the room looking for an empty desk. Her eyes glared at my form for a second before rolling upward, and she muttered something under her breath about a bad seat. She wouldn’t say anything to me for the rest of the day, but at least I had been noticed.

The next morning, she came up to me before class and apologized. “I thought a friend of mine was going to save me a seat,” she explained, and I forgave her immediately. To be honest, I had forgiven her the previous day, but before I could say so my cheeks pinked and all I could stammer out was that I didn’t mind. Somehow, she understood.

At that point, it would be inaccurate to call what we had a friendship. We never did any of the other things friends did, but there was an understanding that the two of us were in the same situation. In those two days the seeds of a deep friendship had been planted. Even when other people gave up on talking with me, we still sat next to each other. The two of us pulled away from our other friends, shrinking into the shadow of obscurity. After a month of high school, she was my best friend if only by definition, seeing as she was also my only friend.

***
It was another month before I was sure I could call her my friend. Our school had allowed students to go out into the city during lunch, but the two of us preferred to eat in the silence only an empty classroom could provide. She sat in the desk across from mine, every now and then glancing toward me across from her meal. Her stare was as intense as it was on the first day, only this time I stared back just as intensely. If our classmates had seen this, they might have thought that we were a couple. I had never even thought such a thing possible, and she had long since made it clear that she had as much interest in such a relationship as I did.

Just as I thought this, a boy in our grade ran, feet tripping over each other, into the room. He walked up to the girl, holding up a piece of paper in his hand, and whispered into her ear. Her face contorted in a cycle of emotions and grew more and more scared the longer I looked at it. After a minute, she left with the boy, leaving her half-eaten lunch.

The silence resumed when she returned twenty minutes later, the bags under her eyes noticeably puffy. She didn’t look at me that day, which was not too unusual, but then she missed the next day of school, which was unusual. I tried to ask around about what happened, but without her name, no one seemed to know who I was talking about. It was as if she had melted into the shadows for the last time, never to return. A week later, I got a call from the main office to talk with the principal.
***
Looking back, I suppose that I should have known that she was going. If I had been able to see that, I would have tried to stop it no matter how futile it would have been. I am certain that if other people had been in the same situation, they would have seen it and they could have stopped it. Instead, I was given the only chance to help her, and I failed. They were too busy with their own lives and their own dreams to bother with just another girl. They never did tell me her name.