She sat with me in the cafeteria.
She walked with me in the hallway.
She came to my house on weekends.
When someone made a comment at my expense in her presence, she looked at them with the specific look of someone who finds them less interesting than they believe themselves to be.
She did not perform her defense of me.
She just was not available for the routine they had with me.
Which made it routine that required her absence to function.
She graduated with me.
She went to the same university
I did.
She is now a pediatric surgeon in Portland, which surprises no one who knew her then or knows her now.
At university, the freshman hallway was not the Millbrook High School hallway.
The temperature was different.
Nobody there had decided what I was.
I could be anything.
I chose to be different.
Not because I wanted revenge.
