When Noah Prescott and I were six years old, we made a silly pact.
We locked pinkies on the swing set behind Brindlewood Elementary and swore that if we were both still single at thirty, we’d get married. We laughed about it the way kids laugh about anything that sounds grown and important and completely made-up all at once.
Two years later, everybody around us started growing. Noah didn’t, not the way the rest of us did.
He’d been born with achondroplasia — the most common form of dwarfism, something his parents had known since he was a few months old, back when a pediatrician first noticed the shortened limbs and the slightly larger forehead that comes with it, and confirmed it not long after with an X-ray and a genetic test. None of that was new information by the time we were eight. What was new, that year, was the rest of us hitting our first real growth spurts, and the gap between Noah and everybody else in our third-grade class becoming impossible not to notice.
