I remember...

It was cold that day. The kind of cold that rarely happens in the Central Valley of California and despite the cold air which usually meant fog where I grew up, this particular day was sunny and bright. It was crisp air, like what my 13 year old mind always imagined it would be like to live where it snowed.

Normally in the morning on the way to the bus, I'd cut through the elementary school yard, across the community center lawn between the lodge and the community pool, cut down the alley, hand a left and walk to a friends house so she could accompany me to the bus stop. It was a Family Circus sort of path and this morning the cool air lead me to walk the straight path along the side of the road I lived on, down the street that ran through the middle of our tiny town, in the front gate of my friends house not the back and to her door.

Her mom greeted me when I walked in and asked if I was warm enough as I joined the boys on the couch watching morning cartoons and MTV, flipping back and forth between being a teenager and a child with a remote control and a bowl full of cereal. When my friend emerged from her room she looked both tired and frustrated, the sign of a bad hair day which can always kill your mood on a Friday morning. I cracked a joke and we pulled our layers on to walk the two blocks to the bank building which was also the bus stop.

As we passed the abandoned store we always walked faster. Someone had been murdered there the year before and we both got the creeps from being to close to the building. As we walked up to the bus stop everyone said hi, compared themselves to what everyone else was wearing to make sure they were presentable and started handing around homework to "check" which was slang for let the other kids copy.

We settled into a seat inside the actual bus stop. Our own little planet and talked about our nights and mornings while we were apart. We thought we were outcasts and we just tried to stay out of the way.

10 years later someone else told me the story about this same morning over a beer at a local bar. I remembered the day. I remembered what I was wearing, what she was wearing, I even remember bits of what we talked about. What I didn't remember was the part he described as "you two were always so much cooler than the rest of us, we all just wanted to be allowed to sit and talk with you".

"Are you serious?" I said with a laugh. We weren't cool and we would have let anyone join us. If only we'd known.

But now when I think about it I wonder... were we better off? We kept each other sane, safe and housed secrets, sins and simple pleasure for each other. Two was the perfect number. We kept each other humble and we were always trying to keep each other just a little out of trouble.

That's probably what made us cool. We had a secret keeper. I remember... I just didn't know.