I had never really been like Collin.
As neighbors of a common age, he and I developed an almost obligatory friendship as children. We were to each other someone to pass the time with; someone we could befriend who we didn’t have to be very similar to.
He had moved into my neighborhood around my sixth birthday, and my mother had been very excited about having another little boy for me to play with. She was ecstatic to have yet another mother to talk to as well, and the day they moved in she baked an apple pie for them and prepared a fruit basket that I had to hold as we walked to their house next door. They were standing outside, watching the last of the moving trucks pull out of the driveway from the porch.
Collin and I reacted very differently to each other. Upon seeing him, shaggy brown hair and big, bright blue eyes, huddled behind his mother‘s hip, I had ripped my hand from my mother’s and trotted up to him, grinning. Collin, however, looked absolutely terrified. His head whipped away from my face and to his mother’s, and he took a half step closer to her before she noticed him clinging to her jeans, halted her greetings with my mother, and urged him back towards me.
“Sweetie, this is Nick, your new neighbor, so be nice. Why don’t you two go play while us Mommies talk, okay?” she said to him in that gentle way only mothers can.
Looking betrayed, he dragged his eyes back to me and huffed. I only stared back at him quizzically, surprised at his reluctance. Neither of us moved.
“Nicky, how about you give me that basket and show Collin around the neighborhood, huh?” my mother sighed, sounding fed up. She knew I’d jump at the chance to run free around the neighborhood, and true to her expectations, I nodded my head vigorously and without another word, placed the basket on the ground, grabbed Collin’s wrist, and dragged him down the street. His mother and I both ignored his groans of protest.
“And don’t go in the woods!” my mom called, and my heart sunk. I’d been hoping I could get away before she remembered. I glared at Collin for slowing me down.
He was shockingly silent the whole time we walked, which annoyed me immensely. I’d never seen someone so quiet.
“Where did you move here from?” I asked him finally, bored of the silence.
“Florida,” he muttered simply.
“I don’t know where that is,” I stated dumbly.
“It‘s south of here.”
“What’s it like there?”
“Warmer,” he said. “Mostly the same. You have more trees…different ones.”
“Not like we get to enjoy them or anything,” I said, looking over at the tree line leading into the woods. “My mom says they’re dangerous. She says their off-limits.”
“They don’t look dangerous,” Collin said, following my gaze.
I grinned. With that, I had all I needed.
“I think you’re right,” I said determinedly. “They don’t. You want to go in?” Excitement flooded my veins, adventure at my fingertips.
“Didn’t you just say -”
“Yes, but then you said they didn’t look dangerous. And I said I think you’re right. So let’s go in. It can’t be too bad.”
I think he only went with me because his mom wanted him to make new friends, but I didn’t really care much about that at the time. I was much too focused on the exploration of new land.
Looking back, the cluster of trees wasn’t much. The trees were all squished together and we had to bend and jump and twist just to get around some of them. There was only a little grass that wasn’t covered up by thick patches of clover, moss, and prickly bushes. What little grass there was had died long ago, spotting the green floor around it with streaks of brown.
Collin was very careful not to step on anything poisonous, and flinched each time a bee buzzed near him. I quickly got ahead of him as I didn‘t take such precautions, disregarding his fears easily (“We’re wearing jeans,” I told him as if it solved everything).
Perhaps we should have turned around before then, because as we continued onwards the trees became denser and the sky above us darkened slightly. Collin held closer to my side, and I stopped trying to get ahead of him.
Suddenly, I saw a little beam of light glinting in the distance, and I pulled Collin towards it.
The source was a small break in the clustered trees, a small circle with a circumference of barely two yards.
It was spectacularly unimpressive, but to us it was magical. Then again, everything seemed impressive to us as six year olds. Two thick trees stood on opposite ends of the circle. Light found its way through the break in the trees, filtering down between the two heavy trunks. The prickly bushes that tended to grow in the shade shied away from the light, skirting the trees in a circle that gave the illusion of a small clearing.
I quickly jumped from Collin’s side and slapped a hand on the tallest of the two trees, claiming it for my own in a loud, pirate-like voice. Collin huffed and meekly staked a claim on the other one, brushing it half-heartedly with the tips of his fingers.
We leaned against our respective trees, I with a look of triumph and Collin with a look of temporary, childish enmity, both of us looking aimlessly around the seemingly spectacular area around us.
We decided to deem the place our secret headquarters, and Collin suddenly became animated as we discussed the terms of our new, absolutely secret hideout in the trees. He offered to make a map for our eyes only, and I nodded my head vigorously, though maps made by six year olds are hardly ever accurate.
Finally, as the sky darkened even further, we fought our way back through the woods until we broke through the line of trees a little ways down the road from our houses.
I chuckled as we jogged home, and Collin grinned along with me, our eyes bright with the excitement of a common secret.

As we grew, so did our friendship. Thanks to our secret Headquarters, we had reason to keep in touch as children and later as teenagers besides only our houses’ proximity, where otherwise our many differences may have caused us to drift apart. Our parents had discovered our trips to the woods not long after they began when Collin tripped into a patch of poison ivy, but after being grounded for a week, they rolled their eyes, sighed, and told us to be careful where we stepped. Of course, we told them nothing of where we went during these trips.
We declared ourselves pirates, and the Headquarters was both our ship and our treasure. I named myself the terrifying No-Beard Nick, and deemed Collin my trusty sidekick, Crewmate Collin. He huffed and puffed that he’d much rather be Captain Collin, but I told him no, because my tree was taller, and so I was, of course, in charge. He never did like his pirate name.
We learned the way to our Headquarters by heart and met there often. Many days we even did our homework there. We grew closer all through Elementary and Middle school. One day, in seventh grade, Collin brought a knife with him to the clearing. Something about our names finally carved into the bark of the trees we had claimed as children made our friendship suddenly official.
Collin and I became very different people as we entered High school. Things that had once been only small quarks about our personalities became their entire definition in those final years of school.
I joined the football team as soon as I was able to, and it became a determining factor of my high school life. I made the grades required for sports participation and not much higher, but no one seemed to mind. I worked much harder on honing my skills on the field, throwing myself into the game, and I refused to disappoint. My team became my family and my letterman’s jacket became my prized possession, a symbol of all of my hard work. Girls lost their cooties, and teachers praised me, if not for my grades, then for my personality and dedication.
Collin had a much more subdued life in high school, to my eyes. He had always been good in school ever since we were scribbling the alphabet down on traceable paper, but as we grew, academics became his life in almost the same way as football had become mine. He received praise and medals for his schoolwork that some envied and others snickered at, and he prided himself on his achievements. It was a fact known by all in our class that Collin would be our valedictorian come graduation, and he blushed a rosy pink when I told him so one day as we leaned against our trees in the Headquarters.
Sure, he didn’t show up at every football game we played and I didn’t come to every science fair and award ceremony that wasn’t required by the school, but we were friends all the same. It was still thanks to him that my grades survived at all, and I could still make him laugh even if he was trying to concentrate.
We had a good thing going. Meaning it could only go downhill from there.
At school, somewhere near the middle of our junior year, I walked into the men’s bathroom on the second floor, and everything fell apart.
Collin – tiny, thin, snap-him-between-your-fingers Collin was sitting there, curled up on himself in the corner of the guy’s bathroom, his head between his knees like you’re supposed to do when you get nauseous. I couldn’t see his face, but right then he looked so small. It was unsettling.
“Christ,” I blurted, surprised. “Collin, are you okay?”
He didn’t answer.
“Come on, man, the floor’s disgusting. What’s the –“
I tried putting my hand on my arm, but he thrashed under my touch, knocking me back a few steps.
“Just leave me alone,” he finally spoke, his voice muffled by the fabric of his jeans.
“What? No. Dude, are you crying? Just tell me what the deal is so I can help.”
“Nick,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was holding in his rage or his tears. “Listen to me for one time in your life and just leave me alone. Get lost. I’m not being difficult – I genuinely do not want to see your face right now, okay?”
“Woah, hold up, what did I do?” I asked, my mind suddenly switching gears from ‘who do I have to punch’ to ‘think through the last forty eight hours what have you done to make him like this’. But I was drawing a blank.
“Nick!” he shot back. Anger. He was most definitely holding in his anger.
So I left. I went straight home and waited for him in our clearing, hoping he’d trod in with his backpack over one shoulder like always, but he never showed. I walked home alone well past midnight and zoned out while my mother threw the “where were you” lecture at me.
That was the last time Collin and I spoke.
He wasn’t at school for a week straight, he wouldn’t answer the phone, and he was always too “busy with homework” to talk to me when I came to his house. At least that’s what his mom always told me with that look on her face that told me Collin had given her a script. It wasn’t until she sent my mother a secretive email telling her what had happened that I knew what I had done wrong.
Some of my football buddies had decided they were sick of someone being so much better than they were I guess, so while Collin was walking to class, they dragged him into the boys bathroom on the second floor and showed their stupidity with their fists. He hid his face so I couldn’t see the black eye, the red welt on his jaw, the bruises on his arms. Those idiots. My “friends”. Not anymore, of course. I must have spent a month figuring out exactly who had the nerve to mess with Collin – my mom never minded the detentions.
I don’t know why Collin didn’t tell me what had happened – maybe he didn’t want to put me in that position or maybe he thought I was in on it. I just don’t know.
I also still don’t know why I couldn‘t just apologize. Or why he would hug the other side of the hallway when I passed and turn away when I started to think I may have the courage to say something. I guess I’d never realized how fragile our friendship really was until that moment.
We graduated a year later, and as was expected, Collin was the valedictorian. He gave a short, simple speech in his soft, nervous voice that always used to make me chuckle, the principal congratulated us, and all of a sudden, we were the Graduates of ‘09.
I went to college mainly for football, but it lost its thrill pretty quickly after high school, and I didn’t try to pursue it as a career, like some of my friends did. I’d heard from my mother that Collin was going to Stanford with an undetermined major. He was thinking about going into science, she said.
A few years later, I was working in an office job an hour away from my old house, and living in a pretty good apartment. I had a girlfriend that I was planning to marry and a dog that I loved, and life seemed pretty good.
They’d written a news article about Collin, I saw in the paper one day. Talking about him and how he’d become such an accomplished neuroscientist at a young age, all things considered. I laughed outright when I read this. How Collin, I thought, to be a neuroscientist.
I regretted everything I’d said to him, and all that I hadn‘t when I’d had the chance. I wished with all of my might that I could still be on good terms with him now, and I could laugh at his excited face when he told me he’d gotten the job. I’d ask him dumbly what a neuroscientist was again, and I’d sit through the hour long explanation that would follow.
For Christmas, I took the hour long drive to get to my parents’ house. I had agreed to stay for a few days, gorging myself on ham and green beans and mashed potatoes. My mother told me that Collin had visited his parents as well, but left Christmas Eve for ‘work reasons’. She said he’d come by to say hello, and that he was just as kind and polite as he had always been. He looked tired, she said, but happy. I was both relieved and slightly disappointed that I wouldn’t be seeing him.
I decided to walk out to the woods and find the Headquarters. As I remembered the way that had become second nature to me in my childhood, I lost myself in the woods like I had years ago. I chuckled, remembering how bossy I was when we were kids. Why had Collin dealt with me at all?
When I found the spot, I walked to my tree and smiled at my name still etched carefully into the bark.
But when I looked to Collin’s tree, I saw a piece of thick paper nailed to the bark over his name. Looking closer, Collin’s neat handwriting read:
“I have now declared myself Captain Collin, No-Beard. I’m ‘in charge’ now. Look up.”
I did as I was instructed with a small, confused smile on my face. It took me a moment to realize what he meant, but then I remembered the day I’d declared our piracy. So long ago!
Some time between the day that I had claimed the tallest tree and this moment, Collin’s tree had grown. Taller, if only slightly, than mine. Collin never had liked his pirate name.
I grinned, throwing back my head and laughing until my eyes watered.
I looked back at the piece of paper, finding more writing inked at the bottom.
“P.S.,” it read, “Friends?”
There was no question in my mind.