Paula and I were never friends, even though we went to middle school together. She was poor (never mind that I, too, was poor), and she didn’t wear the right clothes (never mind that I didn’t, either), and if she wasn’t stupid, it was somehow implied that she was stupid, or that her future was less bright than the rest of our classmates'. It was never talked about, but it was there; it was apparent in the way that everyone ignored her and in the way that she shuffled sullenly from class to class.

And that’s where I would have left her if this story took place 15 or 20 years ago. I wouldn’t know Paula at all today. She’d be forever lost in the shadows of youth, a plump ghost who once ate with me in the small, cramped cafeteria of our middle school.

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