At prom one boy asked me to dance and everybody else in that room spent three hours not looking at me. Thirty years later he mopped up my spilled coffee in a hospital cafe in worn scrubs, counted the last coins in his pocket to buy me another, and did not recognise me at all.
Forty people turned round.
Somebody came over fast.
“You’re all right. I’ve got it.”
Worn blue scrubs, a mop in one hand, and he was limping badly enough that I noticed it before I noticed his face.
He cleaned it up. Then he went to the counter and bought me another one, and I watched a man in his late forties count coins out of his trouser pocket onto a laminate counter and come up short by about forty cents and put a pastry back.
Something happened in my chest that I could not name for about four hours.
When he came back and put that cup down I looked at him properly.
The jaw. The eyes.
Rye Colvin.
Older, and tired in a way that goes all the way down, and still exactly that boy.
He did not recognise me at all. Not a flicker.
I did not say anything. I said thank you and I sat there and drank a coffee a man had bought me with his last money.
At about half past two that afternoon I was in the staff canteen on the second floor, which I was in because a clinical lead had taken me up there for a sandwich.
