ME & JULIAN by Rio Morales

I got Julian’s twelfth birthday party invitation in the mail. Parisi Speed School: I hate sports. Saturday, October 10th: I was going to go bowling with my mom. 4-7:30: three and a half hours of sports. I hate sports.

I’d put up with Julian’s birthdays in the past, whether it was a Wayfinder foam-sword-capture the flag-outdoors-buggy adventure, or a baseball/basketball/skateboarding party at his house which involved sports and only sports. The people at these parties were mostly his other friends, which meant Day School kids, all of which could throw a perfect three-pointer and hit a home-run or land a kickflip. I suppose I liked running and catching and kicking, but these kids, who were my friend’s friends, were so good and so terrifying and so condescending about it that I’d spend the party inside his living room watching two of them play Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, which I was also terrible at. I figured a Parisi Speed School Party meant throwing and batting and running, my question answered by the football and basketball stickers around the border of the invitation.

The past summer had been hard on my relationship with Julian. We’d hung out less, and when we did we played Tony Hawk and he would win, and to make me feel better he’d play me the Jay-Z CD Artie made him then teach me a new curse word he’d learned from Zach. We no longer traded pokemon cards or built towers or reminisced on our trips to the Statue of Liberty or Niagara Falls or the State Capitol Building.

Eventually we stopped hanging out, eventually I stopped hearing about him or his family, eventually my Mom and Ellen lost their friendship, too. Eventually I saw him on the first day of seventh grade, wearing a hat with some obscure logo on it, too big for his head, too big for the little kid I’d known. And eventually I got an envelope from him for his birthday party at Parisi Speed School, but I wondered if he even knew his mom had sent it to me.