At 6, I Promised My Best Friend with Down Syndrome We’d Go to Prom Together – 12 Years Later, Mom Said I Could Go with Him Only on One Condition

Our house became quieter.

Then, when we were 12, my parents divorced.

Dad moved into an apartment 20 minutes away.

Mom started pretending she wasn’t crying.

I started pretending I didn’t notice.

At school, I stopped eating much at lunch.

Noah noticed.

He never asked me to explain.

He just sat beside me.

Sometimes he talked.

Sometimes he didn’t.

He never asked me to explain.

Once, he spent 15 straight minutes explaining why our baseball team needed a new relief pitcher.

I understood approximately four words.

It helped anyway.

Years later, when I failed my first driving test, Noah appeared at our house carrying two ice creams.

“Why two?”

“One because you tried,” he said.

“One because you tried.”

I smiled.

“And the other?”

“Because you drove badly.”

I threw a pillow at him.

At 16, when I told him I wanted to quit art because a girl in my class had laughed at one of my paintings, he stole the ugliest dinosaur drawing I’d ever made.