The Friend Who Came Back

Yusuf had been Esme's best friend from the age of four to the age of nine.

Then his father had got a job in Toronto, and the whole family had moved.

For two years, Esme and Yusuf had video-called every Saturday. The calls had been wonderful at first. They had told each other everything. Then the calls had got harder to plan because of the time difference. Then they had got shorter. Then sometimes they had been cancelled because one of them had a thing on. Now, the call was still on the calendar, but it happened once every three or four weeks.

In the meantime, Esme had grown. She was eleven now. She had made new friends — Hanna and Liv, mostly. The three of them did most things together. Esme thought of them as her best friends now, although she had never quite said that out loud.

Yusuf, in his Saturday calls, was still her old best friend. Esme had a slot in her heart that was Yusuf's, and that slot was full of him, even though it had got a little dusty.

Then, in March, Yusuf's mother phoned Esme's mother.

Yusuf's family was moving back. The job in Toronto had ended. They were coming home in July.

Esme cried when her mother told her. Not exactly happy crying. More — overwhelmed crying. Two years of missing him was about to end. Two years of a friendship lived only in pixels was about to land in the actual world.

Esme realised, as she lay in bed that night, that she wasa little nervous.

She did not know what they would say to each other when he came back. They had said most of the easy things on calls. They had stopped saying many of the harder things — about school, about home, about who they were now — because they had run out of the kind of intimacy that comes from sharing a desk every day.

He had also changed. Esme had seen it on the calls. He was taller. His voice was lower. His friends in Toronto had taught him to say things in a way that was — slightly — not the way he had said them before. He was the same, mostly. But not entirely.

She was not the same either.

She was nervous about whether they would still be best friends.

She was also nervous about her newer friends. Would they understand?