When we were nine, you put on your dad’s suits during art class and deemed that the pencil shavings in Mr. Frank’s red porcelain plate were definitely his nightly sustenance.

We made a bridge of sketch paper on the floor in your basement when we saw that centipede.

We had sword fights with the alphabetical foam mat pieces.


When we were ten, you changed the password to your iPod and made me guess it so many times that you forgot it and had to go to the Apple store to get it reset.

We spent an hour on Wii just so you could make caricatures of people you knew, and we didn’t even play any of the games.

We created a whole fake email community just to prank people and send out newsletters to everyone in our contacts.

We hated on Miley Cyrus so much that we almost got kicked out of Tenacity.

You dropped your third floor window screen out the window by accident one time.


When we were eleven, we sat at the back of ISEE prep together and ate buffalo chicken-flavored pretzels from the vending machine.

We took gothic literature and made puns out of Ms. Maher’s name.

We went to Six Flags over the summer and screamed out our newly learned vocabulary whenever there was a drop on the roller coaster, oblivious to the weird looks we were getting from parents.

I watched you try and climb that rope ladder to win a minion, but you fell off a million times.


When we were twelve, you introduced me to volleyball, and I had so much fun even though I never made the team.

We celebrated your birthday at the Latin club’s board meeting, and I baked you a cake even though I never baked anything. I remember that some of the board members actually thought there was cake for the meeting.

We created a whole orchestra of fake-email personas just so we could recruit one real person.

We took the commuter rail, and I filmed a half hour vlog of you and all the other kids on the train eating the cake we found. We were going to leave the cake for future passengers, but you got nervous and threw the whole thing out when we reached our stop.

We went swimming in our clothes while rapidly switching our personalities and making declamations about our nonexistent mani-pedicures and pedi-manicures just because we’re weird like that.


When we were thirteen, you came to visit me with a stack of index cards, a box of candy, a stuffed Hello Kitty, and a purple pen, which I used to write all of my journal entries.

You defended me with vehement passive aggression against anyone who said anything about me.

My other friends told me you cried in the library all afternoon when I went to the hospital.

I took pictures of you hugging all of my friends.

You made sure that the Yankee Swap in Italian was extra special when most people just settled for fuzzy socks and hot chocolate.


When we were fourteen, I called one of my friends and talked to you from their phone when you guys were on the train together.

You taught me so many important things about life, even though you joke about everything and are the kind of person to dip popcorn in pickle juice and put it on pizza.


When we were fifteen, we played Latin Bananagrams together, and you taught me scansion.

You reposted my petition as one of your very few Instagram posts.

You FaceTimed me from Staples at the start of school to tell me that you were buying laminating paper to make laminated cards of Camila Cabello instead of getting school supplies.

You told me your blue pen was out of ink because your little brother tried to draw the entire ocean.

You copied out an ensemble of sentences for me just because I said your cursive was beautiful.


This year, you called me to tell me that you continued my legacy, went to the playground to sit on the swings, and then sat in a shopping cart you found on the sidewalk.

You told me with utmost excitement that you were sitting in your room when Audrey came in and it hit you that it was the Audrey I was talking about.

You walked to Billings Field to play tennis with me in the summer, and you made a whole fake Instagram on the occasion for old times’ sake.


In all the years I have known you, you’ve never ceased to make me laugh until I can’t breathe, smile until my jaw hurts.

Your excellence in semantics has always given me a run for my money.

I still have a list of all the fake email addresses you have.

You’ve always been such a source of inspiration for me because of how great you are at everything you do.

You were the first person to call me Ania.


Even as I cry writing this, I am smiling remembering you.