Free First Comes Love by Katie Kacvinsky Page A

wrote the dark comedy “Pulp Christmas,” about a drug-induced family holiday. We look at photos of a garage band he started with his sister—he was on guitar, she was lead vocals and tambourine, and his neighbors were bongo and bass. They called themselves Lucky Dogs and played mostly Adam Sandler covers, Bohemian-style.
    Gray tells me one of his favorite stories. During their sophomore year of high school, Amanda went a day without using her arms. When Gray asked her why she was doing it, she said because it “puts life in perspective.” He told her she was being ridiculous. Why would you want to experience having a severe birth defect? She argued you could lose your arms any day. It makes you appreciate what you have.
    So, his mom helped her get dressed and brush her teeth. He fed her breakfast, drove her to school, and hauled her bags to her locker. Her friends fed her lunch and carried her books to class. She got out of doing all her homework. Not fair.
    She went to track practice after school and ran with the team, but she kept her arms tucked close to her sides. That’s the picture he’s holding as he’s telling me this story—a photo of Amanda running around the track with her arms held tight against her hips. People stared at her, he said, but she was too busy sprinting past them to notice.
    “I don’t even want to know how she went to the bathroom,” Gray added. “I never asked.”
    She wrote an essay about her experience and published it in their school paper. It won an award for the most creative essay that year. People still talk about it. I tell him I’d love to read it.
    We leave Tommy’s and drive out to Scottsdale to visit an art gallery where Amanda worked part-time. We walk in and he points out a piece she made that still hangs in the store, in memory of her. It’s a mosaic. Amanda always found beauty in the most random things, he explains.
    “You two have that in common.” He tells me she collected rocks, glass, or anything chipped and tattered that most people overlook. Where most people saw trash, Amanda saw potential and she could somehow string broken pieces together to create something beautiful. He says she sold one of her pieces, when she was fifteen, for four hundred dollars.
    “Amanda wanted to go into art therapy,” he explains. “She wanted to work with people with disabilities and open her own art studio. She would have been great at it.”
    I smile sadly at the idea of her. It’s hard to accept that you’ve missed out on a
person,
that all you’ll ever know of them are pieced-together stories. It’s not like missing out on a party or a concert—those are temporary experiences, and you’ll have other opportunities. But this is permanent. It’s like being robbed of something valuable you never had the privilege to own.
    “I wish I could have known her” is all I can say.
    “You would have loved her,” he says. “It’s scary how well you two would have gotten along.”
    We walk across the street to Nella’s Irish Bar and Restaurant and I follow Gray to the back, where there’s a Ms. Pac-Man video game, one of his and Amanda’s favorite and most addictive pastimes. He lays a stack of quarters on the table next to the game and crosses his arms over his chest.
    “Another quintessential test of any friendship,” he says, and nods at the screen. “Do you appreciate old school video games?” Instead of answering him, I grab a handful of quarters. It just so happens that I not only appreciate Ms. Pac-Man, but share his obsession. By the time we leave, I have a blister forming on the back of my thumb from playing so long. Gray has to pull me away from the machine when I almost dislocate my shoulder from taking a hard right to escape a ghost. When I make it to level two, he’s impressed. When I make it to level four, he just gawks.
    “Okay, I’m seriously turned on,” he says with a smile, and I can feel myself blush.
    We head down the street and walk into the