Montreal, 1967. I was sixteen, an innocent knee-socked girl, in an elevator going down, on a gurney, held upright—completely vertical—by two paramedics. Kneecap knocked sideways from the joint reminding me of a hockey puck just shot into the net, jutting out. Ligaments strained, tendons pulled, throat dry.

The door slid open on six. A woman (girl?) looked at me, looked down at my knee, and said, “Holy shit.” She had to be about my age, wearing our universal Canadian school uniform—navy blue tunic with wide-pleated skirt, an apron top, and wide suspenders of that same mud-blue material. A white starchy shirt underneath, as if freshly unfolded from a box, collar turned high.

“Do you live in the building?” she asked. Her face cherub-like, yet ordinary and plain, small eyes, pug nose, skin colorless like blanched peaches.

“Twelfth floor,” I slurred (pain meds). She left at G, calling back, “I’ll find you and make sure you’re okay.” She turned once more. “I’m Wendy!”

I was standing outside in my hip-to-ankle cast watching our dog pee when I saw Wendy for the second time. I told her my name and looked up at her. She was tall, although it might have been confidence, not height. She was smoking a cigarette. I told her how I wound up knee-knocked (I’d rushed to my bed, fast-kneeling to reach the shelf for Island of the Blue Dolphin). Until then, suburbia had spared me physical pain. That day on the bed, I’d screamed a wild one. She flicked the ashes from her cigarette with such force I thought she might break it. Telling my trauma seemed to fuel her adrenaline. It started to rain.

Our surroundings spoke middle class. Tame architecture of those tall apartment buildings, nothing notable, the air bland. There were irises clustered here and there, manly green creatures clutching blue swords. My dog sniffed around and Wendy and I chatted in the slow rain. She held herself with a masculine nerve—feet rooted as if on two pillars, as if she owned the world, a god. Her laugh was crisp, like bites of the season’s first apple, her voice feisty. She knew life’s punchline and I didn’t. She stood with hands on tight waist, school uniform taut across the bust, the inside shirt unbuttoned above the tunic, hint of cushiony boobs. I’d never talked to anyone like her.

The friendship played out. We didn’t go to the movies or go shopping for jeans or listen to records or buy Rolling Stone so we could swoon over Paul McCartney. We never went out in girl groups to giggle over “real guys” downtown or gaze pie-eyed at Oglivy’s holiday window. We didn’t share secrets. With other friends, yes. Not with Wendy.

I was not popular, I struggled for acceptance. At least I was among a shared tribe, a kindred pack—girls, teenage girls. But Wendy was almost of another species. Certainly not teen-like. Player provocateur, maybe.

She had her swagger. Wendy, busting out of the elevator to take on some mission of the day. Wendy, chain-smoking with the naked confidence of a savvy poker player. Wendy, guffaw-laughing at a crude joke. I’m not sure what I got out of the friendship. Or what she did, other than pulling me along some uncharted course.

She was a mother lion. I, a baby fawn. Over time, I saw being friends didn’t make sense. Not just because I lacked her confidence. Not because I was Jewish (she wasn’t). Not because she smoked (I didn’t). It was mostly because my friends were girls and she, she was a woman. She liked herself, and I didn’t even know who I was. She was daring and deliciously outrageous, and I was cowed and soft-minded and star-struck. Why on earth would she want to spend time with me? Was she waiting for something else to go wrong (besides my knee) so she could take care of me, could take over in some way?

Her strawberry-blonde hair spoke sass and sweetness and secrets. She was always twisting it, working it, making it fall over her eyes. Her eyelashes were so blonde they were invisible. Made me think of hairless cats.

She was athletic. It was golf, I learned. Always golf. A game her parents played every day and taught Wendy to love, too. She had no siblings. She’d visit late afternoons, her parents at The Club for cocktail hour, she’d tell me. She liked alcohol almost as much as cigarettes. Something else her parents passed down.

“What are you drinking, Harold,” she asked my dad that time she came over, as though she were his equal, his old buddy.

“My favorite Scotch.”

“You offering?” She swept her hair back and her face curved into a dimpled dare.

Either he didn’t care how old Wendy was (or wasn’t) or assumed she was older (easy to do). He didn’t let me have any booze. I never thought to ask. She was flirty and rousing and chatty and he was charmed and my mother was making dinner. I thought, well, maybe this was how it was supposed to be—this forward, flighted, girl-woman drinking Scotch with Dad. She sipped with authority, laughed with her head back, smoked like a champ. My dad on his pipe, she on her fag, smoke seething into the tiger orange rug and faux oak table. She was beyond me, beyond what I could understand.

About every time I saw Wendy, she held a cigarette between fore and middle fingers, and she’d work the butt with a nervous thumb—flick, flick, flick. She’d put the cig at the center of her front teeth and clench down, suck in, the smoke spiraling around her flushed face, eyes drawn into slits. She “clench-smoked” like this when swinging a golf club, telling a story, even eating. Cigarettes were part of the shtick, but I didn’t know what the shtick was.

Her gestures. Her stance. She could’ve been a man stalking a pool table, looking for the best shot. Flick, flick, flick. She was seventeen.

I should have asked myself where I wanted this friendship to go. Or why it was going at all. But I was caught up, flattered, supercharged. It’s like I’d had a friends-promotion. She’d picked me. I was used to looking up to others, so convinced—in that way young girls were—I was lacking. Wendy was so experienced. I started to smoke.

Sometimes when I was at her place, guys came to her door. High school boys, golf boys, horny boys. It was Russell, then Yves. Wendy cast them about like her cigarettes. One day, it was Johnny. He looked like a surfer, in snowy Montreal.

The two of them kind of roughhoused, cuffed each other on the shoulder, Wendy egging on Johnny, or maybe it was coming on to him.

“What happened to that other one, you know, Yves?” I whispered, when Johnny went to the bathroom.

“He’s coming back Friday.”

Just then, from her balcony, we saw Russell pull up. Uh-oh.

“Hey Russell-my-boy,” Wendy shouted as he got out of the car, “meet my new friend Johnny.”

I was in a separate stunned space. A girl could do this, and boys still wanted to be with her? Neither Russell, now standing below the balcony, nor Johnny, flinched. No one lost a beat. Not only that, she’d urge her boyfriends to get to know me. I didn’t know why. I hadn’t had a beau —as we Québécois would say—since my first harmless amour at thirteen. Maybe Wendy and her gang were all just friends.

My parents were out one evening and Wendy wanted me to drink. It was my first (and, as it turned out, last) foray into Scotch. She laughed at my scrunched-up face on the first taste.

“Go on, it’s okay,” her voice tender, a mother witness to her baby’s first steps.

“I can’t,” I said as I shivered down the alcohol. “It’s awful! And it’s my parents’ liquor. I just can’t.”

“Aw, c’mon. Just a sip or two. They won’t even notice. Besides, I want to see you have a good time.” Her eyes sparked, dragonflies in the dim light of our den. She held the bottle over a crystal-cut glass pinched from the liquor cabinet. A slight tip of her chin asked, Yah? Okay?

I nodded.

Atta girl. Every few minutes, Atta girl. I giggled and couldn’t stop. I must have had a couple of glasses by then, each little more than a shot. Soon, I twirled and sang. She clapped, waved her arms in the air, whoo-hoo’ed like a school girl for her team. Still later, she whistled with two fingers in her mouth as I howled, gleeful and unhinged, up and down the carpeted hallway of our twelfth floor. The pattern on the rug runner—chevron, after chevron. The frayed edges. The nameplates bolted to neighbors’ doors—Goldstein. Sacks. Ackton.

“Take your shirt off,” she yelled, watching me run past apartment door after door. And I did.

Portland, Oregon, 1999. Decades after my family had moved from that apartment. I parked in dark rain, a rabid storm. I walked using an umbrella, one of the rare times. Oregonians were tough.

On one of the downtown streets, the Park Blocks, with a grassy median, a group of people. Their belongings strewn alongside the street: boxes of peanut butter cracker packs, greasy McDonald’s bags, torn sacks with clothing spilling out like ashes. People winding and rippling, an undulating carpet, across the grass. Frenzied people, swaying to no music, drugged-out or drunk or both, people who had to be single mothers, and sisters of successful sisters, guys who’d lost jobs or never had them, distant aunts and forgotten grandfathers, children of parents not spoken to in years.

Her strawberry hair plastered her face. No coat. Eyes glazed, likely from heroin. Cigarette between her teeth. She was within reach. The site of Wendy flushed over me, a wave washing out an imprint. It was a moment, a minute, a millennium. Strangely, I was not shaken, not at all surprised to see her so far from where we both grew up. I said to myself, Wendy. Of course. It was like finding a puzzle piece that had been missing for years.

She walked past me, looked straight at me, but was soaring in some other world. I could have easily touched her, put my hands on her shoulders, could have shaken her, forced her to see me, could have said, Wendy, it’s me, Sheila, your old friend. I could have taken her home for a cup of tea.

Wendy at my kitchen table that night. She’d have sobered up. She’d have flung her arms around me, I was sure, when she realized who I was, her friend from long ago. We’d hug, my heart in the same tentative pull from decades ago, unsure why we were friends. I’d hear something, my parental senses alert, and see my daughter shuffling in half awake. I’d lurch back from Wendy, gather up my little girl and tuck her face into my core. I’d put her back to bed and tremble up the stairs leaving Wendy alone in my kitchen.

Instead, on the Park Blocks, my body took over. My stomach moved into my heart, my pulse winged. The earth lurched, landed in my mouth. My ever-active mind stalled out. My usual inner voice had left the premises. I was down to reflexes, raw fear, the only choice—run-run-run. My heart said one thing, my reactions something else. And they won, those reactions, were stronger, more primal.

So many years. Had she, after these decades, found the time, found the wherewithal, to be herself, to find herself? Had she worked? A golf pro? My goodness, maybe she’d had a child! Or two! What happened? For how long had she been lost?

Maybe she suffered when my family moved, when she and I lost touch. I never knew. I put her behind me. She’d come to mind—this girl-woman—again and again she would but I’d brush her aside, shoo her away, like a troublesome feeling or a nitty fly. And then, eventually, I forgot about her, and she was gone.

As it was, I sat alone at the table twirling a spoon and staring down my tea, my children steady in their sleep upstairs. For a moment I was outside that old apartment building, Wendy trotting toward me as if she were a distance runner at the finish line, way ahead of the pack, the sun flirting with her rosy hair. Wendy, with that energy and bounce and assuredness and womanhood. The night before on the Park Blocks, I watched her for a moment in her rapture, watched her weave into the flame of the group, watched her lift her arms, her face wet from rain or tears, and worship something I could not see, faint in the downpour.

Sheila Rittenberg found creative writing on retirement. She has been a Fellow at the Atheneum, a masters level writing program. She co-founded the Stepping Stones Fiction Writing Retreat, and founded WRAT—Writers Rap about Text. Sheila creates short stories, essays, and Flash prose that bring small voices into the world. Her work has been published in several presses including The Bluebird Word, Voices, Does It Have Pockets, and Fiction on the Web. You can find her at fiction-mostly.com.