Everyone will have moments like these, a friend like this, an understanding like this. And years later, this girl will smile and recognize that maybe she was one of the lucky ones who find a friend like that so early in life. A person who walks on your side of the sidewalk.

Once there were two girls. One was light, paper-white skin and golden hair, and the other was dark, chocolate-milk skin and wild rainforest curls. Before they blended into poetry-speaking, coffee-drinking, star-gazing young ladies, there was a shyness that they learned to shed hand-in-hand. There were stolen glances of a longing for friendship shared during eternal math ­lessons.

“Spoot.” A bond is formed through the name of a snail. The word is uttered ­between formulas that mean nothing. They giggle into doodle-adorned notebooks. She didn’t ­realize that the girl with truffle curls and hot-cocoa eyes would change her.

They evolved into mycological beings, they grew iridescent scales of green and pink and orange. They swam through salty oceans and laughed in the silence of bubbles. They changed together, two CDs with the same song.

It’s a long walk away from the fading sunlight, arms linked as girls do. They want, they want, they want the whole world. Want something that they can taste but not see, that they can hear but not follow. It’s swinging among children, knowing that if they can swing high enough they’ll be there, wherever there is. But they realize that there exists, and their theres are the same, and that there is not here. The girls fall into the sand and laughter emerges that is uniquely the sound of two people who are, for this moment, on the same path.

It’s about getting dressed up at one in the morning, faces smudged with muddy eyeliner and trashy lipstick. Long dresses. They’ll have their own masquerade. They bounce high on the dance floor of the trampoline and twirl in their swishy gypsy dresses.

“Oscar Wilde said this …”

“And Oscar Wilde said that …”

They recite quotes to a starless sky from the balcony of a bookstore and read plays in the best British accents that they can fake. They shriek and rage and dance to the music that’s blaring from someplace far away but still feels as intimate as if it’s their own.

“Why is everything so beautiful?” the first girl nearly screams, leaning back in a cool metal chair. The taste of coffee lingers in their mouths, but their breaths of dark downtown air are frosty. The second girl shrugs and looks up into the streetlights. “It just is. And that’s why it’s so beautiful.”

“I need to do something.”

“Like what?”

“Anything. You know, something. Gah.” Words that don’t make sense to anyone make sense to them. They’ve developed their own language. Sentences finish and complete, a twirl of hands shifts the topic. If one can’t express, the other can.

It’s screaming in the car about the colors of the ­autumn trees, about the tragedy that makes red stand out against the black and white.

It’s about, “Hey, we’re so cool.”

And, “Heck yes, we are.”

It’s about listening to loud Japanese rock music and twirling around on the wooden floors. Spin me this way, spin you that way. It’s about seeing people dressed in orange outside the house at three in the morning and grabbing steak knives for protection.

They want to take Japanese sword-fighting lessons and slice down the walls that keep them here. They have dreams of a white house with sharpened icicles staring down at the snow. One dreams of famished children in Africa, ribs haunting through sagging skin. The other dreams of thin ink sliding across ­college-ruled paper in an empty café.

Confidence is a lesson that mirrors don’t teach but that outstretched arms do. They walk through the city, heads held high and shoes beating against the cement. When they scream it’s throwing out their ­desire for the future. It’s them needing to leave their city, to sip tea on mountaintops and dress up before pushing their way through the thin fingers of dead trees.