#175. Golem Sundae and Seafoam Articuno (Friday, March 17, 2000)

What was your best day…of seeing the future before the present ended?

The departure of my best friend Harry Liu (#113, #92) to San Francisco came as a shock. One day, we were dropping him off after a school recorder concert when my mom noticed a “For Sale” sign outside his house. Two weeks later, it was his last day at school with us. I barely had time to process the emotional devastation.

That last day did not go well. Harry was in an inexplicably pissy mood through the whole thing, where he:

Ended a bizarrely fun four-person session where Chris McCormick (#87), Jake Ingram (#92), Harry, and I were throwing Pokémon figurines into the snow, by telling Chris and Jake they were “trashing” our area and should leave—while apparently keeping their figurines.
Got his only-ever yellow card from our relatively new teacher, Ms. Ripley, for doing nothing in class and mumbling a half-hearted response when she called him on it.
Refused to help me search for a tuque that I thought I misplaced, while we were waiting for our minivans home.

But that day was not his last day in Ottawa. While he’d be taking Friday off school to pack for the move, we had made a vague assurance to each other—the type that almost never comes through—that we’d meet up one last time before he left. I wasn’t counting on it.

So I entered Friday dejected. Instead of sulking, though, I quickly reattached myself to Chris, Jake, and Maksym that morning, continuing the Pokémon-figurine nonsense Harry had shut down the day before. I was not good at making friends at this point in my childhood, so this mattered.

Most of the morning was spent climbing around the giant snowbank surrounding the schoolyard rink and talking endlessly about something I no longer remember—probably Pokémon. I was more peripheral than the others, but I was included, and for once genuinely felt like part of their group.

Two moments survive clearly. Maksym, normally prickly, stared off into the distance with me and said almost warmly, “That really sucks, Harry leaving like that. I feel for you.” And later Jake held up his Golem figurine embedded in a snowball, prompting Chris to tell him, “You’re going to have a Golem sundae.”

Then afternoon recess derails everything. For reasons I still don’t understand, Ms. Ripley tells Chris and me that Jake thinks Chris is mad at him and that we should include him more. (This contradicts everything I have seen this day so far.) We meet up with Jake, who at one point says, “You have to play with me or teacher going to be angry.” A misunderstanding escalates, Jake smashes one of Chris’s Pokémon snow structures onto the ground, and Chris storms off. I take that as my cue to leave too.

Ten minutes later, as the bell rings, I see a crowd by the rink. Jake is on the ground with what looks like a broken nose. Chris has punched him in the face.

With Chris in the principal’s office and Jake being looked after, Ms. Ripley asks the class what happened. I eagerly recount everything in vivid detail,¹ including the “teacher going to be angry” line, and somehow this becomes the moment I first feel officially integrated into their social world. I now have a group at school beyond Harry.²

But that night, just for one more night, my social world still includes Harry. When I call him after school, he says he can come over, and for the final hour we ever spend together, we play Pokémon Red on my emulator and try obsessively to navigate Seafoam Islands and find Articuno. Somewhere in the middle, I naturally tell him the entire Chris-Jake story.

We never find Articuno.

And with that, Harry left my life. But before he did, one chaotic day had already shown me that my life could keep going in its own way without him.

N.B. For the final four months of the school year, Chris took on a lighter version of the best-friend role. Two months later, he was also the one who taught me Magic: The Gathering (#22), which filled much of the Harry-sized space for the rest of that year—and far beyond.

At one point I recruit Wesley (#87), who witnessed part of it, to help me reenact the incident. He is clearly confused and nowhere near my energetic tempo, so I end up performing both roles myself.
Chris somehow received almost no punishment—just an in-school suspension the following Monday. Jake’s nose also seemed fine by then.