Joshua grew up to be a tall boy and Tandar grew like a tree. By the time they were eighteen he was enormous, bigger than the basketball players, with strong brown hands that were as long as Joshua's feet. And he was beautiful, his face was long and smooth and dark as clay, with thick black eyebrows that almost met in the middle, and the biggest brightest smile. In junior high his voice grew and deepened into a man's voice, quiet but round like a kettle drum, and when he laughed it sounded like the laugh had to look a long time for the way out of his body.
Joshua was very handsome too, he had curly brown hair and started wearing glasses when he was fifteen, and the two of them were always best friends. They were both Boy Scouts, and they worked for three years at a summer camp two hours away. The Appalachian Trail ran along the ridge right above the camp, and the staff ran a race, from Yards Creek to Paxquarra, every summer. The race was run in teams of two; Tandar and Joshua won it twice.
When Joshua started working on the school newspaper, Tandar joined the next week. When Tandar signed up to act in the school play, Joshua worked backstage. When they started dating girls--at about the same time--they often took them to the same places, or just went out all together, and the girls had to learn to like them both.
After high school they wrote letters and remembered but they didn't see each other very much. Tandar was the valedictorian in their high school, he gave a speech, and he went to Princeton, which his mother and father liked because it was close. Then when Joshua graduated he went to college in New York and when he got out he worked in a lot of places. Right now he works in Denver, so he had to come all that way to get home.