A year or so later, a girl awaiting a lung transplant asked to meet me. I spent a couple of hours with her and found myself forgetting the strange premise of why I was there. I liked her. A lot. She was funny and kind and she had a wry sense of humour about her own terrifying predicament. I would have liked to be her friend. The year before my mother died, we had moved from a suburb of Toronto to Aurora, a town which was an hour and a half by bus and subway from the school I went to, and I was never at school long enough to really maintain friendships throughout the year. I was under the impression that this girl would live, that we would talk often, but maybe I just didn’t ever ask anyone what her prognosis was. One day I called her to check in, and she was gone. Her father sent me a T-shirt with her face on it. I sat alone in my room for a long time.