I thought of Andrea mocking me about my height, and I started to cry. Alaina spraying me with the garden hose as I lay in the hammock that we had strung up in the back yard. I thought of the times we all goaded each other into uncontrollable laughter with increasingly infantile jokes and puns. No one understood us like we understood each other. No one else would get it, maybe not even Mom and Dad. And they were gone. Irretrievably beyond my reach, forever. As the loneliness, the loss washed over me, I slid down off my chair onto the floor and curled into a ball. I sobbed until I couldn’t catch a breath, then had to gasp a huge lungful of air.