The Bigger Thing

I almost didn't recognise her. Marisol had cut her hair short, and she was wearing glasses now, but the moment she laughed I knew it was her. We hadn't seen each other in twenty years.

“You used to be taller,” she said, hugging me.

“I used to be a lot of things,” I said.

We found a quiet corner of the pub. When we were young, the two of us used to sit in a place like this every Friday and plan our enormous futures. Eduardo, she would say, we are going to do something that matters. I admired her so much back then. She had more ambition than the rest of us put together.

“Do you remember,” she said, “how we used to argue about which of us would be famous first?”

“You always won that argument.”

“And look at me now. I teach maths to fourteen-year-olds.”

She said it lightly, but I heard something underneath it. When we were twenty, we would have called that a small life. We used to think achievement meant your name in the newspaper.

“My students wrote me a card last week,” she said. “One of them is studying engineering now. She said it was because of me.”

Marisol turned her glass slowly on the table. “I used to want to change the world. Now I think I just changed one girl's mind about herself. I'm not sure which is the bigger thing.”

I thought about my own life — the job, the divorce, the years that had somehow buried all those Friday-night plans.

“You know what I admire about you?” I said. “You stopped wanting to be famous. You never told me that hurt.”

“It didn't hurt,” she said. Then she smiled. “Well. It used to.”