text: It all started with a handshake. 11 years ago, I had found him at the corner of our middle school cafeteria in 6th grade, staring at the ground and glumly chewing on a sour gummy worm. I felt like I’d seen him before, but a distant memory wasn’t enough for me to remember his name. But I sat with him anyway. “You wanna sit with *him*? Eww, why?” One of my prissy friends had asked. The peer pressure almost got me, but I’d hung around the lot of them long enough to know that all they ever did was talk bad about other people. I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t about to tell them that either. “...He got the last pack of sour gummy worms.” I replied before sauntering off towards his table as my friends looked on helplessly. It didn’t take them long to decide that I wasn’t worth anything to them anymore, but I didn’t care. I slammed my lunch tray onto the table he was sitting at and plopped myself down in the seat across from him. He looked startled at first, staring up at me as if he was unsure if I was really there or not. “Hey.” I said. “Where’d your friends go?” He shrugged and refused to meet my eyes. “Let me know when you find me one.” “Found one.” I replied, pointing at myself. I was quite proud for coming up that one, but he didn’t seem convinced. “Yeah, right...you’re just sitting here cause you feel sorry for me.” “Hey. That’s not true.” He looked at me skeptically. I found myself unable to lie. “Okay, maybe it’s a little true. But so far, you’d make a better friend than the people I usually hang around with.” Uncertainty crossed his face. “...You think so?” I smiled. “It’s been at least a minute and you haven’t said anything bad about anyone else’s sense of fashion. I know so. And to prove it...” I stuck out my hand. He knit his eyebrows in confusion. “You want me to hold your hand?” “It’s a handshake, genius.” “O-oh. Right.” He reached out to shake my hand, but I pulled it away at the last second. “A *secret* handshake.” Confusion reached his eyebrows again. “Uhh...what?” “You heard me. Something only the both of us know. That way there’ll be no doubt in anyone’s mind that we’re friends. *Especially* yours.” We spent the rest of that lunch working out the first steps. Front hand high five, backhand high five, fist bump, followed by a twirl and a double snap into finger guns. It was a little awkward at first, and we got some weird looks from people at other tables, but before long he was finally smiling, and I found myself doing the same. “You know...you’re pretty cool.” “Cool enough to be your friend?” I asked with a shrug. He nodded. “Yeah. Friends it is.” The rest of middle school was a blur, but from that moment on we were always there when we needed each other. When his parents wouldn’t let him hang out with me after school just because I was a girl, when I almost failed math, and especially when we both needed someone to sit with at lunch. The handshake went with us, too. As our friendship developed, it became more complicated. We spent tons of time revising it and adding more steps. Elbow jabs, vertical high fives, and even a few rounds of patty cake. We didn’t even know why. Something about it was just really special to both of us. High school rolled around, and we both started to drift in other directions. We made friends who didn’t care about the fact that I’d been alienated by the gossip squad three years ago, or that his only friend prior to meeting them was the girl who’d been alienated by the gossip squad three years ago. None of that mattered anymore. It was the best. What wasn’t the best was the new form of peer pressure that was running rampant through the school; dating. All of a sudden everyone was getting snatched up, and before long he and I were left at odds. “Y’all are so cute, you should totally go out!” They said. And as much as I hate to admit, the pressure got to me that time around. It was awkward at first, suddenly declaring ourselves a couple. But over time, I came to realize that he was a lot more than that shy kid I sat with one day in middle school. He was sweet, and charming, and smart enough to explain trigonometry to someone who had avoided math like the plague ever since bombing her 8th grade algebra final. I denied it for a while, but the feelings I had for him were very real, and one fateful Valentine’s day, he worked up the courage to tell me that he felt the same way. A relationship had blossomed between us, and with it, our secret handshake got more complicated. Before I knew it, we’d added step-kicks, jazz hands and a ballroom twirl as per inspiration from when we took musical theater. It might have seemed childish and silly, but it was special. Every time we did that handshake, it reminded me how much he meant to me, and how much I meant to him. High school and college went by in what felt like no time at all. We’d both been accepted into different universities, but somehow we made it work long distance, so long as we talked every day and met in person at least once a month. At the end of my final year of school, I threw a grad party. Lots of people came, but I was especially excited to see my boyfriend. He’d even taken the liberty to dress up a bit for once, which I found extraordinarily sweet. At the end of the night, he was the last person to head out. We’d spent the evening talking and laughing like old times...just like we used to in 6th grade. He’d just told me a really stupid joke about lyrics to an Amy Winehouse song, and I playfully pushed him. “Alright, dude. You better get outta here before I actually have to fight you.” He shrugged. “Yeah, yeah, okay.” However, right as he stepped through the doorway, he held out his hand and flashed a smile. “Handshake?” I smiled back. “Totally.” We went through the whole routine with practiced ease; Front hand high five, backhand high five, fist bump, vertical high five, elbow jab, swivel, patty cake, hand grasp, turn, step kick, pivot to the left, high five, pivot to the right, fist bump, ballroom twirl, double fist bump blow-up(with sound effects), followed by a turn and a double snap into finger guns. I moved to do the turn, but when I turned back around to do the finger guns...he wasn’t there, gunning me back, like he had been for the past eleven years. He was on one knee. With a tiny box in his hands. And a ring in that tiny box. And a smile on his face that told him, and me, that he was absolutely certain of what he was about to do. “...Will you marry me?” For a moment, I was dumbstruck. But my answer was short, simple, and straight to the point. Blinking back tears, I smiled back and laced the ring into its proper spot on my left hand finger. “...Absolutely.