It was rather hard to forget the first time you saw somebody when you met them when the first glimpse was of their blond hair hanging down over your window as their face peered in. That's one reason I would never forget the first time I ever saw Spot Conlon. Another was what he said after he fell and broke his arm from it.

"Dang it. I really wanted that cherry." It turned out he had dropped a cherry out of the window of his apartment above my house, and had hung upside down to try and get it. I'd looked over just in time to see him flip down and spend a grand total of about a minute hanging majestically, grasping at the gutter for his cherry, before he'd fallen onto the ground two stories below and break his arm in two places. I might have known a new family had moved into our apartment, but I wasn't aware that they had a kid my age, and so I was not prepared for his face to fall into my life. In such a freaking dramatic way.

"Why were you hanging in my window?" In all my ten year old wisdom, I didn't think to ask if he was okay.

"I wanted my cherry." He was splayed out on the lawn, looking for all the world like he was resting, until he tried to sit up, moving his arm. "Ow." That was all he said, but I saw the tears in his eyes. He blinked rapidly, lying back down. "Owowow." He said quietly.

"Are you okay? Should I get somebody?"

"Nah, I just have to shake it off." He tried to sit up again, clutching his arm to his chest. "I just have to get upstairs and maybe put some ice on it." He climbed the stairs up to the apartment, and I didn't see him again until school started.

I never learned his name, because I didn't have a real excuse to know him and I didn't want my parents to think I'd been snooping or anything. Three weeks after his fall, school began and when I walked out to the bus stop he was wearing a neon yellow cast under his flannel. He didn't say a word to me, but he sat next to me on the bus, looking out the window while I caught up with my friends.

"Who's the new kid, Racer?" Jack asked me, nodding at the boy in the cast. I shrugged.

"Moved in upstairs. We'll meet him in class." That was all we said about him until class, when Miss Rosalyn introduced him.

"Everyone, this is Sean Conlon, new this year. Would you like to say something about yourself, Sean?"

"My name is Spot, not Sean, I like cherries but pineapples are evil, and I moved from Brooklyn." The look in his eyes dared us to make fun of him for his choice of nickname or his declaration of fruit choice. Nobody took the challenge, and he sat down.

"Hey Race, ask him to sit with us, hey?" Specs poked me. "He looks alone. I wouldn't wanna be alone on the first day of fifth grade." I sighed and walked to Spot's desk at lunchtime.

"You wanna sit with us? We got room." Spot looked at me suspiciously, but picked up his Star Wars lunchbox and sat down with my group of friends.

"So you came from Brooklyn? What's it like in the city? Did you ride the subway? Did it smell bad? Or did it smell good? Is Connecticut much different from Brooklyn? Do you like it here? What happened to your arm? When did you move here? Do you know Race? Why is your nickname Spot? Are you gonna be friends with us?" Crutchy babbled. Spot looked at him like nobody had ever talked to him so much before.

"Yeah. Different. Yeah. Sometimes. Not usually, except at Christmas. Yes. Dunno. Fell out of my apartment. A month ago. Not really. Because. I dunno." He said, semi-quietly. "Why do you call him Race?" He pointed at me.

"Because he hasn't lost a playground race yet! They call me Crutchy because I had a crutch until last year when I got my brace, and him Specs cause he's got glasses, and him Swifty cause he's almost as fast as Race, and him Snitch cause he's a rat but he's still nice, and him Jack cause it's cooler than Francis, and him Skittery cause… I dunno why. He's Dutchy cause he's from the moon, and he's-"

"I get it! I get it! Lot's of nicknames!" Spot's eyes darted around as he tried to track who was who.

"Crutchy, don't freak him out." Snoddy said calmly. "Welcome to our group, Spot." Spot nodded, taking out a Fluffernutter and starting to eat.

He had to be asked over to our table the first few weeks, but he eventually started just coming over. He loosened up around us, and we soon learned he wasn't as quiet as he'd seemed. Every word that left his mouth was some sort of joke or threat, or sometimes just something really random. He apparently didn't say anything random except to me, though, because nobody else noticed it. We would sometimes hang out after school, usually in my backyard, which I guess was also his.

"Remember when I fell out of my window?" He said suddenly.

"Yeah, why?"

"I really wanted that cherry. You think it's still there?"

"No. The birds probably ate it." He looked sad for a minute, then brightened. That was when I started to get nervous, when his eyes lit up and he grinned at me.

"Then let's find some Twinkies. I have an idea."

"Uh-oh." He was still grinning, and I could practically hear his brain thinking.

"We need Twinkies, chocolate sauce, sprinkles, some dirt and maybe some milk." He ran off. "You're in charge of sprinkles and milk!" He yelled over his shoulder. I shook my head and did what he said. There wasn't much of a way around it.

That prank was the start of a long and beautiful friendship. He was a genius when it came to pranking people in the most detailed schemes I'd never thought of. He was also a master at disguising his voice, so when I had him sleep over we made a lot of prank calls. He was always so careful not to get caught, and his one condition was that we weren't hurting anyone. His non-pranking adventures, however, were not so nice. If somebody insulted him, he fought them at recess, and he always won. He got sent to the principal's office at least once a week, and at home he got hurt doing stupid things all the time. He never did repeat his falling out of his window, but he did fall off our garage roof a few times, out of several different trees at different points in time, and nobody would ever forget the time he crashed a bike into our porch when all our friends were over, knocking himself out and taking out Snoddy, Swifty, Skittery and me on his way to somehow knocking the railing off. Lesson learned from that experience: Never give Spot a bike and stand in his way. Also, it really, really hurts to get run over by a bike.

Our relationship changed in high school, when we were split into a few different schools based on where we lived. The high schools were in different places than the middle and elementary schools, so we were separated. We lost Snoddy, Skittery, Dutchy, Itey, Pie-eater, Kid Blink and a few others, and our group was down to me, Jack, Specs, Spot, Mush, Crutchy and a couple more. It was weird, not seeing the rest of them all the time, even though we all kept in touch, and me and Spot got even closer.

"Do you remember Brooklyn?" I asked him one night, when we were outside, watching a meteor shower for a homework assignment.

"Yeah." He didn't elaborate, so I prodded at him.

"Did you like it there?"

"Sometimes. When I wasn't at school or home, and nobody could touch me. I felt like I was the king when I was on the streets, even though the older kids only let me hang out with them because my brother made them."

"You have a brother?" He turned to face me, instead of the sky.

"Had. I had a brother."

"Oh. Sorry."

"He was killed. We don't know why, and the police said it was just a random shooting. That's why we moved here."

"Oh." I didn't know anything else to say.

"One day I'm gonna find out who did it." Spot said seriously. "I'm gonna be a police officer and solve it, so my family knows. It's not okay not knowing." Spot rolled back over onto his back again and looked up at the sky. Under the starlight, his hair, darkening as he grew up but still bond, seemed to glow with the flashes of shooting stars, and his eyes had their reflections in them. Beautiful wasn't a word I'd usually use to describe the short boy from Brooklyn, but under the shower of falling space rock, he was. He looked, as cheesy as it sounds, like a Greek demigod, noble and proud and yet with so much sadness in him, in those few moments. I think it was that night that everything started, when I started to realize who I was and who Spot was to me. That was when I started, I think, to fall for the boy from Brooklyn who had fallen into my life so many years ago.

This should end up at around five chapters, I think. There's probably a one chapter margin of error in that guess, though, in either direction.