After the ribbon ceremony we did not go home. We told them at home that we were going out for dinner, but really we just sat down on the steps in front of the school and waited for everyone to leave.
The ribbon hung on the lapel of my coat. All evening I had been thinking that this was the end of something, but I did not know what.
Dóri sat beside me with her shoes in her hand. She had danced in high heels all evening, and now her feet were bleeding, but she did not complain.
“I’m not sending in the application,” she said.
It was the first serious sentence she had said all evening.
“Sorry?”
“I’m not going to university. I’ve decided.”
The lamp above the school gate was on, and in its light I could see that her eyes were red.
“And what will you do?”
“I’ll work in Dad’s workshop for a year. Then I’ll see.”
We had not talked about this for three years. Dóri’s father is a joiner, and the workshop is slowly dying because there is nobody to take it over. And Dóri had always said she would be a doctor. Always. For as long as I have known her.
“Do you want to?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She looked at her shoes. “But I know that if I leave now, I will never find out what it would have been like to stay.”
The sentence was familiar. Not because I had heard it somewhere — but because I had been thinking the same thing myself for weeks, and had not dared to say it.
“And medical school?”
“That can wait. The workshop might not.”
I did not know what to say. You think that at seventeen every decision is big, and every big decision is final. Then you realise that most decisions are only final until somebody says they have changed their mind.
“I’m applying,” I said. “For medicine.”
Dóri smiled, and it was the first real smile of the evening.
“I know. I saw it on your exercise book.”
“On my exercise book?”
“On the back of your chemistry book it always says ‘tomorrow’. And underneath, smaller: ‘doctor’.”
I laughed. It really was there.
We sat there until the first dawn bus came. We did not talk much. Sometimes our shoulders touched, and at the time that was enough.
Dóri got on. She did not wave from the window — she only looked, and her mouth moved: “Soon.”
That night I understood that friendship is not wanting the same thing. It is understanding when the other person wants something different.
A year later Dóri applied. Not for medicine. She went to be a joiner, because it turned out that in her father’s workshop there is an old tool that nobody outside their family knows how to use.
I went to study medicine.
Not to the same place. But for a long time in the same direction.
