Porter Hallow was 16 when I met him. He didn't look very interesting; kind of a familiar face but nothing out of the ordinary. He was tall and skinny with big green eyes and dark brown hair. His mouth was permanently curved upwards, like he had smiled one to many times to be able to frown and he had creases around his eyes which made him look like he was always thinking. I only talked to Porter once; to show him around school on his first day. After that I caught glimpses of him in the hallways or at Jillies after school, but that was it. We had different friends, took different classes, lived different lives.

It was the week before my twentieth birthday when I remembered Porter. It was an abrupt thought, an intermediate coalition of emotions that filed into my brain. I remembered glimpses in the hallway and absentminded smiles to unobservant people. I remembered the tan skin and green eyes; the bright, green eyes with dark brown hair and glasses a little too big but somehow looked so natural. The thoughts came in flashes, relapses of memory. The crinkled eyes and piercing laugh all blended together, but still, it was Porter. Porter Hallow who was 16 when I met him and now 20. Porter Hallow who had been the new kid in the 10th grade, who had asked me for directions to chemistry class on his first day and then never talked to me again. Porter Hallow, whom I didn't even know, but somehow knew everything about.

He was 12 when he moved to Salinas, California. He was forced to move there after his mother died and his father began drinking. After the move he lived with his grandma and only saw his dad during the holidays. Eventually, Porter stopped going to see his dad at all because he said he couldn't stand to see a man who was once so proud now so vulnerable. In the 8th grade he fell off a ladder and cut his arm so badly he needed 10 stitches. He refused to tell his grandma about it and instead wore a sweater for two weeks in the summer to cover the bandages. At the end of his 10th grade year at St. Jefferson's he was expelled for supposedly bringing a gun to school, even though there were no witnesses and he swore the gun wasn't his. Ironically, he transferred to Hanson's at the start of 11th grade, five days before two kids in his class admitted to putting the gun in his locker as a prank. At the end of 12th grade grade he graduated from Hansons with honors and he went on to make a career as an inventor.

The next day I called everyone I could remember from high school and asked if they knew what had happened to Porter.
“Who”, they all said.
“You know, Porter Hallow, he came to Hanson in the 10th grade".
“No, sorry, I don't remember him”.

After that I searched for his name in the phone book. I found my old yearbook but Porter wasn't listed there either. I began a desperate search to find him. What did he like to do? Where would he hang out? I asked myself the same questions over and over again. I walked around town, back to school; I knocked on doors, stopped people on the street. I asked everybody I saw if they knew
Porter Hallow; if they knew where he lived, how to contact him, where he worked. But nobody knew. The name Porter Hallow was nonexistent.

Gradually, he faded from my memory as well, until all that was left of him were green eyes and brown hair. After college I moved to an apartment in Marina where I accepted a position at Sawyer & Brick's law firm and met my boyfriend, Benton. For a while, it was just me, until my 25th birthday when I got engaged. The wedding wasn't long after and by 27 I was married.  Within the year Benton and I moved to Soledad where we had our first daughter Milia and I opened my own firm. A year later we had our second and last daughter Hadlee. Together we lived a blissful existence, one with consistency and absent of abnormality. By the age of 40 Milia and
Hadlee were in college and Benton and I moved back to Marina. Fifteen years later I had welcomed two grandchildren into the world with a third along the way. It wasn't until I was 60 that life strayed from it's normality. Benton suffered a heart attack after being in a car crash and died three days later in the hospital. We grieved for awhile, but life adjusted and we continued.  Milia had another child and moved all around the world. Hadlee stayed in California, divorced her first husband and remarried another man with three kids. A couple years later I moved back to Salinas and at 85 I moved into a nursing home.

It wasn't until I turned 90 that I thought of Porter Hallow again. What had happened to him, I wondered. Was he married? Did he have kids? I thought about the time I had walked him to chemistry class on his first day at Hansons and of how sometimes I would see him in the hallway or walking around town. I asked the nurses if they knew him and if he was okay, but nobody answered. Instead they told me to relax and let the medicine sink in. I had pneumonia, they said, and at my age I didn't have much time.

It was late one evening while I watched the sun set that I thought of Porter Hallow for the last time.
“I've been searching for such a long time,” he told me.
“Searching for what?,” I asked.
“The key to the past,” he said.
“And did you find it?”, I asked again.
“I found you, didn't I”.