My new best friend is nine years old

I thought kids were the hindrance to making friends as a grownup, turns out they were the answer to it

Illustration: Léo Hamelin

My boyfriend is carrying our dead dog out of the house and I’m worried my neighbour is going to see. She’s nine years old and she’s accidentally become my new best friend.

When I moved out of the city and to a small town in the 2021 winter lockdown, I couldn’t see any of my old friends so making new ones wasn’t top of mind. But once life started opening up again, I longed for the effortless friendship of a nearby pal.

I’d walk my dogs down my newly built street and wonder about the people who lived in the houses identical to mine. Would any of them become my friend? I’d try to strike up a conversation with the few close in age. But as they bundled children into car seats, their lives seemed too full for new friends.

My first meaningful interactions were with a group of kids who lived in a row of neat houses tucked into the back pocket of our cul-de-sac. 

The first one to befriend me was a mild-mannered 8-year-old called Noah. It was a sunny day at the end of winter and I was pruning the roses in my front garden. One of my dogs, Jack, was sunbathing next to me. 

"Can I throw a ball for your dog?" Noah asked politely. 

As he lingered, he told me about the chickens he looked after at school, that he didn’t know how to swim yet, and how his own dog was naughty. I realised how long it had been since someone had hung out with me while I pottered.

As a 36-year-old woman who doesn’t want kids of her own, people assume I don’t like them. While that’s generally a huge mischaracterisation, I did find one of the neighbour kids, Olivia, deeply annoying. 

Olivia was … a lot. Loud, rude, filterless in that unrestrained way only kids can be. She once asked me if my partner was my boyfriend or my brother. Another time, she pointed to Noah’s 11-year-old brother and told me that he was gay. I wasn’t sure what you're supposed to do when one tween outs another, so I just said: “That’s great, but I think it’s up to him to tell people that.” 

In a shaky voice, the outed kid said: “See Olivia? That’s why none of us tell you our secrets.” And then cycled away.

To avoid bumping into Olivia, I’d peek out my window before taking the dogs for a walk. Yet, she figured out a foolproof way to muscle into my life – by doting on my dogs.

A slightly overweight golden retriever labrador cross who flunked out of Guide Dog school, Jack was the one people gravitated towards. They’d overlook my mutt, Dolly, even though she was the extrovert of the two who thrived off human attention where Jack shrank from it. Olivia was one of the few people who could see this. She loved Dolly fiercely and always came up to her for cuddles first.

In the spring, I told her it was Dolly’s birthday and later that day she turned up on my doorstep with a handmade card. I stuck it on the fridge. By summertime, I found myself tolerating Olivia more, even defending her when my partner grumbled about the constant knocking on the door from the kids asking to walk the dogs.

When Dolly died, the thought of telling Olivia filled me with dread. After the vet put her down, my partner was about to take Dolly out for the last time, wrapped in a blanket, to put her in the back of the vet's car. I checked first to see if the kids were outside, wanting to avoid them not because they were annoying, but because I didn't want them to witness this.

But Olivia already knew that Dolly’s days were numbered. She’d watch her struggle to keep up on walks and then announce that she was going to die soon with a candour that seemed to accept the inevitable in a way that I never could.

“Has Dolly died?" she asked point-blank after catching me in a hushed conversation with Noah's mum. I said yes and she took off to tell the news to the other kids. I couldn’t bear to listen to them talk about it so I scurried inside.

Two days later, beside myself with loss, I took Jack for a walk so I could get out of the house. Olivia and Noah were playing out front and asked if they could join. The request wasn’t irritating, it was welcome. “Sure,” I told them.

We started walking in no particular direction. They asked if we could go to the corner shop to get sweets. “Sure.” I let them pick one thing each – a packet of Malteasers for Olivia and a bottle of Coke for Noah. We kept walking. “Can we go to the park?” “Sure”. 

They played a game of who could scramble to the top of the climbing frame faster. They got me to time them on my phone. They threw a stick for Jack. I don’t know what we talked about that afternoon but it was a rapid conversation that darted between topics. I found their unselfconscious prattling soothing, something else other than my sadness to focus on.

I’d found comfort in the compassionate, uninhibited friendship of two children. I thought kids would be the hindrance to making friends as a grownup, turns out they were the answer to it. They gave me something that my adult friendships lack – spontaneity and lightness.

On the way home from the park, Olivia asked me what my favourite drink was, I thought for a moment and then said, “Bubble tea.” She squealed with glee, it’s her favourite, too. I told her that a bubble tea place had just opened up in our town and she somehow already knew this and said that’s where we were going on our next outing. We were planning our next adventure together before the current one ended. In that moment, I realised I had the relaxed friendship I’d so desperately wanted, it had happened with such ease that I hadn’t even realised.