On my first day at the new school, I sat alone at the back and said hello to nobody. At lunch a girl named Ping put her lunch box on my table and asked if the seat was free. (11) She talked about her dog, her brother, and a photo she had taken of a goose and an ox at a farm somewhere in the south. I only said yes and no, (12) she did not seem to mind. She came back the next day, and the day after that. (13) we had become the kind of friends who do not need to talk all the time. Friendship, I learned, does not always begin with two people talking; (14) it begins with one person who keeps coming back.
For two years the man who lived above us was only a sound: shoes at six, a chair at ten. My mother said we should invite him down, but we never did. (15) Then one Tuesday the heat went off in the whole building. Everyone came out to the ground floor, holding cups of hot juice, and he was there too, a quiet fellow in a grand old scarf. He put out his hand and turned out to be a teacher who had once taught at my school. We talked for an hour, (16) the building was cold. (17), my mother leaves a piece of cake at his door every Tuesday. It is a small thing, (18) it has changed how the whole floor feels.