It's just a thing.

Schuyler brought something significant home yesterday. It wasn't much to look at, just a scrap of paper with an email address. It was from one of her lunch table friends, the met I met when we had lunch.

Schuyler may be on her way to having a real and age-appropriate friend.

Hopefully they'll opt to spend some time together outside of school. I'm trying to stay out of this, aside from bugging her about how lunch went every day like a big pest. Schuyler sometimes needs a little persistent nagging to follow through on things. I can do that.

Anyway, I guess it paid off, because now they appear to be friends. Schuyler emailed her to ask if she wanted to go to the mall sometime soon. We'll see how that turns out.

Earlier this evening, when Schuyler was responding to an email from one of the older girls she met when we visited my friend's band program last year, she told her about her new friend. She described her as nice and kind and funny. Interestingly, she didn't mention that her new friend uses a wheelchair.

I felt pretty certain that this was a good thing, Schuyler simply listing the things that are the most important to her about her friend. But at the same time, I recognized that there was a possibility that she might see the wheelchair as a negative, something she didn't want to tell someone.

So, I asked her about it, because I'm that guy.

"So I'm curious about something," I said. "Why did you decide not to mention that she uses a wheelchair?"

Schuyler's eyes lit up. "Oh yeah!" she said, going back to the still-unsent email and adding "and she uses a wheelchair". I liked that response; it suggested that she might have actually overlooked that fact.

"Do you think that's an important thing to say about her?" I asked.

Schuyler thought for a second. "Yeah, it's important."

"Do you think it's a bad thing?" I asked.

"No," she said. "It's just a thing."

Well, there you go.