They got sick at the same time, last July, in different places.
Matthew Mazzarella is a 9-year-old boy who lives in Lynnfield. Robert Crew is a 13-year-old boy who lives in Mansfield.
They ended up on the same floor at Children's Hospital, North 6, because they had cancer.
Maybe because he was younger, Matt seemed less fazed, more determined to do the things that boys do: watch TV, play video games, draw pictures.
Maybe because he was older, Robert sensed the enormity of it all, and was more withdrawn, rarely venturing out of his room.
He couldn't eat and his weight dropped quickly from 163 to 111 pounds.
One day, Robert inched his way gingerly down the hall on North 6. He paused at Matt's doorway, and Matt looked up from the video game he was playing.
"Do you wanna come in?" Matt asked.
Robert nodded and made his way over, slowly. They sat there, on Matt's bed, taking turns driving a virtual race car. They didn't talk much. They didn't have to.
Over the next three months, confined to their floor on North 6, they were constant companions. They walked the corridors together, holding onto their IV poles, a curious sight: a tall black kid, a little white kid. Robert is nearly 6 feet tall. Matt is 4 feet 4 inches. The nurses called them Mutt and Jeff. When one of the boys threw up, the other one was by his side, offering wordless comfort. They shared a nurse, JoEllen Edson, and as the boys got stronger Edson and the other nurses got them Buffalo chicken pizzas and held dance parties for them at 1 in the morning.
The chemo helped. The radiation helped. But so did things that can't be explained, that can't be written on a medical chart.
"What those two boys had, it was like another kind of medicine," said Marlyn Loftis, Robert's grandmother, who with her husband, Don, is raising Robert.
If they had not been diagnosed at the same time, it is unlikely Matthew and Robert would have ever met. They are so different. They are different ages, from different places. They are different colors. But the very thing that threatened to kill them made all those differences disappear. The medicine they took even made them look alike.
"We looked like chipmunks," Robert said. "Without hair."
As they watched their son form an unexpected friendship with Robert, Mike and Rose Mazzarella became aware they had done the same with Don and Marlyn Loftis. It is doubtful the Mazzarellas would have ever found their way inside the Pentecostal church where Don Loftis is a preacher.
"They gave us strength when we needed it, and we tried to do the same for them," Rose Mazzarella was saying. "We learned so much just watching Matt and Robert interact. You think, as adults, you know everything. And then you watch kids, and you learn more than you could ever teach them."
Matt's 11-year-old sister, Amanda, gave him the bone marrow that saved his life. Matt had the transplant operation in October and his leukemia is in remission. Robert's lymphoma has been more stubborn.
Every Thursday, Matt and Robert go to the Jimmy Fund Clinic, at the Dana-Farber, across the street from their old haunts on North 6, for outpatient care. They both have a long road back, but it's so far from where they were just a few months ago.
They will probably go their separate ways, live different lives, in different places. But Robert said he has no doubt that he will always know Matt, that they will always be friends, because they shared something no one else could, and they gave each other something only they could.
Robert sat on a chair in the Jimmy Fund Clinic the other day and searched for words. Matt was in a nearby room, getting medicine.
"It's hard to explain," Robert said, shrugging. "We're kinda like brothers."
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
