Painting by Elaine Brown Folgar
I was ten when we first met, she was twelve. It was hard not to meet, being two semi-white trash kids in Morrison, Oklahoma, a town smaller than even I was. She was my first love, and I endeavored to know everything I could about her. She liked pink leopard print, walking home from school in the springtime, Warrior Cats, and wildly inappropriate post-hardcore music. She wore the same outfit every day but changed her hair all the time. I loved her, I thought she loved me. She was my best friend. I don't think I was hers.
When it was good, it was really good. I don't recall a single moment where I wasn't laughing my ass off or crying until my head throbbed. Of course, that meant, when it was bad, it was the worst thing my nine-to-twelve-year-old self could imagine. More than once I came home from school trying to hide my face from my parents, having cried until I nearly puked on the bus. I'm sure they knew, but they were barely thirty, still learning, so they left it alone. I don't know if I should be thankful. The worst part, worse than any of the things she'd said or the cold shoulder or the rumors she spread about me, was the instability. Everyone talks about how necessary stable, consistent relationships are for children, but only adults know about this, and then only very intuitive adults. My parents didn't know. And children don't find out until much, much later, except some of the unlucky few who go without.
I think often about how we must have looked, walking through the arboretum near our elementary school, talking and laughing in warm sun under foreign cherry trees instead of going home, eating apple slices we stole from the cafeteria under the maples, telling secrets and writing stories while running around cedarwoods. No one spent as much time with trees as us. We got splinters leaning over the rickety old bridge trying to find fish in the chain of puddles we called a stream, even though all we saw were the formerly squiggling remains of tadpoles. She told a joke about cats or music or sex, and I didn't understand it, but I laughed anyway, because I loved her. She told me she hated me, and I cried, but I forgave her, because I loved her. I always wanted to hold her hand, but I never got the courage.
It feels silly to think about it now. The drama of young love, upon reflection, is one of the most unreal things imaginable, so unreal, you forget how intense it is in the moment. You forget how she grabbed your heart and squeezed it so she could drink what came out. You forget that day under the Bradford pear where she became the first person to tell you how you just thought you were better than everyone else, all in favor of walking under cherry blossoms. You forget gallons and gallons of tears. And you forget how she didn't know what she was doing. She knew it even less than you did.
We spent a night together, sitting outside and looking at the kind of sky you can only see miles from the nearest city. I remember she said something that stuck with me. But I can't recall what it was.
I can't imagine how I must have felt, knowing how devoted I was to her, and how much was just rebellion against my parents, who hated her. But I think about it a lot now, and it looks like a movie in my head. The wiry body and oily skin of the idea of her in my head, lit up by dying sunlight as she breathes, slowly. We've stopped laughing for the night.
"I don't think I'll ever leave here." She looks out above cheaply made roofs and trees that trigger my allergies year-round.
I ask her what she meant. I'm only looking at her.
"I don't think I can ever leave." She doesn't look back at me, not once. "I think I'm stuck here." I tell her she isn't. She just laughs. We watch fireflies, there are more here than there ever were, anywhere, in real life.
The night is over.
It's hard to think of her. I don't want to feel bad for her, I want to hate her, to comfort the child she so often hurt on purpose, but I don't ever recall her being happy, as much as I think about her. One day I snapped and didn't spend any time with her, the worst punishment I could think of. Though, I was back next to her on the bus the next day. It was quiet, and hard for me. But I grit my teeth and balled my fists up on my green t-shirt, I had to do this, for me. Won't she be sorry, I thought. This will show her she needs me as much as I need her.
I decided I wouldn't even look at her. "I don't even know what I did!" She screamed. She was always screaming at me.
It started raining an hour in, like the weather knew and cared deeply about my relationships with other children. The bus that day, usually a decompression, a liminal space between your home and school selves, was a psychological battlefield.
"I know what you're doing." It was immediate, not even five minutes into the half-hour ride. I imagine I walked to my seat as a colder person, or at least trying to be a colder person, and she knew that. Parents like to tell you they know you better than you know yourself, but no one knows you like your best friend.
I still didn't look at her, and of course I didn't talk to her, but I couldn't stop myself from sitting next to her.
"Whatever," she sounded like she didn't care. "You'll talk again when you figure out you don't have anyone else to talk to."
I caved halfway through that day. I saw her talking to some other girl, another friend of mine, at lunch and I ran up to her crying, apologizing. She told me that she knew I'd do this. I still cannot believe she was right.
She was always right about me. Back then, I was a little liar. This, I later learn, comes from a deep, deep fear. I was never interesting enough for anyone around me, and so I lied and I joked and I tried to get the approval of the cool kids, though I learned, from her, that no one is cool at ten years old. It was odd how many people believed me, but she never did. Something about anxiety turns you into a good liar, but I guess it makes you good at seeing right through it, too. Two peas in a pod, we were. If the two peas were codependent.
It wasn't an infallible skill, though, being on guard makes you wary of even the truth. When I told her I was moving away she insisted it was a lie. I wish I could blame her, but now at thirteen she'd spent three whole years being my on again off again best friend, and I'd been getting distant. It was weird to be a thirteen-year-old friends with a fifteen-year-old who hadn't changed since sixth grade. Her insistence may have been desperate.
She didn't believe me until she saw the boxes, piled high and in classic fashion marked "keep" and "trash", and the moving truck outside in our gravel driveway, halfway into the cracked asphalt of Mary Street. Our neighbors would complain about it later, but she had some things to say now. I knew her angry, desperate mannerisms much more as a best friend of three years than as a ten-year-old who just met her. I braced myself for impact.
"How could you leave me like this? How could you not tell me?" I did tell her. I told her many times, she just thought I was lying. I said I was sorry. I said that a lot, too.
"Do you hate me? Is that it?" I didn't have an answer for her. I said I was sorry. Again.
On some level she had to know I didn't plan this. I knew I hadn't planned this, but I didn't have a defense for her. I'd learned a long time ago, many fights and many hurtful words ago, to just let her feel the way she was going to feel.
"I don't hate you."
"I don't believe you."
It was all so stupid. I was stupid. I didn't know why she was hurt; I couldn't see a world outside myself. To me, in some confused, ignorant sense, she was leaving me, and we'd been leaving each other long before my parents found a new place. I still don't get why she seemed to insist it was my idea. Maybe she was frightened of losing the one punching bag she had as the oldest daughter of a couple who didn't want her. Maybe I was always supposed to be there for her. Maybe she did see me as a friend, maybe this was how she thought people loved each other.
"I'm sorry." I said sorry like it was my fault. I said sorry like I had any choice in the matter of my parents wanting me to go to a bigger school with more funding and less mold in the art classroom. "I think I want to be by myself for a while."
She just scoffed and left.
There were two school days between then and when we were set to leave, the last two of the year. Of course, we spent the first day laughing and the last day fighting. An unfortunate coincidence, that it landed there on our alternating schedule of loving and hating each other. By then, though, I'd learned how to fight her, what words would hurt her as much as they hurt me. I never knew if she liked that or hated it. My parents told me later how much I'd cried when they told me we were going to leave, but that last day, after she screamed at me and I cursed at her, I would never miss Morrison, Oklahoma again.
Despite how I cried, how I begged my parents to not make me leave my lifelong friends, I never did. I made new friends, more than I even had access to there. I dressed differently, I cried less, I came out, and I forgot. My new environment was brighter and cleaner, with a steady rotation of adults who cared more about me than any of the faculty at Morrison had.
Not everything can change, though. I was still missing the piece I thought she fit into, I still lied, I was still scared of everything. But I grew up, as young people always do. I don't know how much of it was overcoming teenagehood and how much of it was cutting her out of my life, if I ever did.
The next time I saw her, I was almost eighteen and I was in a Wendy's drive through in Stillwater. She looked at me like she knew me, and it made me want to turn away. This was a stranger to me. Until I realized it wasn't. That was the first time I realized I'd forgotten her name. I didn't even know if her face was right, but she looked at me the exact same way and my heart broke all over again. I did leave her. I left her stuck there in a small town with parents who never loved her and friends who couldn't care less, and I didn't once call her. I didn't once text her. Out of all the times I apologized to her, I didn't mean a single one. Guess it was good she could always tell I was lying.
The day we drove away from her, she told me she never liked me anyway.
I didn't believe her for a second.
