Old Friends

You’d meet a kid in class, or on a field trip, or on the block, and hit it off immediately. You would think to yourself, she’s gonna be my bridesmaid when we’re grown, and smile all toothy and wide. You’d quickly realize that’s never the case.

Maya is the furthest I can think back. Running across the parking lot connecting the Westchester library and Westchester Park. Her legs were too short. They never carried her where she wanted to go fast enough. She was the first one in our class to get braces. I remember how the sun reflected in her smile at the airport while she waved goodbye. I had to close my eyes.

My mom said Raven was fast. Looking back on it now, I guess I’d agree. She was obsessed with boys and practiced kissing on me. She wanted to be perfect for Jared Burchfield’s birthday party. She pinned me down and kept punching me when she found out Triston Ramos liked me and not her. I had to bite down on her arm so hard that I drew blood. I sprinted five blocks home with her blood running down my face. I remember feeling cool, like I was a vampire.

Katya was always, “What’s the worst that can happen?” Before the worst thing that could happen did. I held her baby sister Sophia in my arms as I ran out of the fire. Don’t put metal in the microwave.

We were cutting up Lily’s grandma’s magazines and gluing the cool stuff to cardboard boxes. Her older brother was playing Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak on the surround sound. Lily got up and started dancing and so did I. I’m not sure where she went—maybe to the bathroom or back upstairs to look for some sharper scissors. He came up behind me and put his hands down my underwear. I sprinted to my house and took an hour-long shower.

Rachel wasn’t long, only about a season or so. The Wilsons were the most picturesque suburban family I could have ever imagined. I didn’t like her as much as the others, but I enjoyed the fantasy. I escaped to a world of soccer games on Saturday mornings, family supper at six p.m., and bed by eight p.m. I got ninety minutes of screen time a day. The thing about worlds like that is you always overstay your welcome and end up running back home in the dark, trying your best not to slip on the ice-covered street.

I sat next to Alex Miranda on the school bus. He kept telling me I looked like Kelly Rowland in that one music video. When our parents got drunk and argued, we used to meet up at the big park and talk until the sun came up.

I ran into Alex about eight years later. I had a gig at the library for school credit. I guess his class reserved a study room, and I saw him on my break. We’d both gone through puberty and looked very different from when we were friends. He had a full sleeve of tattoos on his right arm and a half sleeve on his left. He had piercings now and his big diamond studs sparkled under the fluorescent lights. I had childbearing hips and wore thick black eyeliner. We both had less light in our eyes than I remember. We chatted for a while, caught up. He’d gotten adopted finally. I had just gotten into USC.

“It was really good seeing you. Damn, now I feel like I can leave this place knowing you’ll be alright,” He said, “You were probably the only friend I ever had that I thought was a good person. Good luck out there.”

I always think about how that conversation would have ended if I was honest.

“A good person? Me? I became best friends with a girl because she had a car. Really, the whole nine. We’d have sleepovers, she’d confide in me, her mom gave me the family’s secret pot pie recipe—it was written on one of those big sized index cards you can’t really find anymore, written in blue ink in what can be only described as a classic Americana housewife script. I picked a fight with her to get out of the friendship once my dad got his license back.”

That’s the thing about friends, I guess. They’re so easy to throw away. People have the inexplicable gift to grow apart. Whatever the hell that means. You compliment a girl’s shirt just to be nice and the next thing you know you feel obligated to keep up with her life. You meet her family, you become one of them, their dad gives you a spare key to their house. You’d leave them behind, hidden under the guise of growing. You’d restart the cycle.

I met Tyler online. It was a summer program on Zoom. I thought he was fine. We became friends despite my tendencies to ruin things.

“When you stop being my friend after the program…,” “Hurry, before the program ends, and we stop talking…” I’d always say.

“Why do you keep saying that? Why wouldn’t we be friends after this?”

I think it was then that I realized I was broken. He’s my next Alex, I think—someone I’m always meeting again or saying goodbye to. Some people you just like, you can’t explain it. Sometimes you make friends outside of yourself—you close your eyes and realize that your friend sees someone who isn’t exactly you, but someone just a little bit better. I like friends like that. Those are the friends that you stick by, even against your better judgment. When everything in your past leads you to believe you’ll drift apart soon, you’ll stick around because you can’t outgrow a friend like that. At least I hope that’s the case.