“You can’t go around rescuing any dumb bird,” I said to her in a tone I’d borrowed from Kimberley. My babysitting money was heavy in my pocket, and I was itching to turn my bounty into a bubble skirt.
I was the dominant in our duo, but in the green-carpeted hallways of middle school, we were equals. Two artsy honors kids, stranded in the vast flyover territory between cheerleader and nerd, and drawn to both coasts. We wrote each other notes every day, which tracked the movements of boys we liked as though we were anthropologists in the bush. (“Claude was wearing a red shirt today. He sat in a seat close to the door.”) We folded the notes into simple origami shapes, and I kept every one she gave me in a Payless ShoeSource box in my closet. I liked to watch those notes pile up, a tangible measure of my value to another human. The notes were creamy with praise, as if self-esteem were a present you could give another person. You are beautiful and sweet. I love you so much. You are the best friend I ever had. So much clinging and drama. We sounded like parting lovers fleeing the Nazis, not two kids bored in American History.
We bought silver best friend rings from James Avery, the equivalent of engagement rings in our junior high. Flashing that ring meant you belonged to someone. And if we couldn’t belong to the boys we liked, then at least we could belong to each other. The ring was two hands entwined so you couldn’t tell where one hand ended and the other one began, a fitting symbol for our enmeshment. We were BFFs, almost sisters. But then high school came along—and our unraveling began.
I arrived in ninth grade eager to catch the eye of some upperclassman, but it was Jennifer they saw. They scooped her up only to drop her again, but at least they knew she was alive. The baby fat had melted off her round cheeks, and she wore tight miniskirts displaying her long, shapely legs. She developed a scary case of anorexia that year. If she chewed a stick of sugar-free gum, she would run around the block to burn calories. And I knew she was acting crazy, but I was so jealous of how much more successful her eating disorder was than mine.
It was also dawning on me, with horror, that I was short. To some girls, being short meant “petite” and “dainty.” To me, it meant being “squat” and “puny.” Height was authority. Height was glamour. I knew from magazines that supermodels were at least five nine but I flatlined at five two, while Jennifer rose to an attractive five seven, and I grew accustomed to tilting my head upward as I spoke. Jennifer once caught me climbing onto their kitchen countertop to reach a high shelf. “Aww, that’s cute,” she said.
“No, it’s not,” I snapped at her. What was so adorable about a person whose body had been cheated?
On Friday nights, in her bedroom, we didn’t discuss these frictions. We giggled and gossiped. Jennifer stole beer from her father’s stash of Schaefer Light for me. I would drink it while we talked, letting the alcohol work out the kinks in my system, the part of me that couldn’t stop staring at Jennifer’s thighs and hating her for them.
Jennifer didn’t like beer, but she had other vices. She liked to sneak out the back window of the house in the middle of the night and take out her parents’ Oldsmobile. We glided down the streets of her neighborhood in that gray boat, our hearts booming louder than the radio, and then coaxed it back into her driveway. I could not have cared less about driving a car. But I played accomplice to her minor crime, same as she did for me, because we were good girlfriends like that. Always taking care of the other one’s needs.
I WAS A sophomore when the whispers began. Did you know so-and-so drinks? Did you know so-and-so can buy? Nobody needed to explain what the person was drinking and which substance they could buy. It was like the teenage version of the mafia. You just knew.
Ours was a conservative religious community. At pep rallies, a “prayer warrior” spoke before the big game. Youth ministers from the behemoth Presbyterian Church milled around the cafeteria at lunch. Popular girls wore silver cross necklaces and signed their notes “In His Grip.” But these kids were destined for the sanctioned debauch of fraternities and sororities, so high school was a slow seduction from one team to the other. I kept a running list in my head—who had gone to the devil’s side.
For a while, drinking was an underground society. I would show up to a fancy house on the old-money side of town, where the parents had gone on vacation (Aspen? Vail?), and I’d end up in some deep conversation with a stoner from my Racquet Sports class. When people asked later how we’d become friends, I had to remain vague. Oh, you know, some thing. Drinking forged unlikely connections. It dissolved the social hierarchies that had tyrannized us for so long. Like a play-at-home version of The Breakfast Club.