Assignment: Write about your first best friend

When I was growing up, I was part of a famous friendship, and this defined me. Once I wrote a story about the friendship for the San Jose Mercury News, a celebration of the absolute, total bond we shared. It was a gift for Jenny's birthday, and we both loved it, but really, it was hardly necessary. Everyone who knew us knew us. Our parents, our classmates, our teachers respected this. On the night of our sixth-grade graduation, one of the mothers had taken a class photo and had it enlarged and made into a puzzle. She took each individual piece and glued a pin to the back, and wrapped each one in tissue paper and threw them all into a big brown grocery bag. All of the graduating sixth graders each reached in and picked one. Later we were comparing which ones we’d gotten, and against all odds, mine and Jenny’s fit together, interlocking. We pinned them to our sleeves and fit them together, and some of the parents got teary-eyed. “How fitting,” I heard one mom say to another.

I looked nothing like her – she had shiny orange-red hair and so many freckles that in some places, they had merged and formed dark brown splotches on her milky skin. She had pastel glasses and crooked teeth and her mother, Karen, dressed her in pretty, girly clothing. I had dark hair and a squashed nose and tanned skin and I wore T-shirts from my soccer teams. But everyone called me “Jenny” as often as they called me “Kelly”; I answered to both. Our teacher’s aide, Jody, took to calling us Jelly and Kenny. It was impossible to tell us apart, not because we looked alike but because we were the same, one soul in two separate bodies. I truly believed that we were, and I believe it still.

We met in pre-school, where we fought over Chad and Ben, alternating through them and claiming we wanted to marry them. We made rocks out of sand and threw them at the boys, and hid in a huge round inner tube at the far end of the playground. We pretended we were mice and when anyone came near, we shrieked “Zookeeper! Zookeeper!”

In kindergarten we ventured out of the “kindergarten gate” sometimes together, arm in arm, clinging tightly, scared of the sixth-graders. We made up a song about one of them, one who swaggered so much that, even at five, we found him ridiculous. “Jus-tin James, Jus-tin James, what could he be up, to …” was the song, and it came with a stiff march of a dance. When one of us had to go to the bathroom, the other came. We liked to read, and we perfected holding a book with one hand, so we could hold each others’ free hand while we were reading. Even books aren’t the same without your best friend. Whenever we counted off into groups during class, we counted ahead fast enough to scramble to just the right place in the line so that we were both number 2s. We never grew tired of each other.

In first grade we created a new club each lunchtime. Usually it was under the same pine tree, the one at the near end of the field, and we made its boundaries using pine needles. We traded off who got to be president. Everyone wanted to be in our club, and usually we let them and assigned thme positions – usually it was our other friends, Val and Lauren G. and Lauren L., because our fivesome was a subset of our twosome – but some days we didn’t let anyone else in our clubs, just to remind them who we were. We were Jenny and Kelly, and that was all we needed.

In second grade my parents bought a backwards-facing bucket seat to go in the trunk of our tan Volvo wagon. Jenny and I sat there on every trip, no matter how short. We spoke in whispers and giggles and raised eyebrows, the secret language of little girls, safely separated from the adult world by a hundred and eighty degrees. We made faces at the cars behind and next to us and laughed to each other. We were the funniest people in the world.

Once that year Jenny caught me in the morning before class. “I need to talk to you during lunch,” she whispered. I spent the morning worrying about her. I knew something was wrong. At lunch she told me her parents were getting a divorce.

I said, “Who are you going to live with?”

“Maybe I’ll have to go live in an orphanage,” she said, and I was jealous. We had always wanted to be orphans, or pioneers.

"Lucky you,” I said, enviously.

“Yeah,” she said. She shrugged. “But I’m kind of scared.”

“You can come live with me, if your parents don’t take you,” I promised passionately. “You can sleep in my bed and have half of all of my food. And you can have half of all my toys, too.”

She considered this. “Even your dollhouse?”

I winced. That was my favorite, but this was Jenny. “Yeah,” I said. “Even that.”

In third grade, we fought almost daily. We were demanding best friends, more jealous than lovers, and if she invited Lauren over after school instead of me, or if I was cold toward her during recess, it was tragic, a betrayal. Once we got into a fight during lunch and when we came in, everyone else in the class got into the traditional circle in the middle of the room, for Circle time, and Jenny hid in a coat closet and refused to come out. An adult tried to intervene, but she was stubborn, and in the name of not crushing her spirit, no one forced her anywhere. I was irritated at all the attention she was getting. It should have been mine – I was being the good one. We finished Circle Time and she still didn’t come out, and then she didn’t even come out during Silent Reading, and I started to worry. I thought maybe she had died. Finally I told her, through the wooden façade, that I was sorry and I still wanted to be best friends. I told her I was afraid she had died. She came out haughtily, not looking at me. She sat next to Lauren and they whispered to each other and it stabbed me. I went home in tears.

In the morning I was sick. I begged my mother to let me go to school anyway because I knew – I knew – that if I wasn’t there, Jenny would poison everyone against me. I knew she would. And she did. When I came to school the next day all the girls were in her “I Hate Kelly Club.” I knew it would happen. I cried so hard Lauren finally came to my rescue. It didn’t help, and all the girls conferred without us. Finally, they dragged me into talk to her. “You can’t fight,” Lauren said. “You guys are best friends.” I tried to get up and leave, and so did she, but the other girls forced us to stay. We sat with our arms crossed, stony and hateful, while everyone begged us to make up. We were a constant, a pair, and seeing us otherwise didn’t fit for anyone. Even some of the boys, who usually played sports during recess and couldn’t care less about what the girls did, walked by and watched us glare at each other. “Dude, just stop fighting,” Chad said. In the end we made up because someone made a joke, and we both started laughing, and our eyes met and we realized how stupid this was. We thanked our court grandly, and we were restored.

In fourth grade we were in different classes. I felt like I had been ripped in two. During class I would imagine her on the other side of the wall, part of a whole world I didn’t even understand. I hated whoever was sitting next to her and hearing her secrets. It is a tribute to our friendship, and its renown, that the two fourth grade teachers collaborated and came up with tons of activities the two classes we could do together: once we all walked to McDonald’s in the middle of the afternoon for a “field trip.” Each Monday morning, our two classes walked in laps around the field together for half an hour. I learned later that this was because of us – because everyone recognized that it wasn’t right to have split us up. Our teachers didn’t quite have the heart.

In fourth grade our principal resigned because he learned he was HIV positive. We made him a card together, and after we gave it to him we cried. She always stopped crying long before I did, but she always kept hugging me until I was done and had wiped my eyes and smiled, weakly.

In fifth grade we were back together in class. We were euphoric. We ran, jointly, for every position imaginable for student council, reveling in the widened eyes of all the kids in the audience as we went through our speeches. We always made them creative: raps, poems, songs. Once I climbed into a trash can and pretended to be Oscar the Grouch. When the speech assemblies were over and we went back to our class, everyone was talking about the speech we’d made, all the little nuances and finer aspects, betting each other how much we’d win by.

We made a Bad Books Club, and at lunch we perused the class bookshelves for the worst books we could find: The Sweet Valley Twins, the Babysitters’ Club. We read them aloud to each other and laughed so hard our stomachs hurt.

In sixth grade, my parents sat down with me one night after dinner. “Sometimes,” they began, “After a mom and a dad get divorced, the mom will find a new man to love.”

I considered this. “Is Jenny going to have a new dad?” I asked. Karen was the only person I knew who was divorced.

My parents exchanged glances. “No,” my mom said, slowly, “Karen has found another woman.”

I didn’t understand. “Another woman?” I repeated.

“Yes,” my father said. “Her name is Julie.”

At school the next day I told Jenny I knew. “Oh,” she said.

“How come you didn’t tell me?” I demanded. I had to fight back tears. “I thought we told each other everything.”

She looked at the floor. “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t know what to say.”

I sighed heavily. “You promise you’ll tell me everything from now on?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It was just this time.”

“I know.” We thought about this for a moment. “Do you like her?” I asked after a bit.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Jenny said. “You’re going to meet her when you come over this weekend.”

“I am?”

“Yeah. She wanted to meet you. Since you're my best friend.”

Later that year we were lying on her floor in the dark during a sleepover and everyone else was asleep. “I know you like someone,” she said. In the dark I blushed hotly.

“No I don’t,” I lied.

“Is it Erik?” she said. And of course it was. Of course she knew. I told her all the things I felt for him that I’d never felt for anyone before. At twelve, the idea of love is something new, something very real that has deep clarity. There are no adult issues or implications to ruin it; it is pure, and it is deep. In the dark Jenny listened to me.

“Who do you love more,” she said, when I was done – “Me or him?”

“Of course you,” I said automatically. That wasn’t even a question.

“That’s what I thought,” she said smugly.

That night I fell asleep last, and I as I shifted in the dark, trying to find some softness in the hardwood floor, I listened to my friends' breathing and I picked out Jenny’s above all the rest of them, that comfortable familiar rhythm. I scooted my sleeping bag a little closer to her and listened to the steady inhaleexhaleinhale, flooding into lungs I thought were mine, and I listened to that until I fell asleep.