Happy Birthday

Today is the birthday of the person who was the best friend I ever had. (I still like the rest of you, but it's not the same, trust me.) Which isn't to imply that we aren't friends now, we just don't talk often. Apparently, she hasn't been connected to the internet recently and the phone number I have from her hasn't been used for more than a year. I saw her in February, we had lunch with another friend while I was in Oakland. We rushed through lunch because she had to be to work an hour after the restaurant opened, but it was nice.

How about a little history?

Second Grade:
We met in second grade. We had the same teacher.

Once, pretty early in the year, while sitting next to her and her best friend (at the time) we all talked together, each trying to make the other two laugh. We wouldn't shut-up. The teacher warned us several times, but we wouldn't stop. I remember laughing so hard tears came to my eyes. We all had a wonderful time, until the teacher told us we had to stay inside at recess. This was the first time I'd ever been in trouble like this in my life. (The only other time that came close was when I was practicing putting my middle finger up under the lunch table in first grade. Some jerk ratted on me. The lunch teacher confronted me while I ate my sandwich and I lied, telling her that I wasn't doing anything of the sort, and how could anyone see what anyone was doing under the table anyway. She said she was going to call my Mom, but didn't.) At recess, the three of us stayed in while everyone else ran out. Soon, the teacher said that she had to go to the office to make some copies, but we were to stay. As soon as she left, the two girls stood up and headed for the door. They turned to me and urged me to come with them, that we could play and be back before the teacher came back. Like now, I was a coward and told them to go on without me. The-one-who-was-to-be-my-best-friend asked if I'd tattle on them. I promised I wouldn't and they ran out of the room, laughing. I sat at my desk, looking at a picture book I'd borrowed from the library, wishing I'd gone with them.

In the spring, I walked with my, then, best friend (I'd met him on the walk home from the bus stop my first day of school and we were close friends until his family moved away. Parents break up more great friendships than anything else, I think.) around the soccer field, talking and sharing my fruit snacks. The-one-who-was-to-be-my-best-friend came over and started to beg for snacks. I wasn't gonna give them up to a girl for free, no matter how funny she was, so I told her I'd give her one fruit snack for each bad word she knew. She looked at me like she didn't trust me and asked how many snacks I had. I pulled a second pouch out of my pocket (which I'd snuck out while my Mom was making lunch for my little brother and trying to get the other one to eat breakfast) and wagged it in her face. She made me and my friend promise to never tell anyone about this (Oops!), ever. When we had her convinced, she said okay and stared rattling off all the words she knew. To this day, I'm stunned at how many she said. She must have said at least forty words that a seven-year-old isn't supposed to say, ever. In the end, I just tossed her the whole, unopened pack and handed her the rest in the one that I had been nibbling out of. That was the moment I knew she would make a good friend.

Third Grade:
We didn't have the same teacher, so I only saw her at recess. I remember playing lots of tag with her, my friend, and all of her friends. When she was "it" and caught up to me, I usually got pushed hard enough so I'd stumble, sometimes fall into the sand. There was lots of laughing on those days.

Fourth Grade:
My elementary school had opened a second campus, which only had one fourth grade class, so there were only thirty of us. We all had to be friends. Even the bullies were less bullying because they could alienate themselves from everyone too easily.

I was invited to her birthday that year. I was told that other boys were invited, but when I got there, it was just me, her, and some other girls. (In fifth grade, I was invited to another girl's birthday party and was told that there wouldn't be any other boys. I didn't want to go and was fortunate that my parents had planned a trip to Grandparents house that weekend. I did give her some soaps as a gift the Friday before her party, though.) We went horseback riding. It was my first and last time, even though I had fun. We rode on the trails made by deer and children around the neighborhood. We even rode through the creek. After that, we walked from The Stables, on the same trails we had just ridden on, back to her house, where we ate too much cake and ice cream, watched Beetlejuice, after the movie her dad put on the Harry Belafonte song, "Day-O (Banana Boat Song)," and we all danced, wildly. Afterward, it was getting late, the girls were staying to spend the night, but I had to leave, unless I "wanted to spend the night as [her] brother's friend." I didn't. It was bad enough I had spent the whole day with girls, but what would everyone at school think of me if I spent the night at a girl's house with a bunch of other girls. I wasn't going to be the one to find out.

That year, I spent many weekends over at her house: playing in the creek, playing Nintendo (I kicked Duck Hunt's ass, even if I sucked at every other game), running around on the trails. The thing that really sticks in my head is the way her little brother (he has two older sisters) would hide behind furniture and pounce on me. I'd walk down the hall from the bathroom to the family room, just passing the couch, when the black haired midget would come soaring down from the ceiling, knocking me to the floor, laugh crazily, and run away. Or we'd be on the couch in the family room watching TV or playing games and he fall from the ceiling onto me and she'd laugh just as hard as he would.

Fifth Grade:
Her mom took her and put her at the main campus in the district because her mom thought the teacher would be better. I saw her after Christmas. She called and wanted to know if I wanted to ride bikes. I rode up then down the big hill to her house. She had a new bike, a three speeder. We rode over to the school, the only flat pavement nearby, and she let me ride her bike. I learned how to shift gears there and to put the chain back on the sprocket when I popped it off. At one point, we talked about movies we'd seen recently and she wouldn't stop talking about The Little Mermaid. At one point. I remember telling her that I thought I was too old for cartoons (This came from the kid who still enjoyed the occasional episode of Sesame Street.), but she wouldn't stop. "It's so cute," she said. "So wonderful. You have to see it. It's just amazing." Eventually, I did see it, and she was right.

Sixth Grade:
The satellite campus only went up to the fifth grade, so I was now being bussed back to the main campus. Something had changed between her and me, though. She had this large group of girls and they didn't want to have anything to do with me and, therefore, she didn't want to have anything to do with me. Of course, I had my own circle of friends, so it didn't matter. We didn't have the same teacher, so I never really saw her except for those few moments when my small group of boys would square off with her group of girls in a battle of words, hurling insults at each other from twenty paces, no one left those matches unscathed. There was this one time, when she and her brother, who was friends with my youngest brother, spent the night at my house (my other brother had a friend over, too). We all slept in the garage. She had brought her Goosebumps books with her and we read them out loud holding flashlights until the early hours of the morning.

Seventh and Eighth Grades:
Both years, I only had advanced math with her and her closest friends and my closest friends, the two groups made up one third of the class, and the insult matches got very out of hand in there. One time, I was reading a book that was pressed so some of the pictures had texture to them. She took the book from me and said that the only reason I was reading the book was because I like to feel the boobs of the girl on the cover. I took it back and said that I'm a guy and I'm supposed to, what's her excuse. The teacher separated us that day. At the dance, after graduation, she was one of the four girls I danced with.

Ninth Grade:
I had joined band, but didn't know how to play an instrument. My soon-to-be-best-friend had been playing since fifth grade (maybe private lessons in the fourth, I can't remember), but I had quit in the sixth because the saxophone I was playing kept breaking, I'd blow, but no noise would come out. It didn't even work for the teacher the day he got so mad at me he threw his baton across the room. She helped me to relearn how to read music. At football games, we sat near each other, but still with our instrument groupings, and yelled obnoxious things at both teams. By the end, we spent most of our free time, at school, together.

Tenth Grade:
During the first half of the year, we were in zero period PE (a co-ed class) and a class called World Cultures together. (She was in the most advanced band class because she was excellent, I was not, so I was in the normal band class.) World Cultures had the most boring teacher in the world teaching it. He spoke in a monotone voice that put everyone to sleep. Early on, I got a detention in his class and decided I didn't like him at all. (One day, he told the class to do their homework because he had nothing else to do. I had finished my work, so I decided to read the school paper. He saw me turning a page and gave me detention for disturbing the class. Asshole.) A month later, she got a detention. At the semester break, she told me she was getting out of his class and into another. I decided to do the same. I used my influence over one of the assistant principals (who had been my English teacher the year before) to get my schedule changed; I then shared PE (and she had joined our car pool to this early class), English, and Math with her. In the English class, the desks nearest her and my other friends were empty, so I sat right behind her. We were quickly separated because we never shut-up. Of course, when the teacher put me in the back left corner and her in the front right one it only encourage the occasional yelling across the room. The Math teacher was a hippy pot-head, so he didn't care how loud we were as long as we turned in our homework. By the end of that year, I thought of her as my best friend. (And through her, I made met most of the other people who I consider close friends still.)

* * *

Okay, enough with the history, I just wanted to show how our friendship developed, but got a little lost in my memories.

Here's what I really wanted to get to:

We were close. We did nearly everything together. I think that 9 out of every 10 movies I saw in high school were with her. When she got her license (I didn't get mine until I was nineteen), she was gracious enough, most of the time, to give me a ride to school in the mornings and a ride home in the afternoon. She even allowed my younger brother to come with us and got him to school in time for his zero period English class. Each time there was a break in classes, we hung out together, often with other people, but we sat next to each other and usually had our own private, stupid conversation going on only occasionally poking our heads up to throw out a comment that would make everyone else laugh. She was the person I had the most fun around, even if we did have the occasional argument, mostly about me taking her driving me home for granted. (One of those days I scared her by hopping on the bus without letting anyone know where I was going. Apparently, she waited for me until after the busses left, something no student wants to do, when one of our other friends told her he had seen me on the bus. Boy, did that piss her off.)

I never thought of our friendship as anything but.

Two months after I started working for 'Bucks (nearly two and a half years ago) a guy who I didn't care for in high school came into the store, with some girl hanging off his arm. He was just one of those ordinary jerks who expects everyone to agree that he's as great as he thinks he is.

He recognized me right away. "[ticknart], do you remember me?" he asked. "Do you know who I am?"

"Yes," I said, hoping this wouldn't take long, "but the last time I saw you're hair was out to here and your beard out to here." His head had been shaved.

"Yeah, I was a real mountain man for a while," he chuckled. "How's [your best friend]?"

"She's doing good. She's a nurse. Likes her job. Makes lots of money."

"Good, good. So," he grinned, "have you two gotten married yet?"

"What?" The question caught me off guard. I must have looked horrified. "N-no, why would you think that we would get married?"

"Well, you were always together, you know, hanging out. Always. When you weren’'t in class, I don't think I ever saw the two of you apart. I just assumed that you were, you know, going out, and stuff."

"No," I said, shaking my head, my cheeks flushed. "No, we were only friends. None of that funny stuff. Just friends."

"That’s too bad. We all need a good woman at our side." He winked, pulled the girl close to him, and they walked out together.

I sat down on the floor, hard.

I thought about what he said and came to the conclusion that he was crazy.

* * *

When I was visiting my parents, a couple of weeks ago, my Mom asked how my old best friend was doing. I had to say that I didn't know because I haven't had an e-mail from her or anything since February. I said I didn't think she had the internet and that's why I hadn't heard from her.

"I ran into [her mom] a week or so ago," Mom said. "She said [you old best friend] just got internet hooked up, but didn't have it for a while. You should give it a try."

"Okay."

"It's funny. When we were talking, she said that for a while there she thought that you and [your best friend] would start going together."

My insides wanted to be on the outside.

"I told her that I thought the same thing, but figured that you two had just know each other for too long. Like you'd become brother and sister."

"Hmm," I said. I wanted to sit, but there was no where to sit.

* * *

That's been in me for a while, but I thought that today was the best day to get it out. I'm not sure what to think, but it makes me wonder what all the rest of the people thought. I have to admit, that I never thought anything like it. I knew, in high school, being who and what I am, that I would never get to first base with a girl, so I pushed most thoughts of romance out of my brain. Why think about something you won't get?

* * *

In the end, Happy Birthday to the one who was the best friend I've ever had. I don't want to know what I would have ended up being like if I had never known you. You made high school bearable and often fun.

Thank You.

And Happy Birthday.