Simone

We are 14 years old, my best friend and I. It’s midnight. We’ve both just moved, a day apart. She got a bigger, better house. I’ve moved away from the beloved childhood home I took for granted. We’re going into high school and listening to Miley Cyrus’ new song “We Can’t Stop” far too often. We want to be rebellious and free. We wait until her parents go to sleep and then slip outside through a side door on the first floor. We’re nervous, we’ve never done this before. We don’t wear shoes, and our socks get wet. We run down the street. We have no plan. I tell her I want to go to my old house and play on the swing set and we won’t get caught because the new people haven’t moved in yet. We head towards my old house, and I tell her I’m scared. She’s scared too. We pull off the fronts of our shirts and tuck them behind our heads. We run down the street, back towards her new house. Now we can say we’ve flashed people. After a few minutes of sprinting, we get home. Now we can say we’ve snuck out.

We have never been so happy together.

We are 16 years old, my former best friend and I. It’s six o’clock. Her mom is having a barbecue. We’ve both moved on from each other, though not at the same time, and not all at once. She got new friends, and lots of them, fast. I got lunch with the same two people every day until we were best friends. She and I stopped hanging out, and texting each other non sequiturs, and sneaking out for five minutes without shoes or a plan. We are going into our junior year of high school. I’m nervous. I don’t know how she feels; we don’t talk. We don’t listen to the same music anymore. We sit in her room and she plays a song she heard at a social gathering I didn’t attend. We move to the deck. I’m eating chips and dip, and far too much, because she isn’t talking to me. She told me she got high earlier, and it hasn’t worn off. Hours pass and I start to wonder if she can still be high. We barely speak. I go inside to find my phone and make myself look occupied. When the other attendees arrive, I don’t want them to know that I was only invited because no one else could make it. I ask her if she’s dating the boy she’s always in pictures with, and she laughs, and says no. She tells me to leave by 8 PM because she has plans set for later. I call my dad to pick me up at 7:30. We don’t hug goodbye, but we never really did. For a second, I wish we were still close.

We have never been so separate. ♦