The Very Best of Friends

We met on the bus the morning of my very first day of middle school. I was the first kid to get picked up, so the bus was silent. I was unbelievably nervous, and I can remember wondering if I would make any friends at my new school. A few more kids got on the bus, but none of them seemed promising. Then I saw her get on the bus. I knew immediately that I wanted to be her friend. Who knows why, but I just knew. As luck would have it, she decided to talk to me! We hit it off right away. She lived in the neighborhood right next to mine, and I didn’t have any friends that lived less than a 25-minute car ride away, so this was a big deal. We parted ways when we got to school since she was a year older than I was. I thought about our morning encounter for the rest of the day, hoping it wasn’t a one-time deal. That afternoon, I saved her a seat. She took it, and there was no going back.

I kept saving her a seat, five days a week, morning and afternoon, for five years. We talked on the phone every afternoon and hung out every chance we got. Since we were together so much, our moms got to know each other and became friends. Then our dads became friends. We spent every holiday together every year. They were our family. Nothing changed between us when our parents went through job changes, when she moved up to high school and I was still in middle school, when I joined her at the high school, when she started driving, or when I started driving. Nothing. Just after our seven-year “friend-aversary,” she officially moved over two hours away to go to college. Still, nothing really changed. We were comfortable, and I decided to attend the same college. We were majoring in the same thing and were able to get some classes together, just like we had in high school. We almost lived together, but she became an RA and things worked out for us to both have single rooms instead of having to share. It was almost a dream come true, but everything changed on move in day.

My best friend had just met a guy, and he started our ending. We were planning for months all the things we were going to do, but instead I ended up as a third wheel at lunch and then was left alone. The two of us had been in serious relationships before, but that was the first time a boy became more important than our friendship. Before, she was always willing to listen to me. She always cared about my life and my stories. She was my best friend, I was hers, and nothing would ever change that. After seven years of friendship, she was willing to throw me away for a guy she had known for weeks.

The final straw came in October of that year when she showed me how unimportant my life was to her. We were finally hanging out without him, but one of his female friends was with us. We decided to drink, and at some point I told her I wanted to die. It was the only secret I had ever kept from her. I will never forget the look on her face as she told me that I was being annoying and that I needed to leave. I’ll never forget the moment I realized that I did not know the girl occupying my best friend’s body. I’ll never know if she regretted it when she found out what happened the next morning. But I do finally know what changed her.

It turns out, I wasn’t the only one keeping a secret. Around Christmas she told me that she was sexually abused by her dad. I begged her to tell someone but she said she couldn’t ruin her family like that. How could I have known her for so many years and spent so much time with her family and not known? I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for that, but I can say that when I did know the truth, despite how she had treated me, I didn’t let her feel unimportant. I listened to her and did my best to help her. We stopped talking for a long time, but I was still the first person she called when she finally told her mom and sisters the truth this year. She is free. Maybe my story will never be important to her, but hers will always be important to me.