Wanted: One Best Friend, Part I

I’ve been missing something for a long time: a best friend.

My first real best friend was a girl named Shelly W. She lived around the corner from me. I’m not sure how we became friends — whether she made the first move or I did — but we were like PB & J. If she wasn’t at my house, I was at hers, and then we’d walk each other home about 10 times before our parents intervened and made us stay in the house.

She was a year older than I and a cheerleader. And she was on the gymnastics team. She was waaaay cooler than I, so by being her best friend, I felt kinda cool too. I taught her how to dance, which made her popular with all the cool kids in school. I didn’t care that I never got the credit; it was enough to know I’d had a hand in her increasing popularity. Besides, I was so shy. Really, having her as my best friend was plenty.

She was a notorious liar. Not just regular stuff, either, but big lies. Things like how her older brother was in the Mafia. (She didn’t have an older brother, and she was from Corpus Cristi.) Or how some girl at a gymnastics meet had broken her neck the night before. Or that she was about to qualify for the Olympics gymnastics team. And I believed pretty much everything, so glad was I that I had this supercool friend. My mother thought I was a complete fool, but since I tend to be a loner (a trait of the only child), she was just happy that I had a friend.

We were best friends until the summer before Shelly went to high school. That summer, Debbie moved on our street. She was older than both of us and from Maine. Her “wicked” lingo and former proximity to Canada made her exotic. And when she started wearing every pocket style of Jordache jeans, well … that just upped her cool factor. It wasn’t long before Shelly lost interest in our friendship and more interested in this new one. One night when my parents and I came home from dinner, I saw that Shelly had used my family’s lawn chair to climb on the roof to get to Debbie’s window. The friendship equivalent of adultery. I was crushed. Even now, I feel that hurt.

Another best friend was Nina. She was my at-school best friend. She was more like me, kind of in the background. She was also an only child, and her parents didn’t exactly get along either. She and I were best friends from sixth grade until our second year in college. But then she met a boy and I no longer existed. When I ran into her in a grocery store a couple years ago, she was pregnant and full of apologies and promises to stay in touch. (For the record, she hasn’t, though to be fair, it’s a relief. I mean, at this point, what could we possibly talk about?)

In college there was The Crew, a group of Filipino friends that I’d known in high school but became close friends with once we all ended up in the same local college. You know how it is when you see a familiar friend in an unfamiliar place. It draws you closer. And then their friends become your friends. And so on and so on. It never bothered me that I was the only one of a different race. I was used to being the different one. And it never seemed to bother them.

There were cookouts at the beach, parties at each other’s homes. Birthday dinners and Christmas gift exchanges. Trips to Kings Dominion. And then I was inexplicably cut out. Twenty years later I still don’t know why. This fact has been known to keep me up at night.

And then there was Louis. We’d known each other for years but didn’t become close friends until senior year in high school. I could be completely 100 percent myself with him. We’d talk about our lives and relationships and the absolutely craziest crap until the wee hours of the morning. Sing at the top of our lungs in the car. But when we were about 25, he decided that friendship wasn’t enough. When I didn’t feel the same, he flipped. Said some vile things, wrote a four-page manifesto about what a terrible person I am, how I didn’t deserve to be loved by anyone. I’d have been crushed if the things he’d said hadn’t made me so angry — and afraid.