The 31st

            by Lani Rosenthal

 

“Alanna, we were wondering if you wanted to be our best friend,” Alexis said, glancing over at me to confirm her guess that it was what I wanted too.  I smiled at her and turned to await Alanna’s answer.  The near-full moon shone down on us in the pool, enhancing the gravity of the situation and making it feel like a secret seventh grade rite-of-passage.  With Alanna’s “Absolutely!” we officially became The Three Amigas.  Alexis and I had been best friends for ages, but Alanna was new.  She’d shown up a few months earlier with her spicy cheetos and vibrant personality, ready to change my life as I knew it.

My relationship with Alexis had always been laid back.  We talked a lot and understood each other perfectly, but there were few pedicures and popcorn fights, and we never would have tried to cram three people and a dog into a twin-sized bed.  With the addition of Alanna, all of this changed.  Sleepovers became commonplace, complete with the requisite phone calls to boys and walks to the video store.  The three of us were inseparable.  We bought matching dresses to wear when we got our pictures taken in the mall.  We ate lunch together every weekday and hung out every weekend.  We shared T-shirts, secrets, and everything in-between.  Even though it’s been four years since Alanna and I went our separate ways, I still have a tank top of hers in my closet and a pair of her jeans in my dresser drawer.

Perhaps Alanna and I became best friends because she was so different from everyone I had known before.  Smart, athletic, and somewhat down-to-earth, Alanna also knew how to be a girly-girl.  She was the one who curled my hair and wouldn’t let me run away until she had taken a picture.  She brought lotion to school to keep in our shared locker, got ready with me before all of the school dances, and sprawled across my floor looking at catalogs and fashion magazines.  The year before, my phone had sat idle on its stand, but in seventh grade it was constantly ringing – always Alanna making some spur-of-the-moment plan or calling from her bathtub just to chat.  Her life was exciting to me – filled with boyfriends and crushes, spontaneity, and the freedom that permeated the quiet streets of Kensington late at night.

~

In eighth grade, everything changed.  Talking to our friend, Eric, at a dance party, Alanna and I swore that we would never let a guy come between us like a girl had come between him and his best friend.  Minutes later, sharing secrets on the floor of the bathroom, we discovered that we both liked him.  We laughed, promised each other that we wouldn’t let our crush get in the way of anything, and went to her house for a sleepover – the last one we would have for over two months.

 “Hey Lani, do you still like Eric?”  It was a week later, and we were eating lunch at school.

“Yeah.  Why?”

“Well, is it ok with you if I go after him?  I won’t if you don’t want me to, but I mean, one of us should.”

“Um,” I hesitated.  “I guess...”

“Great!  Just tell me if you change your mind,” Alanna said, getting up from her usual spot underneath the dead tree and walking away toward the gym.  I sat there, stunned.  Alanna should have known I would never say no.  A few days later, on October 30, Alanna backed out of the Halloween plans that she, Alexis, and I had made months before.  Some complicated story about how she wanted to go with Eric, and he was going with Margo, but we couldn’t all go with Margo because Lisa had told Britt that she couldn’t come because there were too many people already.  It didn’t take long for Alanna to replace me with Eric.

The summer before, Eric and I had become very close, talking online constantly.  I trusted him with every detail of my life and he was always able to make me laugh and offer good advice.  Now, abandoned by Alanna, I settled into a state of mild depression and found myself turning to Eric more and more.  He listened as I talked about how lonely I was and how unloved I felt.  I remember tears streaming down my face on one particular day as he reassured me that I wasn’t a “Mira” or a “Chelsea”, the two girls in our class with whom nobody wanted to hang out.  I was empty.  Getting off the couch and going upstairs to my room often took too much effort for it to be worth my while.  I had devoted myself so completely to my new friendship with Alanna that I ached from her absence in my life.

~

Alanna had a strong personality – it was something I both loved and hated at different times in our relationship.  For Eric, it eventually grew to be too much.  She had gotten the idea that they were going out, so when he told her that he didn’t like her in that way, it created some of the most intense drama our tiny school had seen all year.  Slowly, Alanna began eating lunch with Alexis and me again, and no one brought up the subject of her two-month absence.  Our lives moved back toward the way they had been, but another dividing point in our friendship appeared when Eric and I discovered that we liked each other.  Not only did Alanna not know about an important part of my life, but I also felt guilty for not being honest with her.

Eric invited me to hang out with him on New Year’s Eve.  “Of course I’ll go,” I told him, excitement and nerves swelling through me at the thought of midnight.  When Alanna asked what I would be doing, I said that I wasn’t sure what my plans were, but I would probably be going to dinner at a family friend’s house.  The day of New Year’s Eve, I got a phone call from Alexis and Alanna.  Alanna had been crying, and the resulting sniffles were making their way through the receiver.

“I just found out that Eric is having this party thing for New Years and he didn’t invite me even though we made plans to hang out months ago and I know you’re going to the Cranes’ tonight but can you cancel and hang out with me and Lexi instead?” Alanna blurted out.  Daydreams about the perfect New Year’s Eve kiss crumbled as I said “Yes, of course.”

Despite what we had been through, on December 31^st I found myself back at Alanna’s house.  Seeing the pain she was already in, I couldn’t bear to add to it.  Alanna’s magical power was that for her, there were no awkward situations.  She greeted Alexis and I as though nothing had changed, taking us upstairs to once again cram into her bed – the three of us and her dog.

“Hey I’ll be right back, I have to call my mom,” I told Alanna as I left her room.  Once I had put two sets of staircases between us, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed a familiar number, albeit not my own.

“Hello?”

“Hey Eric.”

“Hey!  Are you at Alanna’s?”

“Yeah.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I guess.  We’re just hanging out upstairs watching a movie.”

“You’re a good friend for doing this, Alanna doesn’t deserve you.”

“It’s ok, she’s going through a lot right now.  I should probably get back up there, but I wanted to call and say hi, wish you a happy New Year.”

“Thanks.  I wish you were here.”

“Me too.”

~

As Alanna and I started hanging out again, I realized why Alexis and I had always been friends.  While I had desperately wanted someone to show me how to be girly, I had also always been quiet and independent, and Alexis understood that.  The constant flurry of activity that surrounded me when Alanna was there got to be too much sometimes.  I found myself slowly growing jealous of her – of her outgoing personality, her fiery red hair, and her carefree life.  Jealousy gave way to hostility, and soon it seemed as though everything she said was an attack on me, a sneaky attempt to put me down in front of others.

Alanna and I had shared so many good times that I tried to overlook this unwelcome addition to our relationship and simply be her friend.  And, slowly but surely, our friendship did move back toward normal.  Sitting on my bedroom floor one afternoon, Alanna asked me if I had a crush on anyone, and I told her that yes, I liked Eric.  Three days later, when he and I started going out, she gave me a hug and said that she was happy for us.  The sleepovers began again, as did the phone calls, the late night runs to the movie store, and the sharing of secrets.  Alanna even bought a space in our yearbook and spent hours designing a “Three Amigas” page.  It was acts like that which made me wonder if she had any idea what I had been through that year.

            “What do you want to do tonight?” I asked her over the phone.

            “My step-bro and I were thinking we could go see The Ring.”

            “Oh…  I really don’t want to, you know I hate scary movies.”

            “Oh come on, it’ll be fun.”

            “No, I really don’t want to.”

            “Oh come on, why not?”

            “I just don’t want to.  You two should go though, you never get to see him.”

            “I can’t do that, I’m not about to just ditch plans that I already have with you.”

            “It wouldn’t be the first time.”  There was utter silence on the line.  “Sorry.  I, uh, that was, nevermind.”  It was the end of the school year and still the closest we had ever come to breaching the subject.

~

            Over the summer, Alanna and I separated for our various camps and vacations.  Returning to Berkeley from our adventures, we entered different high schools without each other.  The change in environment brought out Alanna’s assertiveness and my shyness and made their imbalance in our relationship more prominent.  There was no defining moment in our split; we simply grew apart.  High school acted as the final catalyst in our separation.

            Three years spent apart from Alanna have allowed me to shelve my pain and realize that, while we were great friends at one point, we became different people with different needs.  Now that she has transferred and we are at the same school once again, these differences are strikingly clear.  Passing her in the hallways brings back old feelings of inadequacy from eighth grade.  To this day, I still wonder if she realizes what happened between us that year.