friends, and "friends"

i was that girl.
the one who everyone made fun of.
when i was little, i was always off playing by myself, looking at bugs; daydreaming. Around this time, my friends were:
~Molly, probably my first (and still one of my best, in memory) friend; her mother ran a daycare, which i was placed in for awhile. Molly and i were the same age, and inseparable. We grew up together and worked at her mom's daycare, which was very fun. We had lemonade stands every summer, supplemented with homemade cookies, in front of the Berkeley Bowl until we got "too old" for it. Climbing on roofs and finding as many snails as we could in her yard were two of our favorite pastimes. When we got older, we would ride bikes around town and spend our allowance on Mexican food (usually flautas). This was our first big taste of what it was like to be "grown-up". Her mom and stepdad (who annoyingly called Molly "Girl" 99% of the time,) took me camping many times, and even to Death Valley once, which is still one of my favorite memories. Later the neighborhood was shocked when it was revealed that her stepdad was actually an escaped member of the I.R.A., in hiding here in the States. Crazy!
~Jody, a sweet, sweet lad; also technically my first boyfriend. ;) His is another (amazing) story for another day. Our friendship ended way too soon.
~Dara, a super-blond waif who didn't hold your hand so much as she just let hers lay in yours, limply. You could tickle her merely by wiggling your fingers in her general direction. She was extremely gentle and sensitive. Had a bratty little sister named Bridget. Last i heard she had beat thyroid cancer and was married with a kid.
~Colleen, a very brief friend of mine whose parents spoiled her rotten, if memory serves. She had a doll collection, the kind with lots of curls and frilly dresses and tiny polished shoes. She also took ballet classes, which i attended one of and was shocked at the snottiness of the girls there. She had beautiful long red wavy hair, though.

Eventually i got a boy's haircut (super-short, with a tail!) and only wore overalls, which earned me the loving title of "Muskrat!" by the local children. Often i would be asked (usually on a dare), "Are you a boy or a girl?" ::snicker, run away:: This was around the time that i played with dirt a lot and frequently shimmied up trees, taking solace in the non-judgmental branches and pinecones. Didn't have a whole lot of friends around this time, hmm..
~Alexandria, a sassy young girl who had a much older sister and brother, a dad rarely seen, and a mean (alcoholic?) mom. She lived in a huge, picture-perfect house with rose bushes in the front yard and even a white picket fence. Sometimes i would pretend like i actually lived there, instead of the loud, tiny, mold-infested dank apartment around the corner. We played with Play-Doh a lot, also Strawberry Shortcake & Rainbow Brite dolls. She and i were madly in love with the movie La Bamba, and knew every Richie Valens song by heart. I had a crush on her older brother, Owen, who used to constantly whack me on the leg with the end of a wet towel. Around this time (that would be the '80s), many wonderful things were discovered, such as: Slip 'N Slide, Atari, and Lite Brite. Also, this is when i Got Caught Shoplifting. We dressed up one afternoon and headed down to the drugstore, specifically the candy aisle. We filled our giant boots, cuffed pant legs, and fake purses with Twix, Rolos, Skittles, Snickers, Milky Ways, Abba Zabbas- you name it. Then we craftily headed up to the checkout counter with one Caramello apiece, to buy (so smart!!). We paid the .50 cents each, then headed out the doors to victory. Twenty feet out, with the rush of what we had just done really starting to buzz in our heads, from behind us a voice came, boomingly: "Your momma let you buy that much candy?"
It was the security guard.
We really should have just made a run for it, but i think deep down we really were good kids, and scared. I remember one of us saying, "Yeeeaaahhh..?", all unsure and warbly, and the security guard, clearly not buying it, just holding out his arm and saying, "okay, come on- let's go." He was trying to sound comforting, but i think we both started bawling right away upon re-entry. He marched us to the office at the back of the store, right back down the candy aisle, where i wailed: "I'll put it baaaaaaaack?" but it was too late. We were criminals. They actually took mug shots of us, with our respective piles of pilfered sweets sitting on a tray in our laps, while our parents were called. Alexandria and i were forbidden to see each other ever again, and i was grounded for 2 weeks. Even though we did see each other again, our friendship sort of fizzled away, especially since she started getting somewhat popular and i was still a chubby bookworm who ate frosting out of the can when upset. Last i heard, Alexandria had joined the Peace Corps, or something similar, and had done some work with children down in South America. Good for her.

So, when i was about eleven, my mom left my dad. They had been separated for a few years, but this was it. My mom woke us up in the middle of the night, put us in the car wrapped in blankets, and drove us to our new home in a neighboring city, Alameda. Enter the worst few years of my life. I think my first friend was..
~Wana Chiu. Yes, i still remember her last name. For some reason it seems necessary when i think of her? Anyway, she was a small, quiet girl with long straight black hair and a mumbling way of speaking. We actually didn't talk very much. Sometimes we would go to her house, where there were always massive amount of Peeps, for some reason, which we ate constantly. Often we would just walk to the park in silence along the sidewalk, and swing for hours, never saying more than ten words to each other. Nonetheless, we were good friends in that neither of us really had anyone else. One day we were sitting against a wall in the schoolyard to eat lunch, along with many others, when some boys decided that it would be funny to torment us by throwing a basketball at the wall, hard, right next to our heads. I think we might have both been crying a little during this. Nobody stopped them, and finally the worst happened. One of the throws hit Wana square in the face, and she dropped her sandwich and cried out, as blood began to gush from her nose. The boys scattered. I ran her to the nurse's office, and she stayed home from school the next day. I can't even remember if i told, but i do remember being taunted by those boys for months after that. Either i didn't tell, and they called me a coward, or i did, and they were punishing me for getting them in trouble. Either way, 4th grade was no fucking picnic. I didn't see Wana very much after that.
~Nikki. Right around that time, my newly-divorced mom was sort of trying to get back out into the social scene (not to be confused with the Man Market). A woman she met had a daughter around my age, but who went to a different school. I remember she wore a uniform, and was very chubby, possibly more than i was. We were basically forced to hang out together when our moms would meet up. It was okay, but we never really had a whole lot in common. I remember being annoyed by Nikki a lot, but in retrospect i think it had a lot to do with the fact that she was an only child being raised by a single working mother, and likely needed friendship waaayy more than i did... Once we all went swimming at a local pool, where i rudely ignored her and swam out into the deep end (she couldn't swim yet, and was always in the shallow area, with arm puffs). My brother swam over to me with a message: "Nikki wants to talk to you", which i responded to by taking a breath and immersing myself completely under the water. i watched his legs and arms treading jerkily in the blue for as long as i could hold my breath, then came back up to the same query, repeated with urgency: "Nikki wants to talk to you!". i went under again, over and over and over, ignoring both her and her message through my brother. i think it may have been the meanest thing i've ever done, and sometimes i still wish i could contact her and apologize.
~Lydia and Faith. i lump these two girls together for a reason. They are the same girl, only with different appearances.
i can't remember which one i met first, but it doesn't really matter. Something trivial was shared in common, perhaps a fleeting interest in the New Kids on the Block, who knows, but suddenly i found that i was friends with-gasp- someone popular! And now i remember, actually. It was Lydia. She had long, rocker-ish hair, wore blue eyeliner, and had giant boobs. This was weird for an early 12-year-old, but hey-it happens! Her family lived in a bad neighborhood in East Oakland, where i saw 3 separate cats get hit by cars on her street. Her parents were some serious Harley Rock 'N Rollers from decades past, and they were pretty burned out. But also awesomely fun. Lydia and i would actually play with Barbies, of all things, in her garage with her little brother Wade. Theirs was another family i wished would adopt me, but it never happened. I guess they went to church regularly, and one Saturday night i finally was allowed to sleep over, but only on the condition that i attend Sunday School with Lydia the next morning. She really wanted me to, even though i don't think i had ever been in a church up to that point, and was scared shitless. The next morning was absolutely awful. was forced into one of Lydia's hideous, chestly-ample Sunday dresses (i was much smaller now; her mom had even nicknamed me "Feather"), and we drove to the church, where we sat at a table with a bunch of items in front of us, instructed by the headmistress to write down how each of these items related to Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Um, whaa?
I was totally lost, and of course felt guilty and embarrassed and ashamed for not knowing the answers while everyone else around dutifully scribbled down the answers. A piece of wood, a chalice, a crucifix, some other stuff i can't remember. Lydia didn't even help me cheat! tsk.
Soon after this, there was a new girl at our school: Faith. Faith changed everything; she was a bad girl at heart, under her plaid skirts and brown ponytail. She and Lydia were instant friends, of course, both rebels without a cause. "We" played a lot of tether-ball in those days, but as the third wheel i was often merely there as a scorekeeper. These two vixens became closer and closer, and thus begand competing with each other more and more, the way girls that age will often do. This evolved into a game of pretending to be nice to me and asking me to hang out with them, in order to make the other one jealous. It took me way too long to figure this out. By the time it dawned on me that our friendships were completely hollow and had nothing to do with me whatsoever, 5th grade was over, which meant that it was time to go to a different school. i never saw those two again.

I've never really been huge on friends- always tended to hang out more by myself, which is fine, actually. These days i have basically one, and she lives 448.568 miles away from me, front door to front door. In high school i hung out with quite the cast of characters, but then didn't we all? I suppose that's another (boring) story for another time.