This strange, unbelievable adventure began a long time ago in Mrs. Cox’s classroom on the last day of sixth grade. It had been a terrible year for me. I felt trapped in the gap between being a child and a teen. I still played with my Barbies in the afternoon after school. But I was ashamed of it and would have melted in denial had anyone my age ever figured out my afternoon activities. The boy on the bus I secretly fawned over was fawning over someone who was not me. My body betrayed my childish, Barbie loving self. I started my period that year and was prone to days of weepiness, soothed only by boxes of chocolate covered raisins. My mother bought me something called a training bra. After all these years I have discovered the little flimsy, lace bra was obviously not training my breasts to grow. I wanted to wear makeup, especially shimmering, silvery, eggshell blue eyeshadow like I had seen on the girls of "Charlie’s Angels." But my mother, being a wet blanket to my slowly emerging womanhood, said there would be no makeup for me, at least not until seventh grade.
In those days we had no air-conditioning in public schools and so our stifling hot classroom smelled of warm crayons, preadolescent sweat, and cafeteria pizza. A small boy named Lucas sat in the desk across from me. He had very pale blonde hair and eyes that reminded me of a rabbit, all pink rimmed and prone to water. Sara sat on the other side, but two seats behind. She was a pudgy, blonde haired girl with the most beautiful, big blue eyes I had ever seen. We sat together during lunch and on the playground. We were not a part of the cool crowd so no one bothered us. We talked about Sean Cassidy who starred in "The Hardy Boys" and discussed the opening ice skating sequence on the previous week’s “Donny and Marie” show. We had even spent the night with each other.
During pre-texting days, we had another means of communication, very prehistoric by today’s standards. We passed notes. On the last day of school, soon to be seventh grader, Sara moved toward the pencil sharpener and slipped a piece of paper across my desk. I caught a whiff of her Love’s Baby Soft perfume as she walked past and the paper skidded to a stealth halt on my desk. She had drawn a large sunflower and in her beautiful, round handwriting the words, “To My Best Friend.” From that moment our fate was sealed. We would be best friends for better or worse, until death parted us.
Had I known how the adventure would end, the only thing I would change would be paying more attention to details. Over the years I learned love echoes in the details.
