Self Help

Best Friends Forever

When I was three years old I sat at my babysitter's house watching Barney when I was joined by another little girl wearing a light blue dress. We sat and watched together as her mother spoke to the babysitter at the kitchen table. That was the day I met Jessica, my best friend.

She and I were completely opposite, and we were thick as theives for our entire childhoods. We did everything together.  We even had the same haircut. Which I have to say - "Mom, what were you thinking!?". Jessica was adorable with her straight blunt bob with bangs. Because I wanted to be just like her, my mother allowed me to cut my unruly curly dirty blonde hair into the same style. The result was definitely more hobo than chic as my curly hair seperated my bangs and tangled to resemble a street person.

Jessica's parents were a doctor and a kindergarten teacher. Coincidentally, her father was the doctor who delivered me, which I guess technically means he was the first person I probably ever saw. Well, maybe I saw a nurse first but for the dramatic effect, we'll say first. The devil's in the details.

We saw each other every week day and almost every weekend. She was like a sister to me, except this sister actually wanted to play with me, and lived in a seperate house filled with an extra set of toys! Our parents enrolled us in Brownies together, and later Girl Guides. We would go to sleep-away camp twice a year together with the Girl Guides, something I would have been to scared to do without her. Jessica was fearless, and she was constantly pushing, no, shoving me out of my comfort zone.

She was not only my best friend, but partner in crime, and sometimes, an actual accomplice. When I was small I had a penchant for stealing toys from my babysitter, green with jealousy for her varied assortment of playmobil accessories. I had been slowly snatching my favourite items and bringing them home, and no one had noticed. I guess I got too confident, because the day I decided to involve Jessica in my toy heist, one of the other children ratted us out, and we were caught, socks filled with small toys, just in time for her parents to come pick us up. Oops.

Jessica was athletic, whip smart and always up for trying new things. She was a played competitive soccer, as well as competitive gymnastics and swimming. When we were little she would spend hours trying to teach me her various skills, but everything that came so naturally to her was a struggle for me. She would even bribe me - "You can't have any mac and cheese until you do a handstand" - but I was hopeless. Constantly moving and impatiently waiting for my skills to catch up to hers, she was the one who taught me to ride a bike (on her hand-me-down bike, in her hand-me-down soccer jersey). After I withdrew from swimming lessons, having failed three times in a row for refusing to put my head under water, it was Jessica who finally convinced me to take the plung (literally and figuratively). Once she got me under the water I was like a little fish and spent the whole summer in Jessica's neighbour's pool. I was never as good as she was at anything she taught me, but somehow that didn't seem to matter to her.

When we weren't in the same class, we would dutifully meet each other in the playground at recess in order to be together. We were so inseperable that in seventh grade when our town revised which areas of town fed into which schools, Jessica's parents began driving her to my house every morning since she could no longer get a bus from her house to our school. We would get ready together in the morning, and when we were old enough to no longer go to our babysitter's, we would  walk home from school each evening to snack and hang out until her parents came to get her.

Until seventh grade, Jessica and I were part of a tight group of five girls, and although we weren't very popular, we were happy. There were enough of us that we didn't feel too lonely, and huddled in our group of five, we didn't feel like losers on the playground. That all changed seemingly overnight in seventh grade when our other friends joined a more popular group of girls and we became outcasts to them. As hurtful as this was, I knew I would always have Jessica, and that made it all a bit more manageable.

When we got to highschool we drifted apart a bit as we each found groups of friends who actually had the same interests, though we always knew that the other one was there if we needed them. Every year we would take a picture in my back yard on the first day of school, right up to the last day of summer before we went our seperate ways. And, to this day, she's never even missed a birthday.