Our earliest friendships are often rooted in little more than physical proximity and mine were no exception. My first best friend was naturally my brother, the second the girl next door, but there was scant more to our bond than that.
When we were four or five years old, her family moved to a nicer subdivision a few miles away, a tough obstacle for a flimsy friendship of convenience to overcome. While I can vividly recall her mother’s extensive collection of Precious Moments figurines, proudly displayed in glass, and the maniacal family chihuahua whose dainty name — Tinker Bell — belied her habits of nipping at hands and peeing on rugs, I remember virtually nothing about Becky herself.
A year or two later it was my family’s turn to move, and there was a new girl next door, a year older. We bicycled or swam together nearly every day in warmer weather, and went sledding in the winter. We had occasional sleepovers when I was healthy, during which we stayed up watching Ghost Dad or Peggy Sue Got Married or whatever else we could find in an early ’90s antenna TV wasteland of religious public access shows and home shopping networks.
But we had nothing to talk about, no common interests, a gulf that only widened once she turned boy-crazy as a tween, with a marked preference for juvenile delinquents. It was a wall most of my friendships eventually hit. I was a weird kid, a loner, someone whose illness meant frequent absences of days, weeks or even months at a time. My personal problems weren’t relatable and I was reluctant to discuss them anyway. Books and blank pages were my constant companions, and reruns of shows like Laverne & Shirley, Mama’s Family and Cheers kept me from feeling the full brunt of my isolation.
Middle school brought with it a chance for new beginnings, partly in the form of classmates from other grade schools who hadn’t known me as ‘the sick girl.’ That was how I met Jess, a painfully shy jock who lived only a street or two over from mine. Our paths hadn’t crossed before because her parents had sought a special dispensation from the district to keep her at her previous elementary school when the newer one that I attended opened. She had trouble adjusting to change.
Now it seemed we couldn’t escape each other. Our surnames were close to identical and we were both bespectacled and wore our hair pulled back. In the earliest weeks of sixth grade, teachers kept calling us by each other’s names. An alphabetical seating chart placed us side by side in study hall, where we bonded over our irritation. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Jess was annoyed by just about everything. She was critical of our classmates without being misanthropic and had a sense of humor about her struggles with anxiety.
We were best friends throughout middle school and into high school but rarely socialized away from campus. She didn’t share my obsessive interests in reading, old movies or Absolutely Fabulous, and I didn’t share hers in sports, particularly ice hockey, though I was at least conversant in it because of my dad and brother. We related to each other nonetheless and, unlike many of our classmates, she was unbothered by my parents’ interfaith marriage and never tried to drag me to church.
I knew Jess was gay before I knew that I was — she reminded me of my aunt’s partner — but she was much slower to figure it out. Even our classmates, who weren’t bright enough to catch onto me, sensed something was different about her, and I deflected questions about her sexuality with a breezy “You’d have to ask her…” Other than nonsexual crushes on NHL players, she expressed no interest in boys. If girls were on her radar yet, she never mentioned it to me, either.
At 14, after first coming out to myself (on the second try), I nervously told my lesbian aunt. Though I was certain of my sexuality, it also seemed like an abstract concept since I had no romantic or sexual interest in anyone I knew in real-life. Still, I thought it might be nice to be completely myself around Jess, so I resolved to tell her. But how? It wasn’t something that felt suitable for blurting out at school, though everyone there would know soon enough.
A greeting card was the obvious solution — coming out via Hallmark struck me as hilarious. Pilfering a seasonal card from a box of my parents’ leftovers, I wrote “Merry Christmas, I’m gay!” inside and tossed it in the mailbox, knowing it would reach her in time for the holidays. But she didn’t acknowledge my announcement, then or for a long time afterward. Our friendship continued — somewhat awkwardly, of course, which was par for the course. The arthritis I’d developed years earlier began keeping me out of school for longer stretches, and we exchanged short emails during my absences, joking about the same old subjects. I didn’t return to the closet but didn’t dwell on it, either.
The closer we crept to adulthood, the further apart we drifted, the rise of the Internet allowing us both to make friends who shared our interests. Jess created websites about her favorite hockey players, while I began writing about many of the same geeky subjects I’m still passionate about today. She joined a recreational women’s ice hockey team that seemed, from a distance, to be a strange cross between A League of Their Own and a gauzy Radley Metzger foray into sexual self-discovery — her teammates kept leaving their husbands or boyfriends for each other.
I don’t remember how old we were when she sent me an unusually serious apology email, but I’m inclined to say early twenties. She’d always felt like an asshole for ignoring my coming-out, but she hadn’t known what to say, privately wrestling as she was with Catholic guilt and shame over her own sexuality. I’d figured as much at the time, which was why I hadn’t pushed the subject. Now she found herself in a pickle. An older teammate, one who lived with a boyfriend or fiancé, had developed feelings for Jess, who returned them. She wasn’t sure how to proceed and wanted my support, but also felt undeserving of it because of her silence years earlier.
It was a more dramatic coming-out scenario than I’d ever pictured for her, but I was proud of Jess for finally accepting herself. Unlike her hockey friends, consummate U-Haulers prone to acting in haste, I urged her to protect her heart and move slowly with that heretofore heterosexual teammate. You can guess how that went. Not long after the big revelation, the phone rang and it was Jess, frantically whispering “I’m calling from the bathroom” of the teammate’s apartment. “We were making out and I went under her shirt, but I’m not sure what to do next.” She had never sounded so happy — or so terrified.
My girlhood friend was all grown up. Given the urgency of the moment, I didn’t pause to say “You realize you’re doing this before me, right?” I gave her general instructions and a pep talk, assuring her that in the moment, she’d know just what to do. Their relationship took off from there, though it was ultimately doomed. So, too, was my friendship with Jess. The insecure partner I acquired in my mid-twenties didn’t want me keeping in touch with old pals, especially women. I didn’t put up much of a fight, figuring such silliness was only temporary. Instead it continued for years.
On the day my ex left, I looked Jess up online and sent her a Facebook message to see how she’d been… and then deleted my account in a panic, fearful of upsetting the partner with whom I hoped to reconcile. In the years since, I’ve considered reaching out again. But if I’m honest, ours was another friendship based primarily on proximity, and it’s unlikely we’d have much to talk about now as fully established adults. I prefer to imagine our paths crossing again in a nursing home, when I grumble “My name isn’t Jess…” right as the old lady next to me mutters “I’m not [Cranky]…”