A Friendship That Changed Everything

By sARAh Ross thoMpson

It all started in 1995 with an Alanis Morissette cassette tape and a few outdated dELiA*s catalogs. We were two seventh grade girls in a small, Bible Belt town dreaming of becoming writers and finding cute boys who really “understood” us. The year that changed everything was the year I found a true friend.

Not to harp on a truth that any feeling human already knows, but middle school is vicious. While I was figuring out what parts of the world felt authentic to me, I also experienced rejection for many of those very same things, and, in the beginning, I found it to be a lonely time.

So, I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I think it involved a homeroom class turned free-for-all where there were too many kids and not enough teachers to maintain any sort of order. A cassette tape was passed from her to me, and, looking back, it was quite a generous offering because I did not provide one thing in return. I took it home for a week and memorized every single word. In fact, I’m pretty sure I damaged the tape by rewinding it so many times to get the lyrics just right. Afterwards, I felt changed. Enlightened. “Jagged Little Pill:” my first experience with music as a religious experience. All made possible by a girl from homeroom.

The simple fact that we both loved the album made me feel as if she and I were kindred spirits, and, to this day I still think music is one of the best ways to find your people. But, mainly, that she had shared one of her prized possessions with me so freely and easily made me know that she was kind. And it truly meant the world. Her name was Shenell, by the way.

After that we were inseparable. We browsed through dELiA*s catalogs, of course never buying anything, and she didn’t pass judgment on my pre-internet, mostly failed attempts at ’90s grunge. We compared notes on boys. Often. To this day, the middle schooler that lives on in me prevents the naming of our two main crushes here, but they likely know who they are.

We found that we shared a love for writing. In fact, we thought of ourselves, not so modestly, as “up-and-coming” literary voices. We kept a shared journal that got passed back and forth between classes, and we made up new words that we used in day-to-day conversation (“Manistified” was one we were especially proud of). We discussed books that would shape us for the rest of our lives. We cried when Asher escaped with baby Gabe in The Giver and stood wide-eyed and heartbroken on our class trip to the Holocaust museum after reading The Diary of Anne Frank. We wrote poems, mastered origami-style note folding and scripted very detailed messages in each other’s yearbooks in which we referred to each other as “Soul Sisters.”

And while the brutal, confusing and miserable parts of middle school still happened, I was not alone. At such a young age, I experienced the pure joy of being known, and it changed everything. Almost 30 years have passed since that seventh grade year, and we have inevitably grown apart and back together and apart again. While too much time passes, sometimes years, between visits, I’m happy to say that my first true friend remains a part of my life. Shenell was by my side when I married a boy who actually does understand me, and a few years later we both cried when her beautiful, literary daughter read a book to my baby boy. And while I would never dream of calling myself a writer, I knew that one of my first fumbling attempts at putting my heart on paper had to be a tribute to her. OH

Sarah Ross Thompson lives in Greensboro with her husband, John, and two children, Owen and Ellie. A psychologist by training, she finds getting lost in the woods and writing short stories to be two of the greatest therapies.

Fifth grade was shaping up to be a good year for me in Elkin, my cozy North Carolina foothills hometown. I was earning an impressive array of Girl Scout merit badges and had learned to ride a unicycle after school at the YMCA. Our Methodist youth handbell choir had mastered “Fairest Lord Jesus,” set to debut at Easter service. Best of all, I was president of my Beatles fan club.

We preteens expended enormous amounts of energy dancing to Beatles records, swooning over magazine photos and collecting Beatles bubblegum cards. Seeing the movie A Hard Day’s Night, elevated our Beatlemania to a new level, and my handheld transistor radio accompanied me everywhere. On rotation, club members phoned the local radio station before leaving for school to request that the DJ play a specific Beatles’ tune precisely at 10:10 a.m. during morning recess. I’d flick the radio on, and, if the DJ complied, our day was made.

When my parents gave my sisters and me the news in early spring of 1965, I cried: We were moving because Daddy had taken a new job in Chicago. My two sisters were young enough that they didn’t fully grasp the ramifications of this turn of events, but, for me, it was earth-shattering. Elkin was all I had known since the age of 4, and I would essentially be leaving behind a lifetime.

Once school let out for the summer, we made preparations to leave 188 Edgewood Drive. I packed up my books, dolls, record player and Beatles collection, then made the heartbreaking drive with Daddy to take my beloved beagle, Hazel, to a farm out in the country. After the movers finished and we bade the neighbors farewell, the five of us crammed into our little black Peugeot and headed north.

Our new home was a townhouse in a suburban neighborhood of townhouses whose residents were almost exclusively young marrieds with little ones. As soon as they saw me, the Swardenskis next door lit up as they considered the prospect of