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Juliet was my best friend in elementary school. She had wild blonde hair and this infectious happiness that was such a presence in itself that I felt utterly desolate and empty whenever she was absent. Jules and I were absolutely inseparable. We auditioned together for our school's annual musicals, made daisy chains and jumped rope, ran cross country. We were the third and fourth legs of our school's relay team and once the bell rang for recess we would sprint to the gym to borrow a baton, spending entire recesses practicing hand-offs on lower field. We timed each other on the fifty-yard dash; crept through the bushes by our classroom when the recess teachers weren't looking and searched for tiny cylinders of colored plastic that we called Indian Beads. We watched
The Newsies like girls possessed. Eager to make our marks in the literary world, we co-authored a book called
Thanksgiving on Mars, in which a young man is sent into outer space to give thanks among the curious life forms (Puffalumps) of the Red Planet. One summer while blueberry-picking with our moms, we found a sign with an arrow directing people to an unpicked row. We flipped the sign--the most disobedience either of us had ever exhibited--and proceeded to crouch in the blueberries, doubled over with laughter, as one after another people followed the sign into the bramble of blackberry thorns and chest-high grass, not stopping for a moment to consider how very un-blueberry-like their surroundings were. Every fall our families would drive north into the Skagit Valley to the home of a friend who owned a small apple orchard. We would climb up in the trees and jump on the branches, shaking the apples loose onto a giant blue tarp that covered the ground below. We would go for long walks on the tidal flats and race kayaks--me and Jules in one boat and her sister Sara and her friend in the other.
Our birthdays were five days apart and we protected each other and intuited one another's feelings as though we were twins. The only fight we ever had--and to this day have ever had--was when we both auditioned for the same role in our school's production of
A Comedy of Errors and one of us got it. After witnessing our quiet, sour moods for an entire afternoon, our teacher, Mr. Watson, pulled us aside. "I've never seen anyone with a friendship like you two have," he said. "Whatever's going on right now, is it really that important?" Of course, it wasn't.
I spent most of yesterday with Juliet at her house baking cookies. Though we live less than five minutes apart, it's been years since we've both been in the same place at the same time. Driving to her home, past the old peacock and llama farm, past our beloved elementary school, made me feel like I had pulled out of the driveway of one home and was pulling into that of another. As kids we spent hours playing in the woods behind her house, picking salmonberries and building forts, pretending we'd been deserted like Karana from
Island of the Blue Dolphins, stranded like Brian in
Hatchet. We created a make-believe family in her playhouse, played endless games of badminton in her front yard and tetherball in her cousins' (they live next door). We made up routines on the trampoline to our favorite songs. In so many ways, for most of my life her home has been an extension of my own. Both are places of love and laughter; the walls of both will forever ring with every line of
The Princess Bride.
Our friendship, though no longer fueled by daily whisperings in class, is an easy, unflappable thing. We are bound by the hikes our families took together, by the dance we choreographed to the version of "Mamma Mia" sung by the ABBA tribute band The A-Teens. We are bound by the laps we ran in P.E. to No Doubt's "Don't Speak." We are bound by those ridiculous inside jokes, the origins of which neither of us will ever remember: "Charles Barkley in a can," addressing each other by the name of Uenheimer Smith, and our puzzling--yet masterful--musical creation entitled "Sour Cream and Happiness." They are small things, trivial to anyone else but the kind of moments that make you fear who you might have grown up to be if you hadn't had them.
It's easy to forget, when someone is so much a part of you, which parts of you are you and which parts are them. After a while, there's no clear delineation anymore. I would argue that in elementary school, Juliet knew be better than even my parents. She was--and continues to be--a calming, encouraging presence, and though she rolls her eyes when I claim to have brought back bell bottoms, she always assuages me with a loving, "Okay, Liv." I am so lucky to have someone who was such a wonderful influence on me in my formative years, and who continues to be a major presence in each consecutive stage of my life. I'm so lucky that of all the friends in the universe, mine are the very best.
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