The Beginning
The moment. It happened when we were thirteen and had something to do with thighs, music and our mothers. We’ve never been able to describe it exactly. We only know that it transpired at some point during that conversation in the locker room. And that it changed our lives. During times of crisis, I suppose it’s good to keep the beginning in mind—if only for something to hold on to as the world collapses around you. As I drove to the airport on that dark December morning, I filled my head with the memory of our first meeting, hoping to calm my fears with the sweet recollection of how simple adolescence could be.
“Do you think Mrs. Wilder knows she has cellulite on the back of her thighs?”
That was the first thing she ever said to me. She being the cool girl from my gym class who didn’t seem the type to wonder about things like that. Probably because I was the type who wondered about things like that, and I definitely wasn’t cool. But there’d always been something different about this girl. She wasn’t popular-cool—no one in the popular crowd stood out the way she did. This girl was intriguing. I think it was the way she wore her confidence—subtle, detached and full of power, like she just might be some kind of rebel. Who would’ve known that underneath it all, she wondered about cellulite, too?
“I like your shirt, by the way,” she said, glancing down at my chest. Milli Vanilli hadn’t become common fodder for comedy sketches yet.
“Thanks! I didn’t actually go to the concert, though,” I admitted. “I got it at the mall.”
“Oh, well, that’s probably better. Things are always way over-priced at concerts, anyway.”
“True,” I agreed, not that I knew. I’d only been to one in my entire lifetime—a Michael Jackson concert with my parents when I was eight. I wasn’t quite sure how this ranked on the scales of seventh-grade coolness.
“I’m Emily, by the way,” she said, flashing a smile of gums and dimples that was both inviting and, at the same time, too quick to let any visitors stay.
“I’m Stella,” I said, smiling back, though I was sure with a little less charm. “My mom was A Streetcar Named Desire fanatic. She said I was conceived during that famous scene where Marlon Brando stands on the street screaming, ‘Stella!’” This last part was a lie and my imitation was hideous, but I thought it made me sound interesting.
“That’s sexy,” Emily said, her voice slipping into a low and seductive key. And then she just kind of stared at me for a few seconds. I found the strange silence ironically cozy. “So, do you think she does?” she asked finally.
“Do I think who does what?”
Emily laughed. “Do you think Mrs. Wilder knows she has cellulite on the back of her thighs?” And there it was. The question that had started it all.
“She couldn’t possibly,” I reasoned. “Or she wouldn’t wear her shorts so short.”
“It’s a shame,” Emily said wistfully, “because she’s pretty hot for a teacher. Don’t you think?”
I had always found Mrs. Wilder uncannily attractive for Willowood Junior High, but I wasn’t used to referring to other women as “hot.” Emily, on the other hand, seemed to own a language untainted by overusage and unhindered by what other people thought.
“She is hot,” I agreed, experimenting with the word. I felt liberated and embarrassed at the same time and knew by Emily’s smile that she’d already embraced me as her devoted trainee. “I guess nobody’s perfect,” I added, wondering if Emily was.
“I guess not,” Emily said with a shrug.
Just then, the bell rang, signifying the end of class.
“Do you have lunch now?” I asked.
“No, algebra,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll see you Thursday. We can stare at Mrs. Wilder’s cellulite together and secretly think she’s hot.”
“I can hardly wait,” I said, using my best “do me” voice to let her know I shared her sense of humor.
“Stella,” she said reflectively, before turning to walk away. “That’s a really cool name. My mom was a Laura Nyro fanatic. She named me after the song ‘Emmie’ and died when I was three.”
That afternoon, I discovered Eli and the Thirteenth Confession— or more precisely, my mother pulled the one Laura Nyro album she owned out of the dust stacks in our attack—and on it was the song that would forever remind me of the girl who, in one indescribable moment, left a lasting impression. There was just something about that conversation—something that made me feel more excited and alive than I actually knew was possible, more like the “me” I’d always wanted to be. Something that made me look forward to gym class.
I fell asleep that night with the song stuck in my head, wondering if Emily was thinking about her new friend from the locker room and if my parents would ever adopt her. It was that instinct right there—to care for Emily—that would accompany me through the next fifteen years of my life.
Fifteen years is a long time to know somebody. And no matter how old you are going in to knowing that person, you grow up. You change. God knows, Emily and I did. But the important thing is that we changed together and never actually grew apart. For all those years of change and growth and experience, I thought nothing could break us apart. But I wasn’t prepared for Europe.
Emily’s phone call came at four o’clock on that dark December morning, ripping me from sleep. It was nine o’clock in London, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that things had changed in a way I could have never prepared myself for.
We always said we’d be best friends no matter what, right? she’d asked me in a tearful panic. A rhetorical question if ever I’d heard one, but that was before she told me the news. Just promise me, Stella, she’d begged. Promise you’ll never forget us.
Emily, you’re not making any sense. If you tell me what happened, then maybe I can—
And that’s when she dropped her bombshell—just like that, from thousands of miles across the ocean—and my entire world came undone.
I arrived at the airport in a flood of fear and sadness. It didn’t even matter about the wait, having to sit for all of those hours with nothing but my own mind for company. I had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, no place else I could be. At least, at the airport, I was safe.
It would take me three flights to get to her. Taking off and landing. Connecting. And taking off again. The whole process dragging out and repeating until one day turned into the next. And in the meantime—the time that separated me from Emily’s frightening reality overseas—all I could do was wait and think…as the seconds turned into minutes, turned into hours, and became my whole life.