Best Friendship
Mindy Kaling tapped into something so true when she said, “Best friend isn’t a person, it’s a tier.” Throughout the years I’ve had many best friends, and one ride-or-die forever best friend that I hope to die on the same day as because I can’t fathom facing this world without her, even for a day. Plus I’d want her opinion on my funeral and vice versa. It would be a whole-ass mess without her. But sometimes you meet people who are acquaintances in best friend clothing.
Tiffany introduced herself to me by shoving me down on the playground in fourth grade. I like to run my mouth, even now, and I had apparently said too loudly that her best friend, Liz, had failed to look like Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century with her half-up pigtails, half-down hairdo. I was right, but that wasn’t the point. Tiffany is loyal to a fault and had decided to stick up for her friend.
We were in different classes, so I didn’t really run into her the rest of the year. Maybe we rode the same bus on our field trip to the state capital or the zoo, but it would require the passing of a few seasons for me to be reunited with this lanky white girl with full lips and freckles.
I’ve mentioned before that my elementary school was toilet white, so it shouldn’t surprise you that Tiffany and I became friends when I stuck up for her after Teisa made fun of her lips (of all things) before social studies class.
“They’re DSLs!” Teisa teased.
Teisa was on the cheerleading squad and had fiery red hair, freckles, braces, and no discernable upper lip. You remember that girl in elementary school that took gymnastics and would constantly be showing everyone how flexible she was by doing backbends, splits, and cartwheels like the lunch hour was a talent show? That was Teisa.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Dick-sucking lips!” she roared, and her friends with varying degrees of perversion laughed at this assertion. “And you have them, too!”
“Huh. Well, I suppose those kinds of lips are better than no lips at all. When you drink Kool-Aid does it just go everywhere?” I mimed a person desperately trying and failing to keep the sugar water inside their mouth.
“Bitch.” Teisa pouted. Happy to have lightened the mood, I continued slurping and mocking her until I got a notification sheet for presumably having too hilarious a stand-up special.
From then on, Tiffany and I suffered the injustice of childhood and adolescence together.
Every night we’d talk on the phone for roughly an hour. That was the amount of time it took me to do a speed-run of Sonic CD on the old family PC and for Tiffany to get in trouble for not doing any number of chores and get kicked off the phone. The topics started with her crush, Chase, another gawky, tall white kid who wasn’t in the “gifted” program. We were never superior about having been placed in the “smart kid classes,” but we were curious about what the kids who weren’t got to do instead of French class. After a half hour of musing, we’d talk about our celebrity crushes (since I had already decided all the boys I’d met were totally too boring to talk to for more than a minute). Hers was N*SYNC (Justin Timberlake was so cute and his favorite color was baby blue, too), and mine was Backstreet Boys (AJ had a bad-boy appeal that I was beginning to lean into). Sometimes there’d be lulls in conversation for minutes and minutes at a time while we both listened to the radio, separately but together. One such time a wedding classic, “Let’s Get Married” by Jagged Edge, played to our captivated silence. It was the remix, and once the magnanimous rap line “WHAT’S GOING ON ACROSS THE SEAS” came in we were both rapping through the entire verse. It became known as our song™. We promised each other we would rap it at each other’s weddings.
I liked Tiffany because she was always the most open-minded person in the room. When we argued it wouldn’t last long because she was always willing to see multiple sides and then make a rational call, one that encouraged agreement. She also knew all the black people songs and all the white people songs. As much as she loved pop groups, she also knew the latest dance moves and R & B songs. I never had to worry about if she’d fit in with my family. She’d fit in with anybody.
The friendship quickly moved into sleepover territory. My mom hates when people come over with any amount of warning. If you spring people on her, she typically laments how “dirty our house is” for the better part of an hour and then enjoys the new person and getting a break from entertaining us. So, I was the first houseguest.
Standing on Tiffany’s doorstep, my mom called to Tiffany’s mom, Renee, from the car.
“She brought her own pillow case ’cause she has some hair grease that might get on your pillows! She knows the phone number. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon!” And with that newfound freedom she peeled off.
Tiffany’s house was small but nice. I put my stuff on the top bunk and turned around to see a man whose head nearly touched the ceiling lumbering through the room.
“Hey,” her dad, Rob, mumbled as he made his way to the kitchen to hang with Tiffany’s mom and little sister, Ashley.
After descending the bed frame’s ladder, Tiffany presented me with options of what we could do.
“I have a PS2 and Crash Bandicoot,” she offered. And we ate an icebox cake and played for hours until her parents got sick of us laughing. It felt good to know that all parents tire of children’s laughter after a few too many hours.
The next morning her parents made a full breakfast of bacon, sausage, goetta, biscuits and gravy, and eggs over medium. I’d never had over-medium eggs. My mom doesn’t like any food that isn’t well-done. She believes foodborne illness is a real threat against which we should remain vigilant.
In addition to being in the talent show with a barely choreographed number to “5, 6, 7, 8” by Steps (one the many events I’m glad occurred in my life PRIOR to the boom of social media), she was my partner for all class projects. In sixth grade we made a trifold cardboard presentation about how marijuana was bad (it was a different time) and recorded a theme song to the rhythm of “The Lollipop Guild” song from The Wizard of Oz.
We represent
The non-potheads
The non-potheads
The non-potheads
And in the name of
The non-potheads
We wish you would abstain
From smoking weed.
I like to believe we got at least a B-plus.
When I skipped two grades and then transferred to public school, we still remained close. Since no one wanted to take me to the homecoming dance, I invited Tiffany. Since Kentucky is so small, kids from other schools coming to your dance was always a big deal.
Tiffany danced with everybody, and lo and behold all the boys who ignored me routinely were dancing back. I had a crush on Mr. Raney, a “permanent substitute” who was filling in for a math teacher on maternity leave, but wasn’t so unrealistic as to believe we would ever date (come on). Still, I suggested we stalk him around the dance, keeping a healthy distance but giving me enough information to write a diary entry about it the next day.
“No! I’m dancing!” Tiffany protested.
“Come on! These guys are so boring!” I whined. But unfortunately, our stalking wouldn’t work anyway. See, the guys liked Tiffany so much that even as we tried to perch near the cookies and punch table, all the guys followed us there, instantly blowing our cover.
“Hi, Mr. Raney,” I said sheepishly.
“Hey, Akilah! Are you having a good time?” I was forever in the student zone. I knew this, but the heart wants what it wants. And the sadness I felt as he definitely went to go talk to other teachers (the most boring!) over me was a devastating blow. I tried to have a good time, but how could I? One day I’d have to grow into my own cuteness and find a boy my own age who liked me.
Our friendship was unshaken even as Tiffany entered high school. There’d be more dances and musicals and reasons for us to check out what was happening at the other’s school. We rated the hotness of different boys by looking through old yearbooks.* Tiffany made another best friend at her school, Emily, and I made one at my school, Stacy. I immediately liked Emily. She was quiet and maybe a bit too Jesus-y for my taste. But I can handle Bible-thumping. Tiffany did not like Stacy. Not even a little.
Stacy was also tall and white, but with jet-black hair and green eyes that she covered with blue contacts every day. One afternoon while I was wasting time pretending to take photos for “yearbook class,” I noticed her in the special needs classroom. She was strikingly beautiful and sitting alone at a desk, appearing to take a test. I have no idea why I noticed her, but when she got on the bus for speech and drama at 4:30 a.m. one Saturday a few weeks later, I remembered.
“She is SO HOT,” Isaac said. All the boys were beside themselves.
“Oh yeah, is she on the team now? I saw her in the special needs classroom the other week when I was taking pictures.” It was so early that it hadn’t occurred to me that this information might affect the way the guys saw her.
“She’s like retarded hot,” Isaac deadpanned idiotically. I listened to them reduce her to all of her “best” body parts until I couldn’t take it anymore and went and sat by her.
“Hey, I’m Akilah. Don’t look but all the junior guys are staring at you.”
She turned her head to glance and they ducked behind the tattered leather seats.
“I’m Stacy. I just started as a freshman at Boone.”
“Oh yeah? I saw you in the special needs room and didn’t know if . . .”
“I was just taking a make-up exam. Did you tell everyone you saw me in there?” She blushed.
And I just had to laugh. But she laughed, too, and we drove the boys crazy all year.
In all honesty, this is what I liked about my friendship with Stacy. I finally got to be cool and fawned over. If a boy wanted a chance with Stacy he’d have to be nice to me, too. And Stacy really trusted me. I was often the third wheel that would put her parents at ease when she wanted to go on a proper date. If there was a video montage of my junior year of high school, it would be set to “You Make My Dreams” by Hall & Oates, and it would be footage of Stacy and her boyfriend holding hands at the skating rink, the bowling alley, and on her couch, and pan to the left or right to see me, just happy to be there.
Sleeping over at Stacy’s house was different. Her parents lived in a big subdivision and were constantly updating and renovating. The living room had surround sound embedded. Her parents’ office had a newer, sleeker computer on a monthly basis. She had a projector screen in her basement where we’d play Guitar Hero or watch a movie I couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen yet, like Back to the Future or Armageddon.
I could never figure out why she hadn’t seen stuff that had been out forever. Her family moved to Kentucky from California, and so it was put to me that kids out west didn’t watch as much TV. I pitied them. But it wasn’t just movies she didn’t know about. One time we were in her room listening to the Alien Ant Farm version of “Smooth Criminal,” and she didn’t know Michael Jackson sang it first. I had to believe that maybe she was from an alien ant farm because who doesn’t know every Michael Jackson hit? There’s just no excuse for that level of ignorance.
Every time I spent the night her room had changed. It was either a different color, from red to teal to dark gray back to white, or it was literally a different room because she wanted to switch with her brother on a whim, and/or she had some new hobby her parents had invested in. The first time I came over she had this guitar she would play and sing songs by the Scorpions and AC/DC for me. The next time she had a pet snake she had to feed a rat to satiate it before bed. I could never keep up with who she was. One day she was decked out in clothes from Hot Topic, the next she was deep in the preppy styles from Hollister. All the while I was wearing a few name-brand clothes, but mostly whatever was the second-to-worst thing at Walmart and Old Navy.
The only constant in my sleeping over was that her family could not cook and never would. We’d eat cereal or butter on noodles. If they ordered a pizza, there were never toppings.
“I don’t like sauce,” Stacy would complain. I still don’t relate on a human level to hating all sauces. Like, what?
There was also this bizarre weekend ritual where her mom would wake us up in the morning. On a Saturday. Before ten a.m. When Tiffany would come to my house, my mom absolutely would not wake us up, savoring the moments of quiet before the teen noise drowned out her solace. Same for when I stayed at Tiffany’s. But something weird was going on at this house.
“Wake up wake up wake up, Stacy!” her mom would sing like a homemade jingle. Then Stacy would groan.
“MOM! Leave us alone!”
Stacy’s mom would continue by grabbing Stacy’s toes and singing the song more.
For the life of me I can’t figure out why this tradition was better than just letting us sleep in our growing teen bodies.
Spring break junior year rolled around, and Stacy and I spent the first weekend painting the set for our school’s production of Clue: The Musical. The set looked cheap and bad. Four big wooden rectangles would come out interchangeably and assemble a different part of the iconic game board. The musical is also terrible, though, so it was fine. Volunteering for the crew of the show was an excuse for me to fawn over Mr. Raney. But that weekend was the only public engagement I had planned for my week off school.
Dipping her brush in yellow paint, Stacy yelled, “My family is going camping this week! You should come! We have a trailer that hooks up to my dad’s truck so it’s not even like we’re really camping. You should come!”
That was the tip off. The refrain of “you should come!” I knew she wasn’t going to let this idea go. I tried to change the subject, but it just kept changing back.
“Plus it’ll be fun, we can hike and eat hot dogs and take naps,” she gushed. None of this sounded like what I wanted to do with someone else’s family for the better part of a vacation. If I had my way I’d be waking up around noon to watch Dawson’s Creek reruns on TBS.
I saw the RAV4 pull up and I got in the back seat. Instead of driving off, Mom rolled down the window to Stacy’s smiling face.
“Can Akilah come camping with us this week?” Stacy asked, oblivious to the subtext that I hated this idea.
Looking back at me through the rearview mirror, I’m certain my mom noticed me mouthing “no” and shaking my head. So it can be considered no less than traitorous that she said, “Yeah, that should be fine, I’ll bring her over,” before we started the drive home.
“What the hell, Marilynn?” I began.
“Oh, come on, Kilah, it’ll be fun!” she said, and then burst into laughter. She knew there was no way I was going to enjoy myself in the woods with little to no cell service for an undisclosed number of days with Stacy’s family. She hadn’t really met them, but she knew I was a frequent guest in their house and that if Stacy was any indication, they were super safe and square.
The trip was doomed from the jump. For starters: I didn’t want to be there. Additionally, the entire drive to middle-of-nowhere Indiana was a drag. Stacy wouldn’t stop tattling on her little brother so we all lost movie privileges (yes, they were the kind of white people with the TVs on the back of the car seats). I’d already seen Chicago, but it’s really not the kind of movie you can just stop in the middle.
Once at the campgrounds, things only got worse and more boring. We drove right out of cell range, and while Stacy was a good friend for sitting and watching TV, without the help of background noise she could be too quiet. Between eating our gas station bounty of sour gummies and chips, we’d just nap for an hour or so at a time and then wake the other up to not have to sit alone in the trailer with our thoughts.
After enough rounds of this, Stacy thought it would be best if we went on a hike.
“Fine,” I said, when I really meant, “I’d rather get hit by a car.”
It was muddier than any of us expected, so we all had to pretend we weren’t pissed off that our shoes had been rendered completely unwearable in public. There were more hills and trees than we expected, so walking took forever. Stacy’s brother, Blaine, was struggling hard, and though I’m no outdoorsperson, I certainly will not be pulling up the rear in the event a bear, wild boar, or drunk dude catches our scent.
“Is this pot?” Stacy asked, holding up a plant she’d found while we waited for Blaine to catch up.
“Yes,” I lied, hoping that would end the conversation. And it did. Kind of. She ate it. She just shoved it in her mouth. And then, when she didn’t like the taste, she thought she was going to throw up, which caused her great distress. She had a panic attack.
At that very moment, Blaine decided it would be a great idea to jump in a puddle that was deeper than he thought and proceeded to fall in, get soaked, and start to cry.
So now I’m in the woods with a damp ten-year-old and a panicking fourteen-year-old when all I wanted was to watch my shows at home in peace.
When we made it back to the campsite, there was more familial bickering to be endured. Stacy didn’t want a hot dog, but all there was were hot dogs. She wanted s’mores, but it wasn’t s’mores time yet. Blaine wouldn’t stop crying. Their dad took him to the bathroom to presumably yell at him some more.
This whole time I just toasted bun after bun and made hot dog after hot dog. I didn’t know if we were going to eat a whole pack as a unit, but I wanted the work part of the trip to be over already. Out of the darkness a tiny meow caught our attention.
A few moments later, a kitten with a broken back leg wandered up to our campfire. It was cute, I’ll concede. Was it pick-it-up-and-let-it-piss-on-your-hoodie cute, Stacy? I don’t think so. So that was a whole thing.
Blaine and his dad came back from the bathroom, and they both looked like they’d seen a ghost.
“There were bloody handprints. Everywhere. On the walls. On the door,” Stacy’s dad recounted.
“Eww,” I said.
“Oh my god, but I have to use the bathroom,” Stacy said.
“Pee behind the trailer; none of us is going back to that bathroom!” her dad ordered, and now it was back to pouting and hot dogs while a literal murder may have been unfolding just steps away.
We ate s’mores mostly in silence because Stacy forgot the amp for her guitar (thank GOD). Around what was probably only nine p.m. we got bored of each other and decided we should go to sleep. Unfortunately I couldn’t get comfortable. None of us could. There was rustling outside, and that murderer was probably on to us.
Plus, it was still kind of cold in the evening, but the bed that Stacy and I shared wasn’t close enough to the heater for it to be effective. Stacy would insist on trying to be the big spoon, but then I’d get sweaty and have to push her off, desperate for this hell-trip to end.
And end it did. By three a.m. her father was having a full-blown asthma attack because someone (I really don’t know who) didn’t clean out the heater filter, and dusty air had been blowing at full velocity into this man’s lungs for hours. I let him take a hit off my inhaler, and we began the long drive back to the ’burbs.
I will always be best friends with Tiffany. She’s so smart, so funny, so driven. As much as both of our leaves keep changing, she’s the person I call when I get into town, and we pick up where we left off. I was in her wedding, and if I can con a man into settling down with me, she will be in mine. In relationships and friendships, it’s important to really see the other person for who they are, their faults and all. And it’s also important to know when those faults are too much.
In Stacy’s case, years after we were both out of high school and college, she fell in love with a guy. I never met the guy, but he was good-looking in a way where he was definitely treated better his whole life. With women I tend to think, regardless of how attractive they are, that there was a period when they didn’t know, or they didn’t believe it. Men don’t make it to their twenties without knowing they’re good-looking. So there’s that. As their relationship progressed, Stacy adopted some of his more backward, racist beliefs. We stopped being friends the day I read a post of hers on Facebook claiming that being big and black (in the case of slain teen Michael Brown) was, in its own way, “being armed.” Yeah.
But it wasn’t easy walking away. It hasn’t been easy watching her get married and have kids with this guy. And the truth is she was always nice to me. Her family never treated me differently and always helped me whenever I needed it. When I think about friendship and love, I think that it really comes down to gray areas; love is the ability or willingness to see the other’s gray areas—the spots where maybe you have to give them the benefit of the doubt, or let them grow into being something else. Love is lost when you can no longer do that. Though I’m aware Stacy really has always just wanted to be in love, and would say anything to be seen as the perfect match, there is no gray area when it comes to my lived experience. I just couldn’t see a way forward for that friendship, and I don’t regret it.
All this to say that Mindy Kaling is right, and some bitches just don’t make the cut.