I ran into an old friend from middle school last night.
I hadn’t seen her since middle school, so when, in the middle of a houseparty in Valley Village, she approached me to say hello out of the darkness, I looked at her face and saw almost a time warp heading toward me. Her face looked so familiar, yet different, changed by years of experience I had not been a part of.
She seemed to have mellowed out since we were friends long ago. I remember she had been considered one of the “bad kids” even though she was in Honors English and was pretty smart. Her parents were divorced and she shaved the underneath part of her hair, probably just to encourage her critics. She wore row after row of glow-in-the-dark and fluorescent beaded necklaces and bracelets. We called them “raver” beads, and it was rumored that, even in 7th grade, she had been to some pretty wild raves.
I liked her. She had played on my sister’s softball team in elementary school, and I had slept over at her house a couple of times (mostly in large droves for her birthday parties). Her mom was nice, a little odd, I remember she brought us all donuts in the morning.
We were sure she had experimented with every drug that existed (that’s what happened at Raves, right?). Not to mention, she was very experienced with boys, and probably girls, who knows! She was a latchkey kid and her parents weren’t even home after school, so she had no rules. She was sassy and talked back to teachers.
I don’t know what happened to her after middle school. She was mysteriously absent from the high school we all fed into. It was rumored that she went to the school for “bad kids” in our district, the one with the delinquents that wasn’t like a real high school. They didn’t even have a prom. And, then, like that, she fell off the edge of the world.
Until last night. Her face came out of the mist of the backyard and floated toward me. I felt like time stood still. She called out my name and I couldn’t hide. I was exposed. How had she recognized me after so many years? What had I been doing since middle school? In this moment, I couldn’t even remember.
