Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

...Baby One More Time
I follow Jessica to the edge of the dock, moonlight spilling onto the dark mirror of the still local lake, painting a galaxy into which she dips her spirited green and yellow toes. They were
decorated to match her cheer uniform for the pep rally that she couldn’t wait for, and the one I wished I could miss. Under threat of detention for spending another school-mandated event in
the library, I sat at the top of the bleachers and watched the school’s stars twirl and flip, forming constellations. But from the top of the pyramid, Jessica outshined everyone.

She’s always had a gravitational pull. I first felt it when I watched her move into the fixer-upper next door a few days into kindergarten, peering out my bedroom window, unable to tear my eyes away. She’s the big bang, a swirling explosion of butterfly clips and laughter and fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies, creating connections wherever she goes. And, for some reason that I’ve never understood, she’s my friend.

She smiles at me as she whips her sweatshirt off, a meteor that hits the dock, and reveals the electric pink bikini that made Trevor Holmes walk into a wall at the public pool last summer. It’s so different from my faded swim team suit. “Ready?”

“It’s too cold.” I don’t want to take a midnight dip in the middle of October. I’d planned to turn down her invitation, but I hopped into her car when she came to pick me up, I walked through the inky woods, I trailed behind her along the sandy banks. Wherever she leads, I follow, like a ship bound to a broken compass that points only to her.

“Where’s your sense of adventure?” She jumps off the dock, scattering the stars, sending them whirling in ripples like a Van Gogh painting. She’s out of sight, one with the night, and I wonder if I shouldn’t have let her go. I hold my breath until she resurfaces and shouts, “Get in here!” It’s not relief I feel, but compulsion. Her words are a siren song and I can’t stop my feet from moving until I shatter the mirror too, drowning in dimly lit desperation and sputtering out ice water.

She laughs and splashes me, but it’s not a cold shock anymore. “See? It’s fun!”

I nod, focusing on the pull and push underneath the surface as I tread water. She’s right, it’s fun to be weightless, to be splashing in the night with my best friend. We float, onto our backs and into the sky, suspended among the cosmos. I think about the few months I’ll still be in Jessica’s orbit before I move to an unknown college campus with no friends, an untethered astronaut floating through cold space, among the stars but never this close again. I’ll be alone.

“Do you think—” I start. But she’s under the water again, splashing and spinning, carefree against my careful. But that’s why we work, why I keep coming back to her, celestial and
addictive.

As she swims, her laugh traveling at the speed of water, I sigh and smile, letting myself glide in easy strokes. I follow Jessica, one more time.

Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely
I slip back under the water, another dip into freedom, as Amanda paddles after me. I am a
dolphin diving, a wild thing in water. With my next sip of air, I laugh, the song of freedom.
“Doesn’t this make you feel alive?”

My shadow yanks me back. “N-no. Just c-cold.”

No. All Amanda ever says is no. No, we cannot toilet paper Mr. Wyatt’s house. No, we shouldn’t
send a love letter to Sean Stone. No, I won’t pierce your ears with an apple and a sewing needle.

Her anchor comforts and terrifies me. Where I go, she goes, and I am never alone. I have never
been alone, not with matching shirts from Aeropostale and beaded friendship bracelets and Julia
Stiles movie marathons. Amanda keeps me coloring in the lines, each no a boundary protecting
me from myself.

Amanda will never understand.

“Fine.”

But I let Amanda haul herself out first, water slicking onto the dock, and give myself the gift of disappearing. I merge back into the dark water, my hair like octopus legs in the floating
darkness, and the cold electrifies my skin. My heart stirs like a drifting current. Here I have no shadow, nothing but the electric pull of myself. I am a sea monster, searching the deep, and I can finally breathe when I am alone at last.

But not for long.

When I emerge back from the silver-flecked water, Amanda’s on the dock, her swim practice
towel already draped around her shoulders. I heave myself up, loving the way my skin prickles
with cold, thrilling the sensation of life. Amanda wraps half of the towel around my shoulder, her wet body mingling with mine, and I lean my head against her shoulder.

I breathe her in, my other half, my home away from home, and yet, I long to run. To find the
answer to the feeling missing in my heart. To fling myself against the world and see if I make a scratch.

The full moon shines down on us, our skin gleaming, and something inside me claws to get out,
to howl at it, to drink it in.

“It’s going to be so different next year,” Amanda whispers. “I’m going to miss you so much.”

“I’ll miss you too.” I can’t sit here and talk about it, can’t think about next year, can’t think about what may or may not happen. Amanda might be my tether but still my blood screams to run run run.

I smirk and throw off her towel, shaking off the seriousness. “Last one back to your house has to prank call Trevor.”

“I’m cold,” she grumbles, but she stands anyway.

“Then this will warm you up.” I poke her in the ribs. I sprint down the dock, my feet pounding
the familiar haunt of our woods, the playground of our childhood, the place I feel most free. The place I long to escape most.

Amanda chases after me, and I yip, urging her to follow me even though I wish she would stay.
My voice echoes throughout the night, and Amanda answers, a call-and-response of sisterhood.

One day, I promise myself, caught in the crimson love of my best friend, I will know the
meaning of being lonely.