Remembering Donna

I recently heard wailing in my middle school, not just crying, but weeping coming from a nearby room. I walked toward the alarming sound to find a seventh grader telling her woeful story to a teacher: “But she was my BEST FRIEND!!!” she wailed. I walked away understanding the scenario. I’ve seen it a million times over my teaching career: inseparable girls now separated due to something one of them said or did, a girl-on-girl style broken heart that will never be forgotten and may never be forgiven. Yes, I’ve seen it before. And this particular scenario?

I’ve actually lived it before.

Donna was my best friend in seventh grade. She was more than just a friend; we were practically twins, born mere weeks apart and sharing personality characteristics that I had never found in anyone else. She was just as boy crazy (while feeling the same amount of awkwardness whenever around them), she was just as committed to her school work (while struggling just a little in some classes), and she was bouncy and bubbly and continually smiling – just the personality I tried to emulate even as those preteen hormones kicked in and made things crazy. We were late bloomers, Donna and I, two “cute” girls (as everyone told us) making our way down the junior high halls full of beautiful women with increasing cup sizes and monthly miseries that we had yet to encounter.

Many weekends we had sleepovers, just the two of us. We would sit on the bed, well into the night, talking about boys and our dreams (usually our dreams were connected to boys), what we would do in a few years when we would be able to drive, how to handle the teachers we didn’t like, and how we wanted to be just like the teachers we loved. We pretended to do each other’s hair – my long, too thick mop of frizz and Donna’s short, soft curls. We wrote poetry together. We wrote poetry apart and critiqued each other.

We giggled.

Boy, did we giggle. Everything was so funny back then in the middle of the night. I know our parents regretted agreeing to the overnight arrangements when that giggling started.

We giggled during the day, too. We were twelve-year-old soulmates excited about our futures. We talked often about high school and beyond; we planned our weddings. We were inseparable.

Until we weren’t.

It all started in an exciting way: a snow day! We were at school that day when it started coming down. We didn’t have warnings back then, no Doppler radar to alert us…which made snow unexpected and much more fun! Donna’s mother was the guidance counselor at our junior high, and Donna asked her if I would be able to go home with them if school was released early. It was! So off we went.

We were literally squealing in the car as it was sliding all over the road, Donna’s mom trying to keep us out of the ditch. Once we got to her house, we started digging through all the cold weather gear – coats, scarves, and gloves – eventually, we found enough for both of us. So out we went to a nearby hill where there was an afternoon full of sledding and hot chocolate. And most importantly, there was a boy.

A boy. One of Donna’s neighbors, who I had seen at school but didn’t know well, was there, and it was love-at-first-crash into a snow bank on his sled. Donna and I did other things that day – we walked to a nearby country store for a snack, we hiked through the snowy woods – but it was meeting him that really stuck with me after I left and went home.

I carefully crafted a letter to him; it was more sophisticated than “Do you like me? Yes/No/Maybe” (but not much). When we got back to school, I asked Donna to deliver it for me. I waited anxiously.

She returned to tell me, in the spirit of honesty that she always embodied, that when she delivered the letter, he told her he liked HER, not me. She thought she may give this junior high relationship thing a try.

As today’s adolescents would say, “I flipped.” I flipped. I felt betrayed, a feeling I had never encountered to that point. I took her school picture out of my wallet, ripped it in half, and threw it at her. I stomped away, determined to never speak to her again. And truly, we didn’t speak for awhile. The coldness between us lasted longer than her young relationship with him. I found some other friends; she found some other friends. There were no more sleepovers, no more dream discussions, no more giggles.

A few years later, when we were in high school, I heard she was in the hospital. I decided it was time to put childish things aside, and I went to visit her. Fluid on her knee, she said. She was there to get it drained. We weren’t as comfortable with each other, but there were glimmers of the old “us” in that hospital room. I left thinking maybe we could be close again and that I would work on that when she got home.

But as it turned out, that fluid led to a devastating diagnosis: bone cancer. Donna would endure a leg amputation and more misery than I can imagine. A poem she wrote during that time held a line I have long remembered: “I just can’t beat this thing.”

And she didn’t.

I sat at her funeral choking on regret. I silently talked to her, telling her I was sorry our friendship had ended over a boy. A BOY. It was unfathomable. I grieved for the senior year she would never have. I felt guilty over the future I had that was taken away from her.

I think of her every September when our birthdays come and go. I’ve thought of her on every early-release-from-school snow day since 1974.

And I think of her every time my students get in silly fights over nothing. When they cry and cry and write nasty notes to each other and when they say, “She used to be my best friend,” I say, “Sit down. Let me tell you about a friendship I threw away.”

Sometimes I dream about my friend. We’re bridesmaids in each other’s weddings, we’re there when our babies are born, we’re middle-aged and shopping at the mall for our grandchildren.

And then I wake up.