Seventh grade was a very memorable time in my life. I was going into a new school with all new people. I'll admit, I was extremely excited because I'd always been boy-crazy and I was looking forward to meeting new ones, opposed to the boys I knew for almost half my life. I was happy with the friends I had, and I didn’t think I would like meeting new girls very much, since I never really got along with girls unless I knew them well. I never would have imagined that the best friend that I could ever ask for was waiting for me this year, and it took me until our friendship was over to understand how greatly she impacted my life.

It all started at one of our monthly dances; I was gawking over the boy I was interested in that month, and I made sure to do my hair and perfect my makeup so he would finally notice me. We were friends and he was flirtatious, but I wasn’t sure what that really meant, because every boy was a flirt. I had gone to the dance with two of my new friends, Jenny and Ella. We weren’t exactly close, but I thought that hanging out with some new people might be worth a shot, since my old friends weren’t talking to me as much. Ella was in a corner of the lunchroom gossiping with some of her other friends, and Jenny was dancing with the guy she was absolutely head-over-heels for. I wasn’t really in the mood to dance at the moment, so I sat down in one of the chairs next to the dancefloor.

As I scanned the room, I noticed the boy I liked. He looked at me and I waved, but he was with a couple other girls, talking to them and laughing with them. He barely even noticed I was there, which made me furious. I immediately felt a sting of embarrassment and rushed into the bathroom. I slammed one of the stall doors behind me and I began to cry. A minute went by, and I was still sobbing. Suddenly, I heard the door to the bathroom open, and someone called my name. It was Jenny’s voice.

“Phoebe, are you okay? I’m worried about you. I saw you run into the bathroom, you looked like you were really upset. Is this about Harry? Please open the door.”

“Go away,” I said angrily, “weren’t you dancing with David? You have someone, and what about me? Why do you care?”

“I care because you’re my friend,” Jenny started, “David is just a boy, and boys don’t mean anything compared to friends. I came in because I know you’re upset. I just want you to be okay.” I was touched by what she had just said, and I hoped the stall door to Jenny’s vibrant face. She had on black eyeliner that made her look like a raccoon, and the blond streaks in her dark brown hair made her look somewhat like a skunk, but she was still extremely pretty. On the other hand, my face was dripping with mascara and my eyes were bloodshot; I looked like I was hit by a bus.
Jenny rubbed the mascara off from under my eyes and Jack me in for a hug. I couldn’t believe that she would rather be in the bathroom consoling a girl she was barely even friends with than dancing with the guy of her dreams. This was how my friendship with Jenny really started.
After a couple months, we were inseparable. We were attached to the hip, and you never saw one of us without the other being there. Every student and teacher at our school knew it. For a while, everything seemed to be going perfectly. We acted so funny and stupid together and we never judged each other, but we could also be serious sometimes, too. Sometimes when we were having a sleepover, we’d get on top of her roof and stare up at the stars and just talk for hours. I still missed my old friends a lot, though, since they had stopped talking to me completely for reasons I wasn’t aware of.

To top our whole friendship off, Jenny was just as boy-crazy as me. That was all we’d ever want to talk about, really. I always had a boy on my arm, but for some reason, she didn’t, which is where our first problems arose. Some boys thought she was too weird for them, but of course I told them they were wrong. I always felt as if she was jealous of the fact that I always had a boyfriend but she didn’t. I couldn’t really blame her, and sometimes I felt guilty that I had better luck with boys than her.

By the time eighth grade came around, I started noticing a lot of things about our friendship that were odd, to say the least. Whoever I was friends with, she would latch onto. All of her friends were my friends before she even knew them, which bothered me a little bit. Also, I felt like she was trying to copy everything I did: the way I dressed, the way I talked, the way I laughed, the way I wrote. Everything about my identity, I felt like she was trying to take and use as her own. She would get jealous whenever I had another close friend or when I had a boyfriend, and she made it extremely obvious. But the worst part about it all what that whenever I had a boyfriend, she would constantly talk to them, try to befriend them, and flirt with them as if her life depended on it. A lot of times, the boy ended up liking her a little bit after the breakup, which frustrated me. I got so frustrated with Jenny, that sometimes I would stop talking to her completely.

During our friendship, I never told Jenny that she was doing something to make me upset because I didn’t enjoy conflict. Instead, I did the most two-faced thing a person could possibly do: I talked about her behind her back and never told her what I was feeling. I would show-off in front of her and I would make her feel so insignificant that it made her want to be more and more like me, which only made matters worse. She was enabling me to make her feel like she wasn’t good enough, and I was enabling her to copy absolutely everything I did. I knew it was a toxic relationship, and I would have done anything to get out of it. We were best friends for almost three years, and this patterned almost never changed until she met her first real boyfriend, Henrick, during freshman year.

Henrick was in my science class freshman year, and he was a good friend of mine, but I knew he wasn’t exactly a great person. I knew his reputation: he did drugs and slept with a lot of girls. Obviously I wasn’t going to judge him, because he was funny and nice and understood me. One day, Jenny and I were hanging out at her house. We were bored and had nothing to do, so I decided we should hang out with Henrick. Jenny had never met Henrick before, but he lived a few streets down from her, and I figured they could become good friends. When he came to her house, we basically just watched TV and played video games the whole time; nothing out of the ordinary. But when Henrick left, he texted me and said that he thought Jenny was really pretty. I told Jenny what he said, and she became flustered. Since Jenny never got that much attention from boys and had low self esteem, she found him very charming. I was happy for her because I knew how much that comment meant to her.

After a few weeks, Jenny and Henrick started dating, and it became very serious, dangerously fast. A couple days after they started dating, Jenny texted me and said that she had something very important to tell me and she wanted to video chat with me. When I got onto the video chat, she dropped the news onto me: she had gotten high and drunk with Henrick, and she ended up sleeping with him. I was so shocked at what she had done because it was so out of character. Jenny had barely ever had a boyfriend before, and now she was sleeping with this guy that she only knew for a couple weeks! I was upset with her, and I told her that she had made a mistake. She was still too drunk to even care, so I decided to just end the conversation.

I felt like Jenny’s premature relationship with Henrick was mostly my fault. I knew her self esteem was so low because boys never really paid attention to her before, and I should have warned her about the way Henrick treats girls. Secretly, Jenny being with Henrick was like a breath of fresh air to me. Finally, she had someone to follow around besides me. Finally, she would break away from me and create her own identity. What I didn’t realize about Jenny, though, was that she’s always had identity issues. Whoever she spent the most time with, she would devote her entire being to becoming like them.

Jenny soon became someone I felt like I didn’t know anymore. She started to not care about school as much as she used to, she started to do a lot of drugs, her relationship with Henrick was never doing well, and she became extremely depressed. I should have been there for her more than I was, but at the time the only thing I really cared about was myself. Jenny and Henrick called me non stop, asking me to be their mediator when their conflicts got complicated. I never really cared about their relationship, so most of the time I would just not answer their phone calls.

Some time around November of freshman year, Jenny and I got into a huge arguement. She found out that I’d be talking about her for over a year and she knew how selfish I was, so she’d finally had it with me. I thought we’d never be friends again. At the time, my mom was taking a turn for the worst with her lymphoma. She had cancer since I was in 4th grade, and I knew that she probably wasn’t going to be here much longer. My mom was like Jenny’s second mother because she understood her like no one else. Whenever Jenny would run away from home just to get away from it all, my mom would be there to help her through her struggles. That year, my mom died the day before New Year’s Eve. When Jenny had heard the news, she was almost as distraught as me.

I felt like the reason Jenny and I became friends again after my mom’s death was because she felt pity for me. I knew she hated me deep down, but she couldn’t help but be there for me because she was my best friend. I knew I didn’t deserve to be treated this way because I never gave her the attention she needed when she was depressed. For a few months, things went back to normal. Jenny broke up with Henrick because they were obviously not good for eachother and she decided to stay away from relationships for a while.

Sophomore year was probably one of the worst years for the both of us. Jenny got involved with a new guy, who was coincidentally also one of my friends. His name was Jack, and also did not have a good reputation. I felt happy for Jenny, though, because she told me she thought she really loved him. I didn’t really think anything would go wrong, to be completely honest.

Sophomore year was also the year that I would start my first serious relationship, and he was one of Jack’s best friends. His name was Chris. At first, being with the three of them was fun. We went on double dates occasionally, and I thought that Jack and Chris were both really great guys. As it turns out, Jack had been cheating on Jenny almost the entire time they were dating. I couldn’t believe it; I felt so bad for her. Jenny’s self esteem plummeted, and soon after, we stopped being as close. She started to act and dress like Jack’s girl-friends, and even copied the way one of them wrote, which I found really odd.

A little while after Jenny and Jack broke up was when my relationship with Chris started to turn sour. During January and February of the next year, he became very jealous and verbally abusive. The reason I had gotten together with him in the first place was because he was the first person to make me want to care about someone other than myself, and I felt like that if I left him I would never care about anyone else, which scared me. Abuse steadily escalated with Chris, and before I knew it, I had lost over 20 pounds due to stress, I could barely speak to any of my friends, and I was becoming physically and emotionally exhausted. On Halloween during junior year, I finally told Chris that we were through. Luckily for me, one of my best friends, Jacob, was there for me after the break up.

I got into my next relationship quite quickly. It was less than a month after I broke up with Chris when Jacob asked me to be his girlfriend. Jacob not only was, and still is, my best friend, but also was the therapist to help my through my emotional distress. Being with Jacob cleared my head and made me realize that I wasn’t as much of a cold-hearted person as I thought, and when I realized my potential to be a loving person, it made me miss Jenny more than anything.

In May of 2012 when I was still with Chris, I wrote a letter to Jenny about how sorry I was for treating her with such a lack of respect and care during the four years we’d known each other. I never sent it, but I always thought about what would happen or what she would say about it. On New Year’s Eve of junior year, I mustered up the courage to send her the letter. For months and months on end, I was nervous about getting the reply. Finally, 4 months after I sent Jenny the letter, I got a text message.

The text was from Jenny, and she told me that she felt bad that she hadn’t replied to my letter. She said that at first, she was taken back a bit and extremely angry because she felt like I was being judgemental in my letter, when in reality I was just trying to make her understand that her love and affection for others is a gift and to not let anyone take it away. For a couple months, she was debating whether or not to get in contact with me because of all her anger surrounding the thought of talking to me, but she felt as though I deserved a response. I told her that everything I said came from my heart, and that I regretted how I treated her because I finally realized how it feels to care for another person.

As it turned out, Jenny was doing pretty well without me. She had straightened her life out since the last time I saw her. She was hanging out with a better group of people and she decided she didn’t want to date anyone for a long time after being with Jack, which made me happy to know she’s independent enough to make that decision. She was doing a lot better in school and she had an idea of where she wanted her life to go. I talked to her for a couple weeks after our initial encounter, and suddenly I realized that her life has been substantially better without me in it.

I talked to her maybe twice a month after this realization, because not only did I feel like she was better off without me, but I also felt like I was annoying her because sometimes I didn’t know what to say. I still get the unbearable feeling of missing her as my best friend, but I also know that the things I did to her and the things I let happen to her are unforgivable. We’re friends now, I only really talk to her on holidays and special occasions because those are the days that I feel I have an excuse to talk to her. I don’t want to overstep my boundaries, even though I have such an urge to explain to her what her friendship meant to me and how it has impacted my life. I’m still trying to repair the damage that has been done to our friendship by still keeping in contact with her and letting her know that I haven’t forgotten about her. Sometimes I wish that she wanted to talk to me as much as I want to talk to her, but I know that that’s not the case, which makes my feelings that much harder to deal with.

Jenny was the best friend that anyone could possibly ask for because she was always there for me when I needed her, regardless of the situation. She would always take my side even when I was wrong. Whenever the world turned its back on me, she’d be the one to stand by me. I never had to worry about her judging me or treating me badly because she understood me. She always knew when I was upset and she always knew how to make me feel better. She’d cry with me and she’d laugh with me because my feelings were hers. We never spent a dull moment together and we knew everything about each other. Many people don’t appreciate the importance of a true friend until they’re gone, and I wish I had understood what an amazing friend I had instead of taking my friendship for granted.