the habit of being

My best girlfriend in elementary school was a Mormon with long blonde pigtails and blue eyes. We got matching notes on our report cards saying we were great students but that we Talked Too Much. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember that having nice hair-ribbons was really important. Becky always had nice hair-ribbons. Nicer than mine. So nice no one could tell she lived in a trailer park. Not even me.

In middle school, we both played the flute. We would call each other up on the phone and practice, taking turns listening and playing into the receiver. She was better at it than I was. When we did our duets for Solo and Ensemble competition, she always played the top part while I played the bottom. At concerts, I was third chair, while she was second. (The first chair girl, Olivia, was not our friend. She was some red-haired Flute Goddess from another planet.) In the gifted program, QUEST, we wrote a paper together, about Cleopatra. We confessed to one another our fears of Being Fat And Ugly.

She gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon once, with some of the good parts hi-lighted and sticky-noted. She said I didn’t have to read it or anything, it was just something she had to do for her church, and it was because I was her friend. I didn’t think Mormons were any stranger than any other Christians, except the part about not being able to drink Coke, and I went to potluck dinners at the LDS church with her sometimes. When, around age 13, I confessed to her I was not only Not Christian, but a Wiccan high-priestess in an online coven, she was fine with it. Though I knew she was more than a little annoyed about her family’s strict rules about dating and caffeine, when Joseph Smith would later came up in our US History class, Becky was the first to raise her hand and proclaim without a shred of embarrassment that she was a Mormon and that polygamy wasn’t allowed anymore by the church’s constitution.

By freshman year in high school, I’d started wearing all black, and she’d joined the cheerleading squad. I was listening to the Sisters of Mercy, and she was listening to Celine Dion. I spent all my free time on the Internet, and I don’t know where she spent hers, because I’d pretty much stopped hanging out with her outside school altogether. We were both unpopular enough that we relied on each other to Sit With At Lunch, but whatever it was we’d had to talk about so much in elementary school, we definitely didn’t have anymore. She had a reputation at school for being stuck-up and snotty, but when it came to the downfall of our friendship, she was neither and I was both. She never cared that I was wearing fishnets and feather boas and pentagram necklaces to school, but I cared that she was doing anything but. Before long she stopped taking all honors courses and traded in band for chorus, and we barely communicated except to write long notes in one another’s yearbooks come May.

I formed much stronger friendships in the latter years of high school, but Becky and I still hugged and cried at graduation. I went off to New York, while she, despite her Dream of Becoming a Broadway Singer, stayed in Statesboro and enrolled at the local school as a music major. We never spoke again.

Last night I Googled her name and found her email address. She wrote back immediately. It turns out that she hated being a voice major, just graduated with a degree in Computer Science, is dating a professional poker player, and will be moving to Las Vegas in a month. I asked her how long her hair is now, and I really, honest to God, am dying to know.