shake it up
Jun 24th, 2008 by charlotte
i never understood how jane and i had become friends. one day we weren’t and the next day we were. every afternoon, if i didn’t have soccer and if she didn’t have dance, we would get into her camry and drive around listening to rent. sometimes we would hole up in her basement with some weed (which i would learn in college was a pretty lame interpretation of some anyway) and watch 90210 reruns. we got along in this strange way that fit and didn’t need defining.
i knew that for some reason i didn’t feel like questioning any of her absurdities. for starters, i had several of my own. and to get further into my craziness, i didn’t want to mess with a good thing while i had it. but she did things that really bugged me sometimes. like she stopped liking Blink 182 one day because they had become “too mainstream”. as if she had only liked their music because she had “discovered them” and now that everyone liked them the same CD of music had somehow changed.
or guys. she was always asking for my permission to have sex with her boyfriends. as if i was her moral compass. as if she could ever do something that would make me not want to hang out with her. i was weird, awkward, and funny looking. i didn’t get to be picky about my friends. i would always shrug and mutter the same thing, “if you want to then what’s the problem? but he should probably wear a condom.”
i wasn’t going to have sex. i hadn’t announced this, admitted it, or promised this to myself or anyone else. i just knew that for the time being i didn’t want to. i wasn’t going to wait until i got married. i just wanted to wait until it was right. and i was practically disgusted at the thought. especially with the way jane described it. it did not sound beautiful and clean like they show it in the movies. it sounded messy, sweaty, and loud. and i didn’t think that my grandpa watching me from heaven would be too happy about me engaging in that.
jane and i were just opposites in about every way. her parents were divorced, mine were married. she had a car, i shared with the two sisters who could drive. she didn’t have pets, i had two dogs. she was allowed to do whatever she wanted, i was on a little bit of a tighter leash than that. and she seemed to attract boys like a bug zapper attracts bugs, i seemed to repel them in much the same way.
so like i said, i never understood how we had become friends and i never much wanted to question it either. things have a way of unraveling when you question them. i didn’t want to find out where i would be without jane as my friend. which i learned later, but not soon enough, was a pretty dumb reason to be friends with someone.