Always on Your Side (NaNoWriMo 2019)

23.

23

Lizzie was our neighbor when we were kids. Being a year between Brendon and I in age, she never had classes with either of us, but we carpooled to school and Catechism together. Her parents both worked during the day, so our moms didn't arrange play dates for us like some of our other early childhood friends, but it worked out; she came over to our house, or we would go over to hers if her nanny was there. All day, every day.

Lizzie had a few different nicknames - her French-speaking nanny called her Lisette, her mom called her Libby and her dad called her Liz, whereas most of the kids at school called her Lizzie. Every time a new adult met her, they would say "Elizabeth? Do you go by Elizabeth, or Liz?" And Lizzie would say, "I go by anything." Lizzie was proud of that. She liked having a different name for every friendship.

And Brendon was obsessed with her name. It got weird. He made a game out of coming up with as many nicknames for "Elizabeth" as he could. I think this is just because he liked word games - he loved that game where you have to make a bunch of words using the letters of a bigger word. He also used to collect lists of homophones, and he also loved palindromes. Eventually he came up with a list of several hundred variations of "Elizabeth" - including foreign versions and variant spellings like Lisa and Liza, Elikapeka, and Liisu. He called her a different name every day. Eventually Lizzie asked him to "stop calling her all those weird nicknames and just pick a normal nickname like everyone else." Then it became a teasing game between them, banter typical of preteens of the opposite gender when one has a probably-unrequited crush on the other. Brendon usually called our friend by her full name, but every once-in-a-while he'd blurt out a nearly-unrecognizable variant like "Zsoka" and set off a game in which Lizzie chased Brendon around trying to punch him.

I used to encourage the romance between Lizzie and Brendon, not only because it would make Brendon happy but because I wanted Lizzie for a sister-in-law. Now, I doubt the feelings were ever there on Lizzie's side. I never knew for sure, since I had promised Brendon I'd never tell Lizzie he'd told me he liked her. The promise of reciprocation would have been the only thing that could have gotten Lizzie to admit she had any crush at all. Like me, she didn't like mushy stuff; she didn't express feelings that made her vulnerable.

We were convinced we'd be friends forever. We had these grand plans to go to college together, buy houses next to each other and knock down the fences in between so our own children could see each other whenever they wanted. We started our own band (though none of us played an instrument), opened our own lemonade stand (which made twelve dollars), created our own language (with a vocabulary of twenty words) which we called "Asparagus" just because that was a word that sounded like a language name, in our logic. We had a YouTube channel at some point, too, but it got banned for copyright infringement because we uploaded a video that had "Fergalicious" as the background music.

We stopped talking at some point in middle school, when it became weird to have best friends of a different age, different gender, different grade. Adolescence cast us as wildly different types; whereas before we were "just kids" and the labels didn't matter without other kids around to enforce them, soon they came to define us. Brendon was a "nerd" or a "geek"; I was a "tomboy" or a "skater", and Lizzie was a "popular girl" or a "stoner." We stopped carpooling once Brendon started high school. We started greeting each other with only those awkward fake "white people" smiles and then averted eyes.

Len, Lizzie wrote on my backpack as I signed her yearbook on her very last day of high school last year. I know we don't really talk anymore, but I miss you and I'll never forget you. You'll always be one of my best friends. It filled me with a weird mix of gratitude and guilt. I hadn't known how badly I'd wanted that validation, to know I wasn't the only one who missed our friendship. It had seemed that everyone thought it was normal to leave childhood friends behind, or, when they became popular and you didn't, just resent them. I didn't have the courage to tell her I missed her, too, even when she'd approached me to sign her yearbook. I'd written a generic note that I hoped she had a great time in college. Lizzie grew up faster than me. She'd learned to do "mushy stuff." She'd learned to be vulnerable.

The last time I saw Lizzie was at Brendon's funeral. I didn't even bother to acknowledge her with a fake smile. She and her parents sat in a back corner. Lizzie cried by herself and I cried by myself.

I've long since lost her number, but I still have her on Facebook. I pull it up and type "Elizabeth Lankarani" into the search bar. It's time to reach out.