Friends Without Benefits

“So . . .” Sandra’s voice beside me was relaxed, almost dreamy. She resumed knitting. “Is there anything I should know?”

I shifted in my seat; “About what?”

“About your high school dynamics. Is there anyone you’re hoping will be there? Anyone to avoid? Who was prom queen and do we hate her?”

“Well, let me see . . .” I shifted again in my seat, forced myself to loosen the grip on the steering wheel, and told a little white lie, “I don’t really know.”

If I were being honest I would have said: I hope everyone is there.

“Don’t know which part?” Sandra’s head bobbed in time to the music.

“I don’t really know about the high school dynamics.” This, at least, was mostly true. I hadn’t paid much attention to popular-people dynamics during high school. But I did know that I’d been universally invisible.

In my peripheral vision I saw her head swing toward mine; she paused for a moment then said, “I call shenanigans.”

I gave her a sideways glance. “It’s true. I was kind of a—well, a loner.”

And by “loner” I really meant “mean spirited cranky-face who avoided my peers at all costs.”

“Then why do you even want to go? We could blow the whole thing off and drive to Vegas instead.”

“I did have some friends.” I tried to defend myself, my face growing hot with the now grayish lie.

I did have some friends—or, more precisely, acquaintances—in high school; but I wasn’t sure whether any of them would show up.

The truth was, I really wanted to go to my high school reunion, but I couldn’t tell Sandra why because most of my reasons were ten out of ten on the petty-insipid-twit scale.

Granted, part of me was simply curious.

However, a much bigger part of me wanted to go because I’d worked my ass off and was now a medical doctor; I wanted to lord it over all the people who were popular, beautiful, and barely knew I existed in high school. I was sure—crossing my fingers—that they were all failures of some sort. I wanted to introduce myself as Elizabeth Finney, MD—as in Medical Doctor. I practiced doing this in the mirror a few times before I’d left Chicago and felt good about my delivery.

My pretend conversation usually went something like this:

Them, surprised: “Elizabeth? Is that you?”

Me, caught off guard: “Oh—hi. Yes, it’s me Elizabeth.”

Them, amazed and in awe of my beauty: “Oh my gosh—you look totally different.”

Me, humble smile: “Hey, thanks—”

Them, interested and still dazed by my good looks: “What are you up to now? Where are you working?”

Me, politely responding with an air of modesty: “What? What do I do now? Well, I’m actually a medical doctor.”

Them, completely blown away and fumbling over their words: “Oh my god! That’s so fantastic!! That’s so impressive!!”

Me, laughing off the praise as though it makes me uncomfortable: “Oh, I don’t know about impressive, but—ha ha ha—I get by. What are you doing now?”

Them, looking actually uncomfortable and ashamed: “Oh? Me? Well . . . I pick through trash outside people’s homes looking for recycled materials to take to the dump.”

It didn’t matter if they were a materials scavenger or a train-hopping hobo, in my fantasies they were always less successful than I was.

But mostly I wanted to go to my reunion because I now had boobs. Like, a C cup on the third week of the month.

In high school I was both short and impressively scrawny. Add to that my belligerent personality, and I was a double dose of teenage girl fail. When I was fifteen most people thought I was an eleven- or twelve-year-old boy; my nickname—Skinny Finney—didn’t help matters. New kids thought Finney was my first name.

Now, I had boobs. I was enormously proud of my boobs. I’d waited so long for them. But, when they finally arrived with a vengeance after my sixteenth birthday, the summer before my senior year of high school, I was too despondent to notice or to care.

I couldn’t tell Sandra the true reasons without sounding like the raging, self-absorbed, shallow twit that I actually was at that moment.

Instead I said, “And I wasn’t really into that stuff—group activities, team sports, and popularity contests.”

“Well what stuff were you into? Living under a rock?”

“I was—” I wrinkled my nose. “I was a tomboy in high school.”

“Well no shit Sherlock. You’re still a tomboy now except that you listen to tween music and have long hair. You’re lucky you don’t need to wear makeup. But you must’ve noticed which cheerleaders were ho’s and which guys to put into your Spank Naughty and Spank Nice list.”

I rested an elbow along the door to my left and tugged at my bottom lip. If I were with Janie I wouldn’t need to explain the reason I was detached during my last two years of high school—and any Days of Their Lives drama from ten years ago. I was detached because of Garrett. Janie was the only person I knew in Chicago that was aware of my story.

Perhaps now was a solid time to test the sharing waters with Sandra.

I cleared my throat and repositioned my hands on the steering wheel; “So, there was this boy . . .”

“Okay, okay—good—good—this sounds promising.” Sandra put her knitting aside again and rubbed her hands together.

A small, saddish smile tugged one side of my mouth upward. “There was this boy, his name was Garrett and he had big brown eyes and blond hair and just the best, warmest smile. He moved to my town when I was in fifth grade, right after my mother died, and I just—I just—” I swallowed. “I just fell for him.”

“I didn’t know your mother died.”

“It happened when I was nine. Garrett really helped me through it.”

“In fifth grade?”

I nodded once. “This isn’t a happy story.”

Sandra was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke next her voice was softer. “Go on.”

I recognized it as her shrink voice, the one she used when speaking to someone upset, emotionally fragile, or with whom she was trying to reason. During one of our knit nights out on the town she used the voice to convince a hoity-toity maître d' that he, indeed, lost our reservation and that he, indeed, needed to set the thing to rights as soon as was humanly possible.

It worked.

We were impressed.

I was impressed.

She was using the voice on me now, and it was working.

“I think I fell in love with Garrett within three months of meeting him. I skipped a grade in elementary school, so he was a year older. But he was so easy to be around, made me feel good, like I was important to him—you know? So gentle and kind, sensitive. He was really there for me—you know? I just always wanted to be around him. We were childhood sweethearts, just like my parents, and were going to get married. But when he was sixteen, he . . .”

I started tugging at my bottom lip again. “We went to a party and both of us drank. He only had, like, two drinks; but, afterward, he had severe pains in his neck and sides. So his friend—uh—Nico—drove Garrett to the hospital. They discharged him almost immediately after he was admitted. I think they thought he just had too much to drink. But,” I sighed. “A few months later, at the end of summer break, he was getting sick a lot—fevers with no other accompanying symptoms, that kind of thing.”

I paused, waited for the sting of tears that previously accompanied this part of the story; but—to my surprise—I felt capable of continuing without fear of a chin wobble or voice waver.

“The doctor ran a complete blood panel, and he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He was sick our entire junior year, at first going through chemo, surgeries, then—later—just succumbing to the disease. He died in April, April thirteenth. He was stage—stage—” I cleared my throat. “It had progressed too far by the time he was diagnosed.”

I heard Sandra exhale, and I exhaled with her. We were both silent for a long while. The World’s Largest Truck Stop came and went. Miles of barren cornfields passed us by. I thought about the day Garrett died, compared and contrasted that day’s weather with the present.

At last Sandra spoke. “Well . . . that is some depressing and tragic shit, Elizabeth.” Her voice was watery.

I glanced over at her and realized that she was crying; or, rather, she was trying not to cry. My eyes widened in surprise. “Did I just make you cry?”

“No, I’m crying because we missed the World’s Largest Truck Stop—” Her voice was thick with sarcasm until she continued, “Yes, you did just make me cry.”

I felt the first tingling of tears behind my eyes, and the chin wobble I’d been expecting earlier made its appearance.

“Oh no—don’t you cry—” Her tone became authoritative, “If you cry I will be forced to beat you with my shoe and you will not like it. I’m not wearing any socks, and my feet seriously stink.”

I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh. After I told Janie about Garrett she didn’t cry, but she held me while I did. It felt good to be held. It also felt good to laugh.