When I was in the third grade, my family moved from the city to the burbs. I hated it. Mostly I was just young and hated being the new kid in the class and I didn't know how to write in cursive and I had no friends. I cried a lot and questioned the authorities who said that kids have to get on a bus and go to school every day. I was ready to go on a learning strike.
When I was in the fifth grade, Adrienne was the new girl in our class, coming in part way through the year, and I felt for her because I knew what it was like and what she was going through. The following year we were in the same class and I was in the height of my "I'll do anything to get attention" stage. She really wanted to be my friend. She liked country music and so did I and we were both really embarrassed about it and didn't want anyone else to find out about our music preferences (this actually went on for years...remember how I bought the Space Jam soundtrack??), so we bonded over that. She invited me to sleep over at her house (actually she and her mom lived in an apartment and it took my overprotective dad a long time to let me stay in an apartment over night because he said that that was the place where all the criminals went when they got out of jail and they were just waiting to prey on young girls...small snapshot of my life, here). The first time I slept over, we watched
Over The Top and ate popcorn and giggled like girls in 6th grade do. Before we went to bed, she said she wanted me to hear her favorite song, which was
"Please Don't Take the Girl" by Tim McGraw (great jam). The song was so great and so twangy and I loved that I could love that song and not feel embarrassed about it with her. We put in on loop (which was amazingly, newly possible with the invention of the compact disc) and fell asleep. It was still playing in the morning when we woke up and we didn't care at all because the jam was just that good.
About a week later she was at my house to sleep over and we were laying on the living room floor. We thought it would be fun to write notes back and forth so we could share secrets, which seemed easier than speaking them out loud...or maybe just more girly, who knows. We wrote who our crushes were, who we thought were the funniest people in our class, and who we wanted to be like when we grew up. After a while she passed me a note that said "will you be my friend?" and I wrote back, "I am your friend, dork." And she wrote, "but I mean BEST friend". And I seriously had to think about it. It seemed like a really big commitment in my 11-year-old mind but I didn't think I had a different best friend so the job was open. So I wrote "sure, I'll be your best friend" and passed it over to her. She smiled and kicked her legs around in the air with a squeely sort of sound and said "great, I've never had a best friend before"...the first spoken words of our conversation that night.
For the next few years we were inseparable. She both had other friends but we mostly preferred each other. We had sleepovers constantly, shopped for and wore the same outfits as often as possible, played with her hermit crabs (and occasionally lost them in her room), listened to country music, watched every Sylvester Stallone movie we were allowed to, celebrated each other's birthdays, went trick-or-treating (with the matching costumes), and shared all of our secrets as usual. Then were also times we'd cry together because she missed her dad, or mine had yelled at me that day. One of the hermit crabs died and we buried him in her back yard, digging a hole with a kitchen spoon and crying through our eulogies. I met her mother's boyfriend, and she met my grandparents. She loved Eeyore and I sat through endless episodes of Winnie the Pooh with her. Adrienne was my favorite person on the planet for a beautiful season in time.
But puberty and middle school are serious forces when you're a tween. We were pulled to different crowds when we got to the middle school and were thrown in with new boys and new friends and new interests. We never had an argument or falling out, just sort of drifted apart. Every once in a while we'd spend some time together and I missed her terribly but knew it would never go back to the way it was with us. We were just growing up.
During high school, we'd sometimes have a class or study hall together and we'd chat and laugh and at the beginning of senior year, I could see she was in love. She was dating a guy that she adored and he seemed to be really good to her. I was happy that she was happy but we both just had our own lives going on. I have to admit though, that I was always a little jealous of her other friends, always sort of missing that fun, giggly, girly, best-friendship we had once upon a time.
Then one rainy day in October we had a half day of school and after it let out I went straight to my boyfriend's house. I remember just sitting on the couch and being lazy and capitalizing on the fact that my parents didn't know it was a half day and wouldn't be expecting me home for a while. At some point, the news came on and the reporter said that two Webster High School students had just died in a car accident. Our attention was turned to the story and as we stared at the TV, at Adrienne's and her boyfriend, Leo's pictures, I remember being in complete and utter disbelief. They had hydroplaned in the rain, the reporter said, and the car collided into a telephone pole in the front yard of a church on Hard Rd.
What?
It just did not seem possible. That was ten years ago today.
The next day at school was eerily quiet as the senior class mindlessly walked through the halls and nobody felt that they even had the right to speak. Grief counselors were on duty. I remember feeling guilty about feeling so sad. I barely even knew her, I told myself. She had so many wonderful friends who were a thousand times closer with her than I was at that time. She was just my childhood friend, it was no big deal.
We all dealt with their deaths in our own way. The next evening there were hundreds of people gathered around that telephone pole with letters and balloons and tears in their eyes. It was so surreal. I used to be a bit of a sentimental pack rat and so even by senior year I still had every note that Adrienne and I had ever written each other. I gathered every note and every picture of us, clipped her obituary, and put it all together in a shoe box, trying desperately to preserve a memory that was so dear to me.
A few days later I stood in line outside of a funeral home for hours just to get inside and pay my respects. "Please Don't Take the Girl" was playing on a loop as I looked at her beautiful face, laying inside a casket, wearing an orange turtle neck sweater, while her mommy was losing her mind two feet away.
Not one time in ten years have I driven down Hard Rd. without thinking about her. Not one time have I heard Tim McGraw (who, I am no longer embarrassed to say, is one of my most favorite singers of all time) sing any song without thinking about her. Not one time have I seen Sylvester Stallone, or a hermit crab, or the number 3, or two 10 year old giggling girls, or a pair of black converse sneakers, or passed an apartment building without thinking of her. It's not about me at all, but a beautiful piece of my childhood was in that casket that day. And ten years later...I've graduated high school, graduated college, had a deeply satisfying career, I've fallen in love, gotten married, endured tragedies, had babies, fallen in love all over again, and will probably attend my ten year high school reunion next year, and that's just not frickin fair because she never got to do any of it.
Yes, I know life is not fair. I choose to rest in the fact that my God is sovereign. But it's just difficult sometimes because although I trust Him and I truly do love trusting Him...He can be unpredictable and indiscernible. He chooses things that I would not choose. He chooses to take and end lives. A very good friend once told me at a very difficult time in my life that "God is in the habit of laying down innocent lives for a greater glory. He always has been." That was about 3 years ago and I'm still rolling that one around in my head.
All that is to say that today I'm thinking about Adrienne and all the things I'm happy she brought to my life and to so many others. She was truly a beautiful person and beauty, in fact, never dies.
