Broken Friendships and a Book Review of My Other Ex

I don’t think I’ve ever been especially good at making friends. I don’t remember much about forming friendships at young ages, but I do remember painfully, shyly, and eagerly learning that in order to start one, I needed to say hello. I had one true friend before the age of six, and today, I can’t picture more than her long, dark hair, and her kindness.

Her name was Janelle, she was from London, and had an accent and a jewelry box that I admired. I can still smell her house. The morning that I went to say goodbye before she moved away, we sat on her bedroom floor, drew blood from our fingers using a safety pin, became blood sisters, and pledged to remain friends forever.

I don’t think that we ever spoke again.

In third grade, I was the new girl after my family’s move that summer. I said hello to the girl sitting next to me in homeroom, hoping to have somebody to sit next to while I ate my hopefully-not-embarrassing lunch in an unknown crowded cafeteria.

She said hello back, told me her name, and when I got home from school that day, I looked up her number, and called to ask if she wanted to play. I called her frequently, and she always said no, until the day that her mother made her say yes.

Eventually, we became loyal, secret-sharing best friends who wrote teary letters to one another when I went away to summer camp each year. Seventh grade and puberty happened, and I spent the night at her house, like I’d done so many times before. I spent many nights there, reveling in the fact that her parents had HBO and Rated R movies, until those nights became full of too much curiosity, me being uncomfortable, and unsure how to draw lines. This time, I was the one who said no, until she stopped calling and stopped saying hello to me when we passed one another in the school hallways.

Eighth grade brought new classrooms, hormones, and health class. It brought the sex ed teacher who freed me from imagined freakdom with an assurance that everybody checked out their butts in their bathroom mirrors. He talked about forming our identities, and about figuring out who we were and who we wanted to be.

He said that we chose what to wear as a way of letting others know who we were.

I passed a note to the girl sitting next to me saying “Great, I guess I’m the Little Tulip Girl now” because that day, I was wearing one of those ugly but beautiful-then 80’s Pappagallo sweaters. It had a ring of pink tulips around the neck.

She laughed, and we became inseparable. High school began, and we decorated our neighboring lockers almost identically, using plaid contact paper, alligators, mirrors, photos, and deep, meaningful quotes only gotten by 14-year-old girls.

She was there for me when I found out that the reason my mom was in the hospital wasn’t for “a needed rest,” but because of an affair with my brother’s hockey coach. She was there, discreetly giving me tampons when I was trying to construct homemade ones using toilet paper and dental floss, too embarrassed to ask my dad for the things I needed “down that aisle” while my brothers were watching.

I spent more time at her house than I did my own during high school. We went to concerts, studied together, tried out for the same sport teams, and spoke for hours, tethered to a curly-q phone cord, stretched tightly from the base in the hallway to our bedrooms, late into the night. We shared clothing, secrets, insecurities, and dreams.

Until we didn’t.

Maybe she’d always been cooler than I was. She was certainly a better athlete, and at her 16, I was still 15. She could drive. But I was allowed to date, and speak to boys on the phone without my mother listening to me awkwardly flirt from the kitchen extension the way that her mother did. For a while, maybe, we stayed mostly friends. I still spent more after-school afternoons at her house than I did my own.

I suppose that there were many words and moments that helped to break us and our friendship. The love and trust we’d once counted on had become buried between a realization at how different our home lives were. Her, learning from somebody else about the loss of my virginity, and me learning from somebody else that she’d laughed at me when I wasn’t even there to make it into a thing that was me, laughing at myself.

Maybe it broke fully the night that we’d both had too much to drink. I puked neon strawberry wine coolers onto her carpet while she had the luxury of getting sick on her more easily-cleaned pillow and sheets. I woke the next morning to an embarrassing pink carpet stain, and to her kicking me, while I tried to shield my cramping stomach and my pounding head from her blows.

I still think about her every now and again, and wonder at how, and who, she is today. I cannot say that I miss her, or her voice, or have any desire to reconnect with her. I can say though, that I’m grateful that we were there for each other, until we weren’t.

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Why am I telling you about broken friendships and so much of my past today?  You may remember me sharing a story in their first book (which is unpublished anywhere else), The Her Stories Project. I read my essay out loud, to my book club, and we cried.

Anyway, right now, I am honored to say that I’ve had the pleasure of being an early reader of Jessica and Stephanie’s newest anthology, My Other Ex.

I couldn’t put it down, you guys. I started reading it the morning that I got it, at first, a little sad that I’d not submitted a story of my own. I quickly forgot my own ego though, as I became utterly absorbed into each and every story.

I read it on the toilet. I read it while drying my hair, and I continued to read it strolling the aisles of Target while Tucker looked at toys. I read and I read, deep into the night. Stories set in childhood, in teenage years, in motherhood and beyond moved me in ways that I’d never have expected.

I fell asleep with the e-book open, my phone dying on my chest. The following morning, I filled a 90-minute car ride to an amusement park with Tucker by reading the words of My Other Ex. I cried, and I laughed, and I felt completely connected to each incredible writer. Some of them, I know, and am friends with. Others, I want to know and be friends with. Each one is talented, honest, and raw.

My Other Ex has haunted me, followed me, and made me remember moments from first and seventh and eleventh grade that I’d forgotten. It’s made me think about my own roles in friendship breakups, and the roles of one-time friends. It’s made me think about friendship in general, and the power behind the bonding of women.

Get your copy today. Just click here.

You won’t regret it, I promise.