A Case of Friendship Envy

The year was 1981 – my freshman year in high school. I’ll do the math – that makes me 44. The luster of high school had worn off and freshman angst was in full swing.

I was one of those Catholic schoolgirls – wait, that didn’t come out right. I was not one of “THOSE” Catholic schoolgirls. There is no such thing as junior high for us Catholics, so high school is a big transition. That transition was amplified for me because my grade school friends had scattered between public, private, girls-only and the more risky, co-ed, Catholic high schools. I had friends, but not a best friend.

As I walked the halls between Mr. Jed’s biology lab and Father Francis’ religion class, I felt a little lost. Maybe it was the ridiculous uniform skirt that mimicked an Irish kilt. If you ever need proof that the devil exists, I will show you a picture of that skirt. Only a truly demented spirit would force self-conscious teenage girls in a co-ed high school to wear a green, plaid, wrap-around skirt with a flat-paneled front and pinch pleats across the hips and butt. That is true evil.

I was never the popular girl. I was never the unpopular girl. I was never the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess, or the criminal. John Hughes did not write a role for me in the Breakfast Club. (I would however have killed at the time for the leather jacket Molly Ringwald wore and the opportunity to kiss Judd Nelson.) I was the middle-of-the-road teen. I was cute enough, got good grades, was semi-involved in extra-curriculars, had a decent circle of friends and didn’t get into too much trouble. I hugged the middle line, which is a pretty safe place to be.

But it was the pep rally that fall of my freshman year that made it clear what was I was missing. It wasn’t sports – they were never my thing. Actually, the most important aspect of pep rallies was that we got out of class for the last two mods of the day. (Mods were the invention of some Catholic school administrator who thought he was revolutionizing high school by dividing the day up into 20 minute increments called mods. Most classes were two mods or 40 minutes. Frankly, I think he came up with the concept because the term “periods” made him nervous. Needless to say, the system was never adopted anywhere outside the hallowed halls of O’Hara High School.)

As I was sitting in the stands feigning my enthusiasm for introductions of the varsity line-up, I got distracted by one of the cheerleaders, Lynn. (If you are a guy reading this, it was nothing like that. Sorry.) Lynn was one of those rare popular upperclassman who was sweet, smart and actually knew my name. As she was standing confidently in front of the entire school, I noticed that she kept looking into the stands to Haley. Haley was her best friend. They were throwing signs and looks that clearly only they understood – a raised eyebrow, a goofy expression, a flip of the hair coupled with a smirk. Periodically it would send them both into fits of laughter. It was like they had their own language. I had never seen anything like it before and to this day, I can still vividly recall their expressions.

It was one of the very few times in my life that I truly felt envious. I wanted a girlfriend like that; someone who could throw out a nonsensical phrase like “Who be these shoes?” or “Be careful in the McDonald’s drive-up on your birthday” and we’d laugh until our sides hurt; someone who could understand my stream-of-conscious way of talking; someone who’d be a forever-friend. I wanted to be like Lynn and Haley, because they had a friendship like Laverne and Shirley.