When I was young, six types of sunscreen sat in the laundry room on the dusty shelf labeled Summer Things. There was the coconut-scented SPF-15 for my mom, whose skin takes on a buttery brown-sugar hue after ten minutes outside; the plain unscented cream for my father who to this day, remains morally opposed to aerosols and scented cosmetics; two different sprays and an expensive facial stick for my high-maintenance sister; none for me, as I never burn, only become more golden with pride; and finally, a single pink bottle of baby sunscreen, SPF-100, for my best friend, Sophie.
In the summers of our childhood, I would watch her smear the globs of white lotion onto her skin, careful not to miss a single spot. Her thin arms would wind around and around, rubbing it in. Finally, she’d look up at me, a sly grin spreading across her face, and we were off—sprinting to see who could get out of the heavy August heat and into the pool first. We’d swim for hours pretending we were mermaids.
“My tail is turquoise with light purple swirls and bright pink fins,” she would say.
“Okay, mine is red and orange and it’s shimmery, not like glitter, but like the inside of those shells we found at the beach last week. You know? Like the pearly ones?”
“Actually mine’s shimmery too! I just forgot to say it. And...and, mine also has gems on the fins. Like the rhinestone ones we used for the craft at my birthday party last year.”
“That’s fine, I don’t want gems on mine. You can’t swim as fast with gems.”
“Yes you can.”
“No you can’t, but let’s just play.”
“Okay, whatever.”
We’d splash and play until the sun began to sink low in the sky. Dusk would arrive, she would leave, only to be back again the very next day.
Each and every summer I preened as my skin gained its July glow, but no matter how much of the pink bottle Sophie emptied, her skin took on blotchy candy-cane shades of white and red.
When winter came around, though, her ice-queen complexion fit right in while I was left to mourn, helplessly watching the color leach from my skin. She told me it was because she was born in February during one of the worst blizzards the northeast had ever seen. In those cold snowy months, her auburn freckles stood out even more, dotted gently across her face as if expertly painted on with a tiny brush.
I remember watching her when we played in the snow. Seeing tiny crystals form on her long reddish eyelashes and waiting to see if a snowflake would ever land right on a freckle.
We’d stay outside making snow angels until the cold seeped into us and we could no longer feel our fingers and toes. It was always a silent battle of resolve—who would admit they were cold first. We’d observe each other when the other wasn’t paying attention, watch for a shiver, the telltale adjusting of a scarf, or the tucking of snow pants deeper into soggy boots.
“Are you cold?”
“No, are you?”
“No, just asking!”
“You look cold…”
“I’m not!”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Finally, one person would relent, never stating it outright, only looking up and oh-so-casually saying, “You know what I’m craving right now?”
“What?”
“Hot chocolate.”
“Ooooh that sounds really good.”
“Let’s go get some!”
“Yes!”
And off we would gratefully scamper, into the warmth of the kitchen to beg her mother to make us some. Not because we were cold. We weren’t cold.
Her mother would smile that knowing smile and turn around to get the saucepan from the cupboard. Her dad would laugh and go to the magnet-covered refrigerator to get the milk, leaving a kiss on his wife’s cheek as he passed. Then, he’d turn to us and say, “Maybe, if you’re good, I’ll even go get my secret stash of cookies,” he’d tease.
Sophie’s mom would look at him, pretending to be scandalized, “And where are you hiding these cookies?”
“A magician never reveals his tricks.”
“Dad,” my best friend would giggle, “that doesn’t even make sense.” He would just grin, with a twinkle in his eye, and turn around to leave, humming some old rock song we didn’t know.
My best friend and I would then help each other out of our bulky snow clothes, leaving them to dry in the sunroom. Shivering, we’d scamper up to the bathroom to strip off wet socks and sweaters, tug down leggings, and sit in scalding bath water until the hot chocolate was ready. She’d turn around in the tub and ask me to gently pull out the thick elastic in her hair. Once released from its tight, frozen braid, her autumn-colored hair tumbled all the way down her back. It was so long, and we were so small, that when she went to the bathroom, she had to wrap it around her hand and hold it up to keep it from falling into the toilet bowl.
My hair, cropped close to my chin, always fascinated her. Many years later, she would cut hers short like mine. She quickly decided it didn’t suit her though and tried to grow it out again. “I want it like when we were kids,” she’d tell me. But each time she tried to grow it out, she only made it a month before becoming impatient and cutting it off again.
As the years spun by, our friendship grew. We did everything together. Told each other everything. Spent hours upon hours draped across the bean bags on her bedroom floor talking. Sometimes it was about small things—like when I lost my last baby tooth, or when she realized she hadn’t actually gotten over her massive crush on the floppy-haired boy at school who didn’t even know her name. It was okay though, we’d already planned their wedding. He’d know her name by then.
Other days, it was bigger things like the growing arguments erupting in both our homes that felt too big and scary to tell anyone else about. Still other days, we grappled with what it meant to be right in the middle of growing up. She bought me my first pair of lacy Victoria Secret underwear, telling me, “It’s like having a fun little thing that no one else in the whole world knows. It makes you feel sexy.” At the time, sexy was a word that felt forbidden and exciting in my mouth, and I shoved the underwear to the bottom of my drawer where my mother would never find it. Another whisper between best friends that held us together like a little invisible string.
She was the person I called when I got my period for the first time. Though we still had the minds of children, our mothers told us we now had the bodies of women—of future mothers ourselves. At the ripe ages of twelve and thirteen life took on a new weight.
I remember everything we talked about when we were younger. Every little thing. Every big thing. One memory I often wish I didn’t have. It’s the kind of memory that feels like a tag you forget to cut out of a new shirt. It pokes and itches, and just when you’ve found a position where you don’t feel it any longer—where you can forget about it entirely—something shifts and it all comes rushing back.
The day she told me her parents were splitting up fell two weeks after she told me she thought her parents were splitting up. But now it was real, and we didn’t know what to do or whom to blame. We sat on her blue and green trundle bed, and I held her in my arms while she sobbed. We cried together. It was a long cry. After her last sniffle, she looked up at me. There was a hiccup in my heart. Her liquid green eyes were hollow. No trace left of the childish sparkle I’d always known.
That hollowness never went away. Sometimes I would catch glimpses of who she was before. Flashes between long, painful stretches of empty. Once when we jumped into the pool fully clothed the summer before high school. Another the day my grandfather died. A third after her first date. They were tiny moments, gone in a blink, when the nothingness subsided, and I saw the person my best friend used to be. I wondered if they were simply moments of distraction—moments when she forgot all that weighed her down. I wondered if the hollowness came from remembering.
The weeks that followed her parents’ announcement were agonizing. Each morning, I called and asked the same question. Are you okay? And each day brought a response just as underwhelming, Yeah, I’m okay. Some days, I’d try something different.
“It’s okay not to be okay.”
“I know.”
I wonder often, if I’d just pushed a little harder, asked a little more, if things wouldn’t have turned out like they did. My family, her other friends, they always tell me that I was, and am, a good friend. That I did all I could. But the nagging voice in my head persists: what if... what if… what if….
Though the days felt like years, the years passed like days. I often had a rushing feeling in my stomach like that time we went to the carnival together and rode the swing ride. It whips around in circles so quickly that the lights all rush together into streaks and you wonder if the world will ever stop spinning—if your legs will ever regain their steadiness. Time rushed by far too quickly for me to keep up on unsteady legs.
Two years after her parents got divorced, my best friend went away to boarding school. I didn’t see her much in those days. We’d plan the occasional weekend visit, our voices full of laughter and excitement over the phone. But when she’d knock on my door, I'd open it for a stranger. Different hair, new clothes, too much makeup or none at all, new piercings and ones from only a few months ago left to close up. Then, I’d look into her empty eyes, recognize her all over again, and hate that they were the only feature I could always pick out.
We would mirror our childhood selves, sitting cross-legged on my bed trading stories and jokes and laughs.
“Soph,” she would say, “I finally feel like I’m finding myself, ya know? Like my style and who I wanna be. I’m taking this creative writing class and I’m thinking, hey, I might wanna be a writer!” Though the styles and careers changed with the seasons, the certainty that “this is the one” never faltered.
Soon enough the weekend visits dwindled, the calls dried up, and the texts shortened, almost to nothing at all. Days continued to whirl by.
I remember the day a year later when I opened my mailbox and saw a letter addressed to me, my name and address scrawled on the envelope in her favorite blue and green gel pens. My first thought was how much I envied her handwriting. As I read the letter, tears began to collect in the corners of my eyes. The letter detailed what her hollow eyes could never tell me on their own. I threw the letter down on my bed and called her mother, the tears blurring my vision. I wanted the carnival ride to stop.
“She’s okay, Sophia, she’s getting help.”
“Do you know everything? Did she tell you everything? She wrote me a letter and I don’t want to go behind her back but—”
“Breathe sweetie, you mean about her dad in the car, and that time in the kitchen with the knife, and the roof of the apartment building in New York?”
“Um, yeah, I think that’s—yeah.”
“Yes. She told me everything, and she’s not gonna see her dad anymore. She’s also talking to her therapist.”
“Alright,” I said with a shaky inhale. “Okay.”
“Don’t worry too much sweetheart.”
“Okay.”
“I love you, and she’s really lucky to have you.”
“I love you, too.”
“Okay, bye sweetie.”
“Bye.”
I often wonder if things would have been different if I’d known what was coming. I imagine myself traveling back in time, running to embrace my younger self in this moment and tell her the things I wish I had done, though I know she did her best. Tell her not to feel guilty, though I know she still would. Tell her it would all be okay, though I still don’t know if that’s true. I’d tell her about the cuts that would stripe along Sophie’s left arm and both legs, the hospital visits, the pills, the suicide attempts, the diagnoses, the rehab facilities, the deafening silence—all of it. I often wonder if it would’ve made any difference at all.
I loved my best friend. I love my best friend. But the problem is that I love her the way many a parent loves a grown child, desperate to fix her, aching to make it all okay, and trying so hard to hold on to a version of her that only exists in pictures and memories.
I saw Sophie periodically throughout her last two years of high school. She would come over to, as she put it, “get away from my fucking family.” Sophie would knock on the door, I would open it.
She’d spend the time telling me about her newest obsession. A band, a style, a tv show. I’d ask about her latest trip to the hospital psych ward or residential program. She’d tell me how the therapists at every place suck, or how the program is just so poorly run. Eventually she’d tell me about her newest plan of escape. Anything from moving to California to become an apprentice at a tattoo parlor to re-applying to college. Her imagination always fascinated me. I’d nod along, reminding her that I’d always be there for her and that she’d have to keep in touch no matter where she went. “Of course,” she would always say, but like her eyes, her promises felt empty.
When I look back, it’s easy to pinpoint the moments where things went wrong. At the time though, they felt like nothing more than that: moments. It often makes me wonder where her path is leading. Is now another one of those moments?
The last time I saw Sophie was for her birthday a few months ago. Her hair is a medium length, falling to her shoulders. It’s a length I know well. She’ll get impatient and chop it off any day now. It’s no longer the color of autumn, but instead, just brown. She covers her freckles with makeup and has shaved off the ends of her eyebrows because she got bored.
She had told me on the phone a month before that she didn’t think she’d be alive much longer. A few weeks later, she turned nineteen. We went to an indoor skating rink to celebrate, but she only lasted a few minutes on the ice.
“I’m freezing, and I’m kinda done with this. I hate skating anyways I don’t know why the fuck I picked it.”
“Here, I’ll come with you and we can go find a warmer place to sit.”
She huffed out a breath, “Okay.”
“Okay.”
We found an open spot in the locker rooms on some red soda-sticky benches, but even though we were far from the ice, we just couldn’t manage to shake the bone-deep cold. We sat pressed against each other watching as young children stumbled over un-tied skates. Off to our left, one of the locker room showers turned on. The scalding water shrieked as it ran through the long-unused pipes. Steam puffed out through the doorway. I shivered and tried to pull her closer.