a catfish story
but "catfish" as a noun and not a verb
How many best friends have you had in your life?
In my life, it feels like I’ve had my fair share. In grade school, it felt like an honor I awarded too easily, fewer defenses at a younger age. I’m sure I had a kindergarten best friend back in the Philippines, but then I immigrated to the States, learned English, made a new best friend.1 My first grade best friend, I got to keep through second, because our class moved up together with our teacher, but third grade brought a different class, a different teacher, a different best friend. In high school, when my first-and-second grade best friend was anointed popular by virtue of being a cheerleader, I still remembered a dumb lie she tried to sell me, in the sandbox under the magnolia tree: I had told her that I was related, by marriage, to a minor country music star, and she countered by saying Reba McIntyre was her aunt. She lost one of her front teeth flipping over her bicycle in front of that elementary school, back when we were best friends.
Sadly, none of my childhood best friendships survived to adulthood. Some bloomed for just a school year, and some withered from neglect. Some were paper flowers, faded and forgotten somewhere in my bedroom with the rose-patterned wallpaper. But I’ll tell you now, with a smile, that one made it. Once, twice, three times or more, we drifted apart, offended each other, stopped talking, held a grudge, but somehow we were able to breathe life into our friendship again as adults, less dramatic now, more forgiving.
This best friend recently had her first child. I’ve only ever had one, but as firstborn children go, I beat her to it by a long shot. It wasn’t a contest, of course, but it does remind me of when we were best friends back in the early 2000s, when she passed a milestone without me. We were high school sophomores, both in marching band, both flute players. We’d actually weathered a break already, and funny enough, it was also a result of marching band drama. Back in middle school, we had traveled with the band to a competition, held at a small amusement park a few hours away from our small town. I carpooled to school early in the morning with Monica and her mother, but as soon as we joined the rest of the group, I ran off to hang out with my best friend. I spent the entire day with a different girl and her boisterous crew that even included goth kids, an unexpected connection for me, good quiet Asian girl. To me, Monica was a Sunday friend, one I saw at our town’s one and only Catholic church, a small congregation where we were the only girls the same age. But in my mind, my best friend was Krystal, a brash girl with dark, curly hair and a high, taunting voice, a girl I would spend hours on the phone with, talking about the WWF.2 Maybe a fleeting thought for Monica flitted past early on, but by the time we were finished with our performance and were set loose upon the theme park grounds, I was all obnoxious laughter and stupid prepubescent flirtations and nausea from riding The Spider six times straight, and the whole world was me and Krystal. It wasn’t until we were in college that Monica told me how wounded she’d felt that day. I was genuinely oblivious, and only felt bad on the bus ride home, when I could still feel the woozy twists and turns of the rollercoaster in my stomach.
Back to high school, and technically a different marching band, though it was mostly the same kids we’d gone to school with for years. Only now we had acne and wild hormones and a sharper point to our flirtations. Now we were dating. Well, I wasn’t dating, unless you count Legolas as played by Orlando Bloom or Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees. I would count them, based on how many hours Monica and I logged talking about Orlando Bloom (and how many fan fictions I wrote about Mr. November, but that was my little secret). Meanwhile, the most popular girl in our grade had dumped the most popular boy in favor of an upperclassman, a senior and a twin, a Catholic boy to whose family Monica and I had once served plates of catfish and beans at Knights of Columbus fish fries.
Sophomore year, I blamed my falling out with Monica on Matt. Many years later, I’d blame another falling out on the very same Matt, but I’m jumping ahead in the story.3 Sophomore year Matt… that fucker. It makes complete sense to me now, nearly forty: he was clean-cut and blond, blue-eyed, good teeth. He wore Red Hot Chili Pepper T-shirts and deodorant. He was a nice boy. What more could a teenage girl want? To me, he was a threat, a rat with rat buddies. To me, he was stealing away my best friend, the person I went to weekend movies with, the person who always saved me a seat in the cafeteria. Never mind the fact that a mere two years before, I had ditched Monica without a second thought for a girl who, by the end of the school year, I realized I had so very little in common with that it was almost laughable to remember the intensity of our camaraderie. But sophomore year, it was me or Matt.
And my best friend chose Matt.
I would do well to remember this period in my life the next time that I watch some half-baked rom-com and think, Well, this whole thing could have been avoided by some simple communication. Because sophomore year saw very little of that. Instead it was icy silence and stubborn pride, and all through marching season, I chose to seethe alone while Monica and Matt, the golden couple of the geeks, lorded their superiority and all their rat buddies over me.
God, I was an idiot.
But I was fifteen. What the hell did I know? All I knew is that she had won: she had the boyfriend, she had the upper hand, she had new friends and I was alone. It wasn’t until the tail end of senior year that we made up, and I realized how wrong I got it.
By then I had a boyfriend of my own, and he even had a car. We were in the drive-thru of the Catfish King, an establishment I didn’t frequent because there was a different fish place closer to my house, so I was equally surprised and mortified to hear my ex-best friend’s voice through the tinny intercom. My instinct was to urge my boyfriend to drive away, to let it lie, to take us to Jack in the Box instead. “Why don’t you just talk to her?” he asked sincerely. That relationship was a verified shitshow by the end, but if there’s one thing I can give him credit for, it’s that he was astoundingly mature and supportive in that moment.4 He sat next to me in my parents’ kitchen as I nervously flipped through the phone book, dialed up Catfish King, got Monica on the line and asked her if we could meet up some time and talk. Simple communication and we were friends again, and I found out that things with Matt weren’t always wonderful, and that she’d wanted to break our silence more than once but was too proud to apologize before I did. I didn’t blame her.
High school ended, and my high school relationship did too, but I would regularly drive the thirty minutes back to our home town to go to the Olive Garden with my best friend. We would always split a slice of lemon cake.5
Maybe I missed it in Seventeen magazine, but I swear I didn’t know that you should never, ever lose yourself completely in a romantic relationship, and that perhaps then more than ever, you should take care to foster your friendships. Clearly the messages of Bend It Like Beckham and even Clueless sailed straight over my head, and every song they played on TRL was a love song. So when I was seventeen and started dating too, I confess that I ditched my best friend (a different one, because Monica and I still weren’t speaking) for my boyfriend faster than you can say Carson Daly.
I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed to admit that I let all those friendships wither and die. I’m embarrassed that I neglected the flowers because I thought that a passing cloud was the shade of a sturdy tree. I was wrong, with Monica, with LeeAnn, probably even with Krystal.
Friendships are different now in adulthood, or more accurately, in parenthood. I have friends, and I even have a best friend, but I don’t have that intense girlhood connection between two BFFs, the kind that wear matching heart-shaped necklaces sold as a pair at Claire’s. I don’t feel that with one singular person anymore, and I’m certain none of my friends feels it with me either. Nowadays, our most potent bonds seem to be with our children, and for a time, when they’re little, it’s a two-way street. But now that they’re in school and making their own best friends, those feelings are beginning to skew a little more one-sided, as our children find their own Krystals to our Monicas. Why, as women, does it feel so natural to make someone else our whole world? I wonder now if TRL should have played different songs.
I do remember that my kindergarten crush was named Xerox (and I could be misremembering but I want to say that he was the apple of more than one little girl’s eye). Filipinos have strange and funny naming conventions.
I think at that time it was still called the WWF, before they ran into legal issues with the World Wildlife Fund and had to rebrand to the WWE. That’s right: I went through an entertainment wrestling phase. Keep this between us, but I had a pet rock I called The Rock, if you can believe it, and as a good Southern girl, I also liked Stone Cold Steve Austin. I can’t explain it, other than to say I grew up in a hick town.
In retrospect, I probably won’t tell that one. That one isn’t mine to tell, other than to say: if your friend is dating a run-of-the-mill asshole (not a dangerous or violent kind), be careful about being too honest about it, lest your friend be too embarrassed to admit to you that she took him back. This seems obvious now, but back then, how was I supposed to know? I was twenty.
Maybe I’ll write about that relationship sometime. Just kidding, I’ve tried writing about it and I want to write about it but clearly the story isn’t yet ready to be told.
Until Matt: Part Two. Again, I can’t tell that story, but Matt… that fucker.
Honestly, though, I’m just kidding about the Matt censure. I can admit that I feel nothing about him, because who is he to me? No one. No, if I had to dole out all my anger on one of Monica’s exes, it would be a different and worse person, whose name I can’t even curse because I don’t know it.
So many friendships are transient and circumstantial(and that’s okay), but friendships that last for decades are both intimate and remote, firey and dependable, calm and disparate. Just special.
Your writing! It’s too good.