Out grocery shopping the other day, I was making my way across the sidewalk, seeing the world pass around me but not really registering – lost in a vortex of empty white thought. Suddenly there’s a voice in front of me, questioning at first, then getting louder and more insistent. It takes me a second or two to realise it’s my own name that the voice is calling, the voice belonging to none other but my friend Stephanie. She’s got another girl with her, someone new at school this year who I don’t really know. They’re both dressed in slinky black outfits, with glossy watermelon lips and darkly outlined eyes. Heading out clubbing. It shocked me at first, and I didn’t recognise Stephanie because I’d never seen her quite so dolled up before. Hey there, I say, at a loss for suitable words. Haven’t seen you around here for ages.

She haws and hems for a bit, giggles nervously, and finally gives me some sort of broken, distant-sounding answer. We have a mini-conversation, neither of us having anything meaningful to say to each other. I wonder to myself – has our friendship always been so awkward? I’m just um, well, walking this way, she tells me. And she has to keep walking, her new friend butts in, we’re ten minutes late. With that, she drags Stephanie off and they yell a hurried goodbye over their shoulders. I wave back with a non-judgemental grin on my face and return to my own journey, stunned.

My mind reels. Was that really Stephanie? The Stephanie I met on the first day of secondary school so many years ago, all bouncy hair and overbite grin?

I think it’s time for a sojourn down Memory Lane…

It was a balmy day in the summer of nineteen ninety- okay, never mind what year it was. (Perhaps it wasn’t even a year in the nineties…) It was a balmy summer day a week before the start of the new school year. Orientation day, for us littlies and newbies to the high school system. The hallway was already bubbling over with girls who had known each other from primary school, eagerly catching up on all that had happened over the holidays. Being the only one from my old primary and stepping into a great wide unknown, I entered the school hall of the next six years of my life with trepidation. In my mind it had already grown to a hulking monolith, ready to swallow up all the loners and stragglers not wise enough to band together.

Finding a seat in the fast-filling auditorium was proving to be no easy task. Originally my plan was to be all antisocial and to take the seat at the end of a row with a gap between the nearest person and myself – so as to act as a barrier against awkward conversations of any kind. Alas, there were plenty of girls who shared my idea and plenty more who decided to be friendly and had filled up the whole row. Plan A, scrapped. My next plan of action was to find a happy-looking sort of girl and plonk myself down next to her. Failing that, I could always spend the whole morning staring at the head of the person in front of me.

I edged myself gingerly into a seat, then took a deep breath and turned around to face the person sitting next to me. And there she was, my new best friend. Stephanie. We introduced ourselves and shook hands with each other. A getting-to-know-you conversation – hobbies, star signs, countries of origin. We hit it off immediately. By chance out of the 200-odd people in our year level, we got sorted into the same class. I remember our first actual day of school, how I stepped into our deathly silent classroom seven minutes late, after catching the train that didn’t deliver me to school at the time I thought it would. The teacher shot me a disapproving glare as I slipped meekly into a chair at the corner of the room. I scanned the unfamiliar faces for the one I recognized – Stephanie. When I caught her eye she smiled and gave a little wave back. I felt a lot better about being late.

I got to know Stephanie over the years for the person she was. The smiling, bumbling, endearingly clumsy Steph with the habit of walking into closed doors. The Steph who was great to have hours-long conversations with over the phone, leaving my parents fuming when the bill came in. The Steph with her obsession with horror novels and Deltora Quest. ‘Honorary blonde’ Steph, as described one memorable time by a basketball coach. Innocent bubbly Steph, never one of those air-headed boy-crazy bimbos who dominated our school. Sure she wasn’t the brightest thing around, but we loved her all the more for it.

What went wrong? When did we lose her? I think it might have been the beginning of Year Eight, where she ended up in a class with the ‘Asian pride’ people, the Natalies and Jennys. To be honest though, she had already started to drift away before then. Being put in a class away from the rest of us was what really finished her off. We can put all the blame on Lydia, the new girl in Year Eight who came from a school with a reputation for sluts and sordid stories. I guess we can accredit her with the dubious honour of being the one to turn the ‘Asian pride’ group into what it is today. But I know it wasn’t just Lydia, it was a whole lot of things that resulted in our sweet, innocent Steph morphing into one of those girls we try to steer clear of.

Perhaps I’m being a hypocrite here. Again. After all, I myself would feel totally comfortable wearing a black slinky outfit and have been known to wear them on several different occasions. I am very obviously interested in guys. I wear eyeliner and eye shadow and lip gloss too, although not the dark and heavy stuff that Steph had on. But that could all come down to technique and not yet mastering the art of applying subtle eyeliner if I do say so myself. I guess I’ve always been girlier than I thought. But Steph? Steph was never like that in the past. Steph wasn’t into that stuff until she got in with the ‘Asian pride’ group. Maybe I’m being selfish, wanting all my friends to never change. Maybe it was inevitable anyway, the interest in guys and makeup. Puberty, they call it. Perhaps if she’d stayed with our group I wouldn’t have minded so much. But the thing is Steph hasn’t, and she’s becoming one of THOSE people. And frankly, it sucks.

One day, after all the initial craziness and hormones have taken their toll, I hope Steph can still hold some semblance to the girl who became my best friend. I know she still has that girl in her, buried somewhere underneath the makeup and shallow laughs. I see it sometimes, when she’s not around her new group of friends and trying so hard to be one of them. I just hope it’s not too late, that she’s not too far-gone to be rescued from the ‘other side’. I hope we still have a chance to find her again, our sweet, bumbling Steph.

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