“I told him that I’d rather hang out with you, you’re my best friend,” I said, as we sat drinking coffee after school one day. Internally, I cringed. I’d never called us best friends. We’d both been “best friendless” for a year, but we had been becoming closer every day.

“Is that us? Are we best friends?” she said, a slight smile on her face. “It’s okay with me.”
“Well, it’s okay with me,” I said, beaming.
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I sat scrolling through my Facebook feed in the spring of 2011, clicking ‘like’ on every fan page that was suggested for me. As I added more and more pages to my account, I saw that one of my friends, a girl named Sally I knew from summer camps at our local theater had liked nearly all the same pages as me. I smiled and hit her profile to send her a message. Her profile revealed a girl, thirteen years old, with wild sandy curls and bright green eyes. I quickly wrote her a note to say how cool I thought she was and how much we had in common. I suggested we become friends. The next day, I saw she had replied, a short message that agreed with what I said, but pressed no further. I was thrilled, and considered her a new friend.

However, at this time, I had a best friend, a girl in my class named Julia. We had been friends since third grade. My elementary class was small, and we had our roles as Julia and Abby, the girls who liked to laugh and talk too much in class. After middle school though, we just weren’t supposed to be friends. Middle school in general is a bad idea, and we both had low self-esteem. We weren’t the friends we should have been to each other.

“Why do you like The Plain White Tees? They’re awful!” she said, in a snobby sort of way, after I showed her a group that I really enjoyed. “You should be listening to the Velvet Underground,”

These comments lead to the demise of our friendship, and I haven’t talked to her in over a year now.

The summer before eighth grade, I decided to do the play “Beauty and the Beast,” at our local youth theater. Sally was also cast in the show, and I decided this was the perfect opportunity to get to know her. I decided to peg her as one of my “summer friends”, but we spent an awful lot of time together. She liked all the same movies as me, all the same books, and we could easily talk for hours. She had this cool sort of confidence about music and art that I really admired. She was smart and she didn’t hide it.
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Through eighth grade, Sally and I stayed friends. We had coffee, we hung out downtown, we went to football games together and ate the awful concession stand food. We stayed this way until freshman year of high school. The first day after school she came over and we gossiped about all the new people we had met.

“That one kid I pointed out to you at lunch, he told me he was going to blow up my house in second grade,” she told me. “And it really freaked me out! I told the teachers and everything but they didn’t do anything!”
“He wasn’t actually going to blow up your house,” I reminded her.
“I was seven!”
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“Hey, we’re entering the town of Weehawken, New Jersey,” Sally announced as she looked out the bus window on our band and chorus trip to New York City. She loves New York more than anywhere in the world, and had been gazing out the window the whole bus ride down, filling me in on the route we were taking and the route we should have taken, in her professional opinion.
“Weehawken, we-rockin’,” I joked quietly.
“WEEHAWKEN, WE-ROCKIN’” Sally yelled back at me, laughing.

For the rest of the trip, we hung out in the back of the bus listening to music, (“This song changed the music industry. It actually CHANGED the music industry, Abby.”) talked about the city, and, of course, gossiped. We pulled a prank on one of our more forgetful friends, who had just bought a CD at a music store and nearly left it behind in a frozen yogurt store. We took the CD, held it in plain sight and waited until she noticed it was missing. It was one of our crueler moments, but also one of our best. We spent a record amount of time together, but I never felt myself getting sick of her at all, which, again, was not something I experienced with Julia. The bus ride back home, we both sat in a comfortable silence, listening to music, half-awake, my head comfortably rested on her shoulder.
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Sally has stood by me loyally through some of my more embarrassing phases. She is quietly supportive of me, but never hesitates to warn me if I’m about to really screw something up. She tells me when I need to rein it in.
“Stop. Abby, seriously, you are going to regret this. Would you chill out?”

We are a lot like Cher and Dionne from Clueless; Sally often has to bring my head out of the clouds and away from my crazy schemes. On the other hand, I am able to bring out a more positive side of her. We pull each other in the right direction. If we haven’t seen each other in a while, we end up talking over each other with news and gossip, chatting at over 100 miles an hour, about things that have no bearing on our lives.

“Did you hear about-”
“WAIT I have to tell you this first it’s so important.”
“No hold on I have the funniest story.”

“I can’t believe that happened! I can not believe that happened. There is no way that literally happened.”
We text each other at anytime, all the time, with any thought that floats through our head. She is as welcome in my house as I am in hers. We bicker constantly and she is the biggest backseat driver I know, but I drive her nuts with my annoying voices and impressions. She’s my gal pal.

The biggest thing Sally does that cements our friendship is that she apologizes. Recently, she was supposed to give me a gift as part of a Secret Santa but forgot. She sent me a long apology text: ‘Abby. I am sosososososo sorry. I am not worthy of you! I promise I will buy something for you soon and leave it at your door! You deserve everything!’

I never got the present.  But, I’ve never had that kind of honesty in a friend before. I’ve always had friends who selfishly defended themselves from their actions, and it was so refreshing for me to discover that someone can take responsibility. Sally makes it that much easier to forgive her.

To girls, best friendship is a sacred thing. Personally, I love the idea of it. There’s that one person, that one friend who all of your other friends know and understand is your number one, your girl, your ride or die. Sally is that person, and always will be. She has all the things I lack and more. She’s my gal pal.