The summer was supposed to be a great one. Full of hanging out and having sleepovers with my best friends Tori and Morgan. But one weekend was all it  took to ruin the whole summer. One weekend to cause major damage to my longest friendship.
     

That weekend our church youth group was going to Springhill camp in Evart for a three day weekend. Morgan and I had been struggling with being excluded by Tori. A girl named Skye had recently just started to come to our church again after not coming for six or seven years and that’s who she wanted to hang out with instead of us. Skye was completely different, not just from Morgan and I but from Tori as well. She had periwinkle purple at the ends of her perfectly straight hair.She wore skater skirts with tops that were almost always black with a floral print, skulls, or both and she was always wearing a sweater. Not only that but she also had a taste in music foreign to us. Tori, Morgan and I had never colored any part of our hair, not being allowed to prevent offending anyone at church. We also had a style quite similar to every other girl in our church, consisting of pencil skirts with colored tops or sweaters. Plus we would never even think of listening to her kind of music. I started to doubt myself. Did Skye have something I didn’t? Did I not fit the part Tori wanted me to? Was I not ‘cool’ enough for Tori anymore? Morgan and I had so desperately been attempting to become friends with Skye so we would stop feeling so excluded. Only we hadn’t really succeeded.  So we hoped that our trip to Springhill would help.

 Morgan and I were immediately excluded the second we got on the bus. Skye and Tori were talking between themselves and to everyone but us. Sure Morgan and I could have tried to include ourselves in their conversations, except both of our passive personalities prevented that. So instead we chose to put in headphones and chat as Morgan took out and  rebraided my frizzy brown hair, hoping that things would get better.
  

The first night Morgan and I just kept our  distance to see if maybe after giving them some space they would want to talk to us. It didn’t work and by the second night Morgan and I had cried at least twice already. “I just want to be their friend,” a small whimper came from Morgan.

“But they obviously don’t want to be ours,” my voice was bitter. I was sick of crying over them. They just continued to ditch us and the say that it was our fault. They didn’t care how much they were hurting us it was all about them and I was sick of crying over them.

“Maybe if I try harder,” Morgan sounded defeated and desperate. I wanted to yell at her. If they were treating us like this now who says they are going to treat us different later. Why didn’t she understand that they didn’t want us around.
  

I couldn’t stand being in the same room as Skye after that. Just her presence annoyed me. She was stealing my best friend from birth. My thirteen year old self didn’t understand how someone could do that. As the school year started up I learned that it wasn’t Skye stealing my best friend. It was my best friend deserting me. Tori was the one pulling Skye away constantly, telling her that Morgan and I didn’t like her, which was true on my part but I had never told Tori that. I wasn’t resentful towards Skye anymore, I was irritated at Tori. I could have fought her and been rude and showed her how I felt. Instead I realized that she probably wasn’t going to change no matter what I did or said. So I let it go and tried to be the friend I wanted her to be.