Spring 1993

We were sitting in the front seat of my dad's pickup truck, just the two of us. We were waiting for my dad to finish saying goodbye to my roommate and my girlfriend. Suddenly she turned to me and said, "You know, I really do love you."

I looked at her and smiled, confused, and said, "that's cool." Why now? Why right before a long drive together? Why not six months before, or any other point at the time we'd known each other? Why, when it was too late to matter anymore? Why, when I'd never see her again?

She and I had first met because I'd thought she was cute and had ingratiated myself to her and her two crazy friends. We'd bonded over a long Columbus Day weekend watching a Ren & Stimpy marathon on Nickolodeon. We'd cemented our new friendship when my roommate had broken her external window over my head during a silly prank and had then had to come up with a plausible lie to tell the RA. Over time, it became less me hanging out with the girls and more just me hanging out with just her.

We'd sit in her dorm room until late at night, talking about her life back in Hawaii, about the tension between all the ethnic groups in her high school, about my own weird high school experience, about the boyfriend she hadn't seen for over six months. About growing up in Anaconda, Montana before her father moved the family to Hawaii — a place famous for its unreasonably tall smokestack and not much else.

Boys loved her. On any given night when we were hanging out, two or three guys would stop by to say hello and flirt. Sometimes we'd all go out for walks together, and she'd grab her two other friends and we'd walk around in the cool Missoula darkness, talking about nothing important. The girls could fill an entire evening complaining about how boring Missoula was compared to Honolulu or Boulder, although the third girl, who'd grown up in Kalispell, didn't have much to add. She was sad by nature, and probably figured that Missoula was a much more exciting place than Kalispell, even though she missed it.

Other times, guys would stop by and find her and I in the middle of a wrestling match or tickle fight. She trusted me, because I never hassled her about her boyfriend. Everyone else did, but I didn't really see the point. Trying to talk someone out of that kind of devotion seemed like a lose-lose situation designed to make her feel bad and make me look bad.

After a while I was just one of the girls, with the four of us getting together to listen to Catherine Wheel and watch Peter Murphy videos and gossip. I knew I was there on sufference, but I was also on good terms with them all, and it wasn't until late that fall that cracks started to develop. I still don't know what happened, but it felt like it wasn't just me and the group, but the three of them also getting a little worn out after dealing with a lot of each other's sassiness and snark. You can only live in a sitcom for so long before reality starts to set in.

A friend of mine came to visit from out of town at the end of the semester. I was getting a cold, and was about to spectacularly fail another set of finals, but as usual, I really didn't care, because my friend was in town and we had some serious catching up to do. I was excited to introduce him to the girls, which happened at the big end-of-the-semester dinner at the cafeteria. The cafeteria food was mostly indifferent, but they made up for it at the end of the semester by laying out a huge "holiday dinner" with several different kinds of dessert. We all loaded up, of course, and somehow, I don't know how, really, she dared my friend to put his finger in her pie. My friend being my friend, he did, and suddenly there was a subtle tension in the air that hadn't been there before. He gave her a feral, challenging grin, she just stared back. She never had much to say about my friend, except that he was a little weird.

When we all got back from winter break, things weren't the same anymore, and I started spending more time with a different group of friends. One of them had gotten a new roommate who had impressed me with her tall, pale, surliness, and she and I had begun to do a little dance that very rapidly got out of control and turned into something else altogether. Before I really knew what was happening, I had a serious girlfriend, who unfortunately was kind of jealous. She was especially jealous of my friend, who I didn't see much as a result. I was sad, but we'd already started to drift apart.

Then came the end of the year, and my dad came to pick me up, and we all got lunch together, and then it was just the two of us sitting in the truck. She'd transferred to the University of Hawaii to be closer to her boyfriend and her family, and her sister, who lived in Eugene, was going to pick her up at my family's house that evening. She'd probably never be back to the University again. I didn't know what she meant. I still don't.