Together, Laura and I stepped through the looking glass of childhood straight into the rabbit hole of adolescence. We were more than simply best friends. We were Siamese spirits, conjoined souls, sharing our hopes and fears and birthday candle wishes, finishing each other’s sentences, chasing our dreams like fireflies around the banks and bends of our small, river town. Even our names were linked. When people spoke of us, when they spoke to us, one name followed the other without pause or breath in between. KimandLaura, LauraandKim.

We met at Colleen Malloy’s eleventh birthday party. When I reach back and search those long ago memories, the ones buried deep below first crushes and first kisses, beneath other highlights and lowlights of growing up, I can’t remember Laura before the moment I met her. Though we went to the same school, though we must have had friends in common, I can’t place her. In my memory it’s as if she simply appears at my side, an extension of myself; a best friend sprung fully formed from the surf. Venus rising from the school yard asphalt.

Almost overnight we became inseparable, gluing ourselves to one another in the intense way of eleven year old girls. Middle school was looming, it’s sombre, flat brick presence tinting everything around us with a little more importance. We clung to each other, making blood sister promises to stick together in new and uncharted territory. We would be the Lewis and Clark of Wampuset Middle School, blazing a trail, pushing ahead.

We forged through those middle school years, leaving behind bits and pieces of our grade school selves. We learned how to slow dance with boys, our hands on their shoulders, theirs hooked just above our tailbones. We learned the rituals of lunchtime, how to save a seat, which hot lunches to avoid. We dodged spitballs, slicked our lips with Bonne Belle, feathered our hair in pink and white tiled bathrooms. We suffered through the embarrassment of Health Ed., the horrors of gym class, the confusion of an expanding universe of emotions and hormones. Side by side it seemed, if not easy, then at least bearable.

On weekends, free from homework and history lessons, we rode our bikes, bumping roughshod through the woods that separated our houses. The beginning trickle of the Shawmut River meandered through our town, its one and only claim to fame, and the concrete bridge that spanned the narrow flow became our meeting point. A forever friend HQ, complete with its own code. Two rings of the telephone meant ‘meet me at the bridge’.

On damp, summer nights we sat watching a cloudless sky for shooting stars, lying back on the prickly grass of the river bank until we couldn’t take the mosquitoes any more. The bridge is where Laura told me about her father, about how he passed out on the sofa, empty beer bottles littering the house. It is where I told her my parents were getting a divorce. It is where we confessed and wondered and cried and laughed. It’s where we made secret pacts and whispered wishes in the dark. It is where we wrote our loves and desires and dreams on scraps of notebook paper, releasing them into the wind to be carried away by the slow moving water, away from us, toward something bigger, something better.

As teenagers we felt hemmed in by borders and boredom, the small mindedness of small town life. We fantasized of leaving it all in our wake. We would follow the river toward those city lights, rent an apartment, go to college, get jobs. I would write for a newspaper. Laura would open a boutique. Our husbands would be best friends and we’d all live together in a giant town house. It never occurred to us to look for a fault line in the landscape of our dreams. It never occurred to us that what you wish for doesn’t always come true. 

All those paper secrets fluttering in the wind. All those wished upon stars. All the birthday candles and pennies and coins in the fountain. So very many wishes.

In high school Laura chose French and I chose Spanish. I joined the school newspaper and Laura took design. It was the first time we had stretched the reach of our bond, tested its strength, let it out bit by bit, like kite string from a spool, but always, we came springing back to one another. But for the first time there was a breath between our names, a space. Kim and Laura. Laura and Kim. 

We caught up at lunchtime, sitting across from one another on orange button seats, stuffing our faces with greasy fries and chocolate milk, gossiping about cheerleaders and jocks: who got caught smoking behind the bleachers, who was having sex in their boyfriend’s basement. We met by the bridge, drinking wine coolers stolen from my parent’s fridge, sneaking cigarettes, always careful to roll clumps of damp grass between our fingers to mask the smell. The where, what, and who of our dreams, secret words scribbled on notebook scraps, changed as we did, fluid as the river below us, but always inclusive, always sharing some small part.

When Laura met Brad, the invisible bond between us grew taut. We let it out, gave it slack, but it began to sag under the weight of a third person. At first, Laura tried to include him. He sat with us at lunch, his arm draped possessively around Laura’s shoulder. But it wasn’t long before three became two once again, except now it was Laura and Brad, Brad and Laura. My name, like my place by Laura’s side, once so assured and expected, so assumed and taken for granted, excised in one clean slice. 

They sat by themselves. Away from me, away from everyone. There were whispers behind locker doors: they were having sex, they were smoking pot, skipping class. There were rumors that he pushed her around, roughed her up. I reached out, but she eluded. There were days she didn’t come to school at all, didn’t answer her phone, returning two days later with thicker makeup, more eyeshadow, an excuse. She avoided me, would not take my calls. At times it was like a physical absence; a missing limb, a skipped heartbeat. After a while, when the hurt gave way to anger, I simply stopped trying. My sight was blinkered, my hearing muffled by my own heartbeats and heartaches. She became a ghost in the hallways, something I would see out of the corner of my eye while I sat doodling in class. Just like that she fluttered away from me, her name caught on the wind.

The summer before our senior year I worked stamping invoices and filing carbon copies in gray, metal cabinets. There was plenty of time to think, to muse, to piece together the breadcrumbs of our story. I thought about Laura, about Brad, about all the things said and unsaid in the spaces between our names.

I swallowed my pride and called her, not long before school started. “Meet me by the bridge,” I said. She paused, a few heartbeats too long, a pause in which everything between us was balanced; past, present, and future teetering precariously in the long seconds before her ‘yes’.

We met, in the same place we had been meeting for years. Laura was there before me, hungrily smoking a cigarette, twin dragon plumes of smoke streaming from her nostrils. She had let her hair grow out. The ends were ragged and chewed, the color bleached out in chunks.

“Hey,” she said, without turning her head.

I sat down next to her and we were silent. It was dusk, a palette of colors washing through the clouds just before the sun went down. Swarms of late summer gnats hovered and hummed in front of us. For a long time we stayed quiet, simply sitting next to one another. In the dying light I could see there were fading bruises decorating her arm, ripe colors pushing up through her skin. If she saw me looking, she did nothing to hide them. 

When the sun finally set and we sat in shadow, she dug through her old, army surplus bag and pulled out a notebook and pen.

“Let’s make a wish,” she said.

I was relieved to have something solid and familiar to stand on, a known ballast to brace myself against. We took turns with the pen and wrote down our wishes on a ragged scrap. It took me a moment to think of something to scribble down, but Laura wrote quickly, without hesitation. She dug out a lighter from the pocket of her cut-offs. In the growing darkness, with a soundtrack of water flow and mosquito hum, with nothing but a crescent moon and starlight as witness, we lit our dreams on fire, offering them, like a sacrifice, to the river below. Laura held the flaming sheet aloft before she dropped it into the water, and we watched it float downward, trailing embers like a comet tail.

“Do you want to know what I wished for?” Laura asked, looking down.  

Did I? There was a time, not that long ago, when I would have known what her wish was, when there would have been no need for her to say it out loud. But now I had no idea. Were her dreams the same? Did she still want to escape the river, the town, the beer bottles strewn across the living room floor? Did she still want to move to the city to find the ending to her own story? Did she still want to open a boutique or get married or have two children or live in a townhouse, become a designer? There were so many months and days and years when I would have known, without Laura having to tell me. But now I didn’t. I had no clue. 

“I wished I could fly,” she said. “I wished I could just rise up into the sky like a phoenix, you know?” I was surprised, but I let her talk, watched her speak into the night, safe in the dark.  “Just break free of it all and rise above it. Start all over. Start again.” 

In that moment it became clear she wasn’t only talking about reaching toward a life beyond our town, at grabbing the opportunities that lay beyond that river border, but from Brad and her father and me and everyone else. From the staring eyes of friends and strangers who hastily looked away from her bruises, who were satisfied with a hasty excuse, a half hearted denial, who were relieved when she stayed at home until the worst had faded. Standing there, Laura at my side, I was ashamed to admit I had looked away too. I had seen only what I wanted to see, blinded by my own hurt. How many scraps of paper had Laura burned or sent downriver asking someone to see, to help?

It is so easy to get muddled, to get so confused by what is right and what isn’t, that we get turned around. I thought of the times I had been knocked flat by ocean waves, pulled under the surf, churned and pounded until I didn’t know which way led to the sky and which to the bottom of the sea. Life was like that sometimes, sometimes things got so murky and muddied that you couldn’t see your way out. Couldn’t tell which direction you should fly toward.

Perhaps it was the power of wishing into the night. Perhaps it was having someone pay witness, albeit silent. Perhaps the strength was within her all along, and she just needed to find it again, to dredge it up from the depths. But whatever the reason, when Laura walked away from the bridge that night, she walked away from it all.

I was only a little surprised to see her sitting across from me at lunch a few days later. She’d cut all of her hair off, shorn almost to the scalp, defying people to look away from her. Instead of looking wan and anemic as she had over the past year, her paleness was now almost ethereal. She shone, lit from her phoenix fire within. She had let a part of herself be destroyed, consumed, but a stronger part of her had risen, ready to soar above it. I could see it on her face.

When I sat down across from Laura that day, it was as if the room relaxed. Simply sitting down together, sharing limp fries and a packaged brownie, everything turned right side up. We were once again LauraandKim, KimandLaura, no breath between.

Though our dreams had grown apart, had differed and diverted, we had enough of a shared history that falling back into friendship was easy. We spoke at night on the phone. Not every night, but enough. One night I was surprised to hear the phone ring twice and then fall silent. Our old code. I was looking for an excuse to take a break from the financial aid forms I was laboring over. I grabbed my bag and walked down to the bridge. I watched the river for a few minutes before Laura arrived. We stood in companionable silence for a while, watching twigs and leaves get caught up in the eddies of swirling water below us. She produced two wine coolers from her bag and I laughed. We twisted off the tops and toasted each other. There was only another week or so of school and then summer break before we left; left the river, the town, our pasts. Our dreams had divided and forked, ready to take us down different paths, but we were happy. Laura had been accepted to a small art school in the city and I would be heading out to the middle of nowhere to study teaching. Not the same dreams we’d had as eleven year old girls, but valid and worthy all the same.

Our town would go on without us. Most of our graduating class would stay behind, happy to stay within the familiar; to marry, have children, to take over family businesses. A few students had joined the military’s ROTC plan. A few, like Laura and myself were college bound, pushing the boundaries of what was expected of us.

“One last wish?” she asked. 

I nodded.

“Forever friends,” she said simply, clinking the neck of her bottle onto mine.

“Friends forever,” I returned.

Summer came, full of parties and packing, reconciliations and break ups. Long hidden crushes were revealed, desperate last minute chances taken. Graduation was funny like that. All of a sudden you were thrust into the spotlight of grown-upness, whether you were ready or not. Laura and I made plans to meet over Thanksgiving break, it would be my first trip home from the midwest and Laura said she would take the bus from the city. In the back of my mind, the date was there, inked in my consciousness. We’d meet, down by the bridge as we always did, this time trading stories of our first few months of independence, of freedom, of flying solo.

It was a beautiful fall night, warm enough to have the windows open while I studied. I could smell the sharp scent of leaves being burned outside, hear the soft laughter of students crossing the quad drift up to my second floor room. My RA came and knocked on my door to let me know my mother was on the communal pay phone. I padded down the hall in my socks. There was music playing, I could hear it through the closed door of someone’s room. Bon Jovi. 

“Kim?” my mother said. Her voice was different. Softer, quieter. Solemn.

“Mom?” I said.

“Kim, something’s happened.”

In the end, it was ruled an accidental death. Stumbling from bar to bar on a fraternity dare, blind drunk and barely coherent, Brad had leaned on someone’s buzzer until they let him in. She was not hard to find, she was listed in the phone book, hiding from nothing. Somehow he managed to climb the endless stairs to her fifth floor walk up. Maybe she let him in, unafraid of him. Maybe he forced his way in. Maybe he was simply so drunk that he fell in. There’s no way of knowing, not now. There were broken glasses, a shattered ashtray; the result of a boy out to prove something, or perhaps one seeking redemption and forgiveness, or perhaps in the end, just drunk and off-balance.

She would have had her window wide open on that Indian summer night. I can see her sitting on the sill, smoking, exhaling into the October air, drinking in the lights of the city below. Perhaps he knocked into her, stumbling forward, or maybe he reached out for her and she recoiled. Perhaps she slipped or was pushed or one of twenty other possibilities.

For a long time I was haunted by what went through her head. Was she fearful, did she know what was happening? I calmed myself by imagining her defying gravity for a few moments, long enough to feel like she was flying, floating above the avenues, soaring above those city streets she and I had dreamed of. Free from it all for just a moment. I imagine her rising from the ashes of herself, a girl on fire, a phoenix rising from the flames. It helps, a little.

Sometimes when I return to the place we grew up people still glue us together. LauraandKim, KimandLaura. Forever friends. A ghost name, now forever attached to my own. It is something that tethers me to the ground, keeps me weighted. Somewhere just beyond, she hovers, making sure I push myself to fulfill all those dreams we sent flaming and fluttering into the river. Alone, but together.