If adventure was a person, it would be my best friend from early high school. Adventure would be that girl who came in late on the first day of ninth grade with water stained Ugg boots, a denim skirt and long brown hair piled up into what looked like a high ponytail mixed with a sloppy bun. Adventure would surely be she who plopped her backpack down next to the desk in front of me in geometry class and took a seat, her yellow blouse drooping slightly off of her shoulder bringing her neon-pink bra strap into plain sight.
This girl lived, spoke and breathed adventure. Adventure was what drew us together and made us practically inseparable throughout that first year of high school. I was the new girl, and she was the girl who lived on the edge of everything. On the edge of the cliques, on the edge of self-discovery. She was free to go from group to group as she pleased, and she brought with her a thirst for any kind of excitement. Her free spirit was something I had never experienced before. She had something that I wanted for myself, and it wasn’t until one specific visit together that I realized what it was.
It was the summer between freshman and sophomore year of high school, and I hadn’t seen my best friend since the last day of school in early June. Of course, we had texted, emailed and called each other’s phones constantly as the summer passed, but were not able to see each other until about the end of August. It was then that our schedules lined up and our moms said “yes” to go and visit with each other.
Not nearly soon enough, my mom pulled our car into the driveway of a small, one-story house near the end of the street in suburban Alexandria where she lived. I jumped out and we both shrieked as we ran across the front yard toward each other. Our mom’s chatted casually on the steps leading up to the front door as my best friend and I laughed and practically shouted over the top of each other about happy we were to see each other while plotting the adventures that we would go on during my overnight stay.
That evening was filled with giggling and gossip as we spilled out all of the thoughts, rumors and cute boy sightings that we had been holding confidential all summer. We listened to the newest albums of Katy Perry and Linkin Park while we dreamed about what our futures would look like, and what would happen the next year at school. We ended up falling asleep around three in the morning with the movie we had attempted to watch playing in the background.
The next morning, as we sat on her twin bed with our backs against the wall trying to think of what we would do next, she jumped up suddenly and sprinted to her dresser, dodging stray items of clothing and our plates from the last night’s snack raid on the way. I watched the TV sitting on her dresser wobbling precariously as she haphazardly pulled a drawer open and then slammed it closed seconds later. She turned around with her arms full of craft paint, her lips pursed over her braces into what I had come to know as the smile that always meant that mischief was to follow.
“Let’s paint,” she said, her eyes sparking with the crazy enthusiasm that led us down so many treacherous paths.
“Okay… paint what?” I replied, a little hesitantly.
“Everything!” She exclaimed.
As I quickly scanned over her bedroom walls plastered with massacred song lyrics, half peeled off stickers, and dozens of sharpie creations, my hesitation turned into excitement. Her parents had given her free reign over her bedroom, and she took that, along with everything else, to the extreme. We changed out of our pajamas and into old jeans and t-shirts and begun to search for the perfect space for a masterpiece.
“Oh, I know,” she whispered as she closed her bedroom door and pointed to the plain, white panels that made up the back of it.
Taken over with giddiness at the idea of doing something that I would have never been allowed to do in my own house, I found myself smearing black paint on the palm of my left hand and leaving a splotchy hand-print right at eye level against the pretty, white painted wood of her door.
“Now you’ll have my hand-print to remind you of me forever and ever,” I giggled, in slight disbelief of what I had done.
On the back of her bedroom door, we left hand-prints in pink and black paint from the floor to the top of the door frame. On her closet door, we attempted the same, but were quickly carried away by our excitement with the messy project. Instead of the splotchy, strategically placed hand-prints, we ended up smearing black paint on the entirety of the door creating something like the background of a canvas, and then used the neon bottles of paint like squirt guns against the black. Before we even had a chance to think about what we were doing, we were sitting on an old white sheet on her front lawn next to her favorite denim skirt, now speckled with paint, taking turns coating the bottoms of each other’s feet in the neon paint.
“Ready?” she asked, scooting herself around so that her feet were hanging off of the curb.
“Ready,” I replied, following her lead.
We both jumped up and walked around a bit, then danced and leaped around in the street in front of her house, leaving rainbow-like neon footprints wherever our feet made contact with the hot asphalt. We laughed so hard that we both ended up in tears with our backs in the grass of her front lawn. We laughed until we couldn’t laugh anymore, and the silence that followed as we fought to catch our breath held the moment that I realized why she and I needed to be friends; why we were so drawn to each other.
As I mentioned before, she was extreme. She would do absolutely everything she could to make sure that she was living every moment to the fullest, even if it meant that she put herself or her academic standing at risk. I, on the other hand, was terrified of stepping within ten feet of any given boundary, physical or otherwise. I was the goody-goody nobody who was afraid to branch out and even just live a little. She was the one that reached through my little bubble and pulled me out of my comfort zone.
When we became friends, I became friends with adventure. Although I feel no need to be as extreme, and I still think that boundaries are necessary in certain siuations, thanks to her, I’m not still stuck in that geometry classroom wondering what life could be, because I’m out making it what it should be.
