Tara calls us collect because she doesn't have any money. Instead she has a baby and a questionable relationship with the father of said baby. Apparently that takes most of her money and doesn't leave much for a long-distance service plan. She doesn't expect us to pick up the charges, so she calls us collect, we don't accept the charges, and then tell Ashley to call her back on her cell phone with expendable minutes.
Tara and Ashley were best friends in elementary school, before they were old enough to realize that they were destined for different lives, before they could distinguish between the social and economic classes, before it mattered who went to college and who didn't finish high school. And now they are still friends, because they have always been friends, and because they have nothing in common anymore, but don't want to not be friends.
It's depressing when Tara calls, because her news is never happy. It seems like she's always trying to work things out with her boyfriend, or the baby is sick, or who knows what else. She's a sad case, and Ashley is probably the only friend she has that isn't in the same sort of situation or worse.
I have had my share of Taras in my life, though I don't communicate with any of them now. Friendships like that kinda fizzled out when I hit middle school, when the classes that the rest of society knew about all along finally hit kids. It's not that we all suddenly started discriminating that we weren't going to be friends with certain people, but that we all fell into place naturally into social groups that we would stay in through high school, maybe through life.
My Tara wasn't Tara at all, but Alisha. I spent the night a few times with Alisha, and in the course of those sleepovers, I saw an 'R'-rated movie, set a bowl of paper on fire, and almost smoked my first cigarette before I chickened out. Alisha lived with her mother and grandmother, and her mother sometimes went out at night and wasn't home the next morning when we woke up. When we ate breakfast, Alisha offered me orange juice that turned out to be Sunny Delight (Ashley says that Tara's family's orange juice was also called Sunkist). Alisha wanted to be a hippie when she grew up. Things like this struck me as odd then, but they hit me now as obvious indications that a friendship like Alisha's and mine was doomed from the start.
We stopped being close in the sixth grade, and I doubt I ever even talked to her after then. At some point, I heard that her grandmother died, or maybe it was her mother; I don't remember. I remember wondering what she was going to do.
Actually, I did talk to her once, when she was my cashier at K-Mart. She may have called me by name, but we didn't say anything besides the regular communication between a cashier and a customer. Nothing that indicated we had ever been more than strangers, that we used to go to each other's birthday parties, that we'd talked about when we would get our periods, that we had once taken a bath together.
Thinking about Alisha depresses me. She was always pretty, and she wasn't a stupid girl, but by the time she was eleven, she was already doomed to her life. I didn't do anything special but be born into a different family, with two well-adjusted parents and orange juice that came from oranges. It was only a matter of circumstance that made her who she was and is and me who I was and am.
I don't even really meet people like Alisha anymore. I work with college students, and I go to school with them. Even if I did, would I have enough in common with them to be friends? Or is that something that goes with childhood, the ability to not know any better than to make friends with the people that you simply like, no matter what kind of orange juice they drink at home?
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