Happy, shiny people laughing..

Middle school was easily one of the best times of my life. I had the best friends, I had cute boyfriends, and my grades were good. Everyone knew who I was, and I loved every second of it.

You can imagine that when my mother told me that we were moving away, I was slightly upset.

(Maybe slightly upset is an understatement. I think that I wished death upon my mother, and then I ran out of the house and far, far away. To my friend's house, down the street. There may have even been some swearing!)

We'll come back to this.

As you may or may not have read previously, I am a survivor of Catholic school. I attended St. Charles School through the fifth grade, and when my parents told me that I would be transferring to the Dr. Daniel L. Joyce Middle School, I couldn't have been happier. However, public school was not immediately everything I imagined it would be.

First of all, I had no friends. Really, seriously, I was "the new girl", and it was terrifying. Over time though, people started to warm up to me. I had no sense of style, because I'd been wearing a uniform to school for my whole life. I didn't understand hot lunch, and I didn't know that school dances could actually be fun. It was a new world for me, but eventually I found some people to help me start learning about it.

Sixth grade came and went, and by the time seventh grade arrived, I might as well have been famous. My friends and I were inseparable - and that's saying a lot, because there were approximately eight thousand of us. If you'd asked me who my best friend was then, the answer would have changed by the minute. I was starting to go out and do things outside of school, and it was the best beginning to a social life I could ever have imagined.

In the seventh grade, I learned about mitosis (Mitosis, Mitosis, the division of a cell. Mitosis, Mitosis, cells do it very well), I voted for the new color of M&M (I voted for pink, because blue is not a naturally occurring food color), and I took a typing class. On a typewriter. I sang in the choir, I took my first year of French, I threw palettes loaded with acrylic paint out the windows of the art room while the teacher wasn't looking. Things were going wonderfully, and my friendships were growing stronger by the second.

Eighth grade though. Eighth grade was the year to end all years. I know that a lot of people think that their childhood was the best childhood - but really, the year that I was thirteen was the best year of my life. If I'd thought that my friends and I were inseparable in the seventh grade, then in the eighth grade we must have been surgically attached. Literally, offhand, I can think of at least ten of us that were always together. We went to the movies. We went to dances. We went to the mall. We went to each others' houses. We lived and breathed each other, and it was perfect. When we weren't together, we were on the phone. "I have to hang up with you to call this other one, but don't worry, you can call a different one, and then later that one can call me." Getting rides from our parents was never an issue, because we just walked everywhere. I had calloused feet by the end of that school year, because I so rarely wore shoes while I walked the streets of the city. We had parties at every opportunity, but they were the most well-behaved parties. We were loud and we were rowdy, and we laughed and we screamed, but we did it all while drinking soda and eating chips. We wrote notes and we told stories and we all dated each other, and then we all broke up and dated someone new, but we were all still best friends through it all. The idea of life being any better was unimaginable, and it was the clearest fact in my mind that we would all be together until the end of time.

Until one day, I went home, and my mother said:

"We're moving to New Hampshire."

Without a doubt, I felt my heart - my physical, beating, blood-pumping heart - break in half at that moment. I begged and I pleaded. I cried and I screamed. When none of that worked, I swore - and I left.

I didn't go far, really. One of my beloved crewmembers lived within walking distance, and I ended up at her house, sobbing and sharing the terrible news. She cried with me, and we tried to decide how we could make it work so that I could live with her through high school. Eventually, we realized that it wouldn't work that way, and I went home.

My mother hadn't come after me. She knew where I was going, and she knew that I needed time. When I got home, we talked things over, and I eventually came to accept that - whether I was happy about it or not - I would have to move.

And so, I did the only thing I could think of. I threw a raging party.

My friends came to my house that day and they were wonderful. We laughed, and I cried, and there were hugs and pictures and presents and love. I realized how lucky I was to have all of those people in my life, and I felt warmer in my heart than I ever have felt before. We all promised to stay in touch, and then the party ended, and with it went the best days of my childhood.

It's been nearly fifteen years since that day, and it still amazes me to realize that it's ended. I kept in touch with most of those people for a while, but now I only speak to a few, and even that is rare. We've all grown up. We have careers, we have lives. Some of them are married, some of them have children. Some of us have moved, some are still where we were when it all happened. One of us has died, and he will be forever missed. The world is turning, and the days keep going, and life keeps moving, and we are all what we are, and that is amazing. And though I miss these people every day, I realize that it is because of them that I am who I am today - a smart, goofy girl who isn't a girl anymore, but a woman. A woman with the utmost respect for her friends, because sometimes you never know.

Today could be the best day of your life.