The Profile Essay

Over the summer, my writing course gave me several prompts as fodder for short stories. This one is a profile of someone in my life that has changed me. I could have chosen anyone. At the time, I chose someone whom I hadn't spoken with in years, right up until our recent reconnect. It has been awesome to see our friendship bloom again. In fact, so much more has happened since, and now it seems unnecessary to write about it, because we're living it. 

Julie and I met in 1988 at the beginning of our freshman year in high school. This many years later, there are still so many things I don’t understand about our friendship, but of one thing I’m sure: we are in it for life.

I was in my second year at a private school for grades seven through 12. Eighth grade there had been terrible for me--I grew too fast and I was awkward looking. With my thick glasses, a very thin physique and hurtling toward six feet tall, I became the butt of most jokes. I say most, because there was only one person lower than me in the pecking order. I’ve heard that he never recovered. Back then, no one thought much about the bully. In fact, I’d venture to say their behavior was largely ignored, if not condoned. If you didn’t have the right hair, the right shoes, and a pair of socks to match every shirt, you were doomed. I was lucky to find a pair of pants that didn’t make me look as though I was waiting for a flood. One other thing about the 80s everyone should know: appearance was everything.

Determined to make a new start the next year, I’d convinced my parents to get me my first pair of contacts. When we went school shopping, I chose everything I wanted to wear very carefully. Some were just clothing patterns, which my step-mother spent the summer sewing. The first outfit I wore was a short, fitted black and white plaid skirt, with a white shirt, both of which were homemade. On my first day back to school no one sat at my table in the cafeteria before class and no one spoke to me. As it turns out, they didn’t recognize me; I was prepared to take advantage of this oversight. I sat with the new kids, and didn’t acknowledge the old kids. By the time they figured it out, it didn’t matter. I’d climbed up the ladder. A little.

When Julie walked into our homeroom on the first day of school, she immediately caught everyone’s eye. The boys turned and stared, and one in particular looked at her from a few desks away for the entire twenty-three minutes. She was wearing a matching sweater skirt and top, green and black. Her hair and makeup were done like a woman who’s been doing it for years. She wore heels. She was curvy for her age, but only looked older in body and dress. She also had an angry face. If ever you’ve heard of “bitchface,” she’s the one who first suffered of it. Basically, it means that you’re a girl whose face always looks like she’s pissed off about something, even when she’s not. Explaining this to potential dance partners at the clubs many years later was a challenge. Now it’s a thing. Go figure.

That first day at lunch, I made sure to get in line behind Julie at the soda machine. I had in my mind constructed the perfect ice breaker:

“That guy Matt was staring at you in homeroom,” I said.

“Really,” she said, turning around.

I wasn’t sure if it was disbelief or modesty. Either way, I’d hooked her. We talked all through lunch, and I learned that she had a job. I thought, “Wow, this girl has it together. I want a job, too.” She said she cleaned rooms at one of the local motels on Saturdays and Sundays. Everything she said made her seem so…adult. I learned that she had a little brother 13 years younger than her. And that she liked Def Leppard, too. I’m pretty sure toward the end of lunch I admitted that I was a nerd, and that hanging around with me wasn’t going to make her any friends, but she didn’t care.

We talked often on the phone after that, and she didn’t live far from me. I found out that her best friend Wendy was already in her 20s. Julie loved her dearly, and there were times I wondered if Julie would ever consider me as good a friend as she did Wendy. At this point, both Wendy and I have both had our fair share of ups and downs with her, and I’m pretty sure we’ve made her equally angry at different times over the course of the 20 some odd years I’ve known her.

Flashback to 1988. On my birthday—September 29th—Julie called. She invited me to go with her and her mom to see, yes, Def Leppard. I had never been to a concert and even now, I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun on my birthday. Julie and I danced and sang along, while her mom sat a few rows back and kept an eye on us. I’d look at her mom every now and then and she would laugh and make fun of the boys who were playing air guitar a few seats over from Julie and me. Julie’s mom was a rocker, too. She liked her music, though often enough Julie hated what her mother liked: Pink Floyd, The Moody Blues, Blue Oyster Cult, The Police… So much great music—and she had it all on eight track. But the one band Julie really hated that her mother liked is Rush. I loved their music, too. Julie’s mom and I planned later that she and I would go to a Rush concert together. I would do anything for that chance, even today.

For the next four years, in spite of us changing schools and my parents moving our family a town over, we were inseparable. I got a job with her at the motel and got to know Wendy, as she worked there, too. I can’t say we ever liked each other. There, Julie and I tried our first cigarettes. We met our first crushes. We drank for the first time. We also saw a lot of things young, teenage girls probably shouldn’t see. But I got to know her parents. I fought with my parents, and therefore became a fixture at Julie’s house. They fed me, they housed me, and they let me smoke cigarettes in the house. But mostly they listened to me. Especially her mother. I, in turn, would scratch her back which she loved. I learned a lot of things about Julie this way, not because her mother told me, but because I saw all of it close up and personal. Some of it wasn’t pretty.

I didn’t know that Julie’s curves were the product of a self-perceived weight problem she had in middle school. I saw pictures, and her face was chubby, but if it was baby fat before, she’d turned it into something that made her feel much more confident. Julie resented the fact that her mother had a baby so late in life, and that it interfered with Julie’s expectation that she would continue to be an only child through her teen years. The most important time of her life! She also resented me sometimes. In fact, it was she who ratted me out to her parents for smoking. What made it worse was that they didn’t much care. Her dad and I sat at the bar overlooking the open dining room and living room regularly, drinking coffee, smoking butts and talking about our lives. Julie and I fought like sisters. But she cared. She thought I threw away a perfectly good life by leaving home. My parents had money. We had a nice house. And I didn’t have a three year-old brother.

At the end of our sophomore year, Julie’s mother was diagnosed with Leukemia. I wasn’t living there at the time, and only a year passed before she died. It seemed like a day. She made it into remission for a few months, but that nasty sickness got her. I didn’t see her in the week before she died. Julie did, and she was so very angry. With me, with her mom and dad…with cancer. My father and I attended the funeral. She asked me to stand with her in the receiving line, so I did. We cried, we lamented, and sometimes we were filled with regret. Other times we joked along with her grandmother that Julie’s mom might just sit up in her coffin and flip us all off. But the same as Julie did years later when our friend Christian committed suicide, she cried for me. For the world of hurt I was experiencing. I remember her saying as she and I stood over Christian’s closed casket, “Look what you did to my friend.”

None of this is to say we didn’t have our trials and tribulations. Sometimes I’d get so wrapped up with a boy that I’d abandon her for months. Sometimes I didn’t like her boyfriends (rightfully so) so she’d disappear for a year. When we argued, it most times ended with us not speaking for long stints. But our history always brings us home. Not to her old house—it’s since been purchased by a bus company and levelled for parking. Her father started a career in drinking and hasn’t been seen for at least ten years. Her brother is a lazy, out of work couch surfer. No, home is wherever we are together.

Our most recent separation lasted five years, over something trivial. Almost a misunderstanding, but I hurt her feelings. This time was one too many times. In my defense, she is very sensitive, though you wouldn’t always see it through the anger. She doesn’t always say much, and less often tells you what she needs. I try to guess but I’m not a mind reader—man alive. At the end of the five years, I’d found that my life was missing something without her. As much as I also felt hurt by her constant judging, I thought she must have been trying to protect me. Sometimes from others, and more often than not from myself and any number of my own questionable decisions. For all of her faults, she’s never steered me wrong. Except maybe that one time when she set me up with her boyfriend’s 21 year old friend. I was 15.

This time, it’s taken several months for us to regain our faith and trust in each other. She’s had two babies, one 18 months before we reunited, and another about a month after we began talking. She let me meet them both almost immediately after we had reconnected. We laughed and I made her cry. The biggest difference between us is that I do talk about my feelings. Sometimes to the extreme. One thing she said that made me know that we are exactly in the right place at the right time, and that she truly loved who I’ve become is that she’s never felt overcome by how intensely I tackle a problem. When things get crazy, I take them on in a big way. My sister runs, and my mother and father tell me to calm down. I’ve terrified more than one potential suitor in my 39 years. But Julie isn’t like that. She takes it all in, without flinching.

I couldn’t be more proud of Julie for daring to have children later in life. Her pregnancies weren’t easy, but she took it in stride. Her kids, though, are perfect in every way. They are wonderful and smart, and they bring out the very best in their mother. I’ve never seen Julie feel so loved, and love so much in return. I’ve never seen from her the level of patience she exhibits when her children cry or whine, or when Mikey, her oldest misbehaves. He’s two now, and the thing I love to hear more than anything is his little voice saying my name. I’ve never felt so much affection for a friend’s children as I do now. I love that her heart is so full, and that every time she hugs them her face softens a little.