When Amber and I picked the plants we'd use for our potions, we knew which ones would be best for turning the water different colors. I don't remember which plants they were anymore, but we learned quickly back then. The ones that bled the most red, though, did not grow for free behind the garages but had to come from the flower petals from the neighbors’ gardens nearby.
Eddie, the bachelor with the rock garden who lived between our houses, had many of these flowers but we had to be careful stealing from him. He was already on alert for kids pilfering from the multicolored rocks on display in front of his house. We wouldn't pick whole flowers from Eddie's garden; from his yard we snuck only petals at a time.
Amber had a magic red purse and I wanted to be just like her, so I got one, too, also red, and she helped me decide what objects could double as charmed for the kit I was assembling. No amount of wishing, of careful consideration, could put life into those objects, though, so we stuck to making potions, adopting the underused concrete steps attached to the side door of my house as our lab. We called our creations Mutagen.
Amber got me into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a franchise I was unlikely to have enjoyed on my own, by telling me about her crush on Raphael. She liked how moody he was, and how he had a red bandana which was her favorite color, although I'm not sure which favorite came first. She instructed me to choose my own favorite, a requirement now that she had confessed to hers, reminding me with a warning look that Raphael was taken. Michelangelo seemed like too much of an immature party boy and I didn't like orange. Leonardo was too serious and blue was for boys. Donatello, though, he could work.
Looking back at my friendship with Amber reveals both the desperation and unexpected intelligence of children, the former displayed by my eagerness to hang out with her, the latter expressed by my easy knowledge that she never really wanted to. I was a backup kind of friend for Amber, five years younger and definitely not up to speed with whatever one was supposed to be at her burgeoning adolescent age, which varied between ten and fourteen in the years we lived two houses away from each other. I was still a baby but I didn't fit in with them, either.
When her mom wasn't lying for her, telling me she was sick or at her aunt's house or otherwise unavailable to play, we would hole up in Amber's bedroom with the striped rainbow carpet and wooden console TV and write stories on her typewriter, and later on mine when my dad’s wife gave me her old one. We took turns, five minutes each, clicking out our TMNT fanfic before they called it fanfic, writing alternating paragraphs of the same story.
We were two single young women, roommates in New York, slaving away at our low-paid journalist jobs, when one of us would inevitably fall into the sewer by absentmindedly wandering through an open manhole cover on the way home from work. We'd be nursed back to health by Splinter and, after briefly freaking out upon waking at the sight of the fearsome creatures surrounding us, maybe have some pizza with the turtles before heading back to our apartment to tell the other about our wild adventure. The turtles would become our friends and protectors. If this sounds just like the first Ninja Turtle movie of the 1990s, that's because it was.
I was gullible and Amber was bored and vaguely diabolical and so this worked out well for her when she wanted to entertain herself, like when she nearly convinced me that dry cat food tasted just like Lucky Charms and I finally tried a piece just to shut her up and discovered what I had suspected all along, which was that she was full of shit. Like the bumper sticker on the medicine cabinet mirror over her kitchen sink, a strange architectural setup to be sure, which said:
I'd slap you but
Shit splatters
I couldn't read it correctly. The way the words were broken up into two lines threw me off, making me think it was two separate clauses where “but” was spelled incorrectly, that it was some kind of intentionally grammatically incorrect way to announce that some child was getting their poopy butt spanked. The vulgarity grossed me out but I couldn’t stop reading and rereading it every time I was in her kitchen, trying to make sense of it.
One night I slept over at her house and she showed me what she had just gotten, which was a huge stuffed animal in the shape of Raphael. Bigger than an average toddler, she could snuggle with him at night and I'm sure more, it being puberty time for her, and I was instantly jealous, pining for my own near-life-sized Donatello stuffie. She had another plan for that night, though, after sufficiently raising my envy up to eleven: we were going to write letters to our turtles.
Amber instructed me on how to write my letter and what to say to Donatello to really get his attention. She wrote hers to Raph and said it was private and I wasn't allowed to read it, so I started on my own. I don't remember what I filled the page with anymore other than the announcement that my favorite color was also purple, followed by the assurance that my affection for the color was independent of him and his bandana.
We sealed them in envelopes and the next morning, Amber got us some ziploc bags. She put her letter to Raphael in one and gave me the other.
“This way, they won't get wet when we drop them into the sewer,” she explained.
We went out her front door and into the street where the nearest sewer drain was, and I stopped.
“Are the Ninja Turtles really real?” I asked Amber, ziplocked letter dangling from my fingers. I was skeptical but really wanted to believe and fully expected her to placate me even if she knew better, but she picked the wrong words: “they're real if you believe in them.”
I was only eight, but I knew what that meant: No.
Feeling crushed by the revelation but unwilling to show my disappointment to Amber, always trying to impress her and usually winding up embarrassed by my efforts, I dropped the plastic-encased envelope into the slot, littering as romantically as I could.
I had few friends during this time, maybe one per school year, a single declared best friend in addition to my desperate attempts to be cool enough for Amber, who increasingly didn't want to spend time with me, a literal child she liked manipulating when she was bored, but she was like me and also had few other friends, both of us our own version of repellent, awkward nerd. If she or Crystal, my school best friend, couldn't play, I was on my own, my little sister not yet old enough to interest me as a playmate, she and I living almost entirely separate lives until her mid-teens.
We moved when I was nine and Amber and I predictably drifted apart aside from a couple meet-ups, her finally free of the neighbor kid incessantly knocking on the door, wanting to play. I was scared in my new house, only a mile or two away, close to the cemetery and with an unreasonably eerie basement. I was lonely, too, Crystal having moved in the middle of the school year after her mother remarried. We'd still have weekend sleepovers but I didn't have anyone left in school.
No one could compete with Crystal and Amber, the bonds I had with them, and no one liked me enough anyway, no one but the girls who I suspected had ulterior motives, who maybe just wanted to escape their own crowded or otherwise unpleasant homes for a night or as many as my mom would allow before I secretly asked her to make them leave. It didn’t yet occur to me that I had become Amber, growing tired of people I didn't much want to spend time with, who demanded too much of my time, having my mom lie for me to get rid of them so I didn’t have to do it myself.
Quinnisha caught on after several nights in a row sleeping over at my house and called me racist for it, her mother phoning mine to discuss the accusation, my mom assuring her she didn’t raise me that way and that I just got overwhelmed by her daughter's constant presence, but Quinnisha didn't buy it and she never spoke to me or asked to come over again.
I didn't make another new friend until 7th grade. Noelle was a boy-crazy nerd like me with mousy brown hair and a sarcastic attitude. She wasn't very pretty but she looked like she could be if she tried, which was how I saw myself. She was my new official best friend but it wouldn't feel the same as before, not as complete or properly bonded because she'd never sleep over, some secretive rule in her household forbidding it, and I rarely slept at hers, a large old yellow house on the corner that smelled like a premodern generation was haunting it.
Noelle mail-ordered a book we saw advertised in a teen magazine entitled “How to Get a Boyfriend,” a cheaply-printed purple paperback. She brought it over and we read it together on the mustard-colored cushions of the wicker couch in my family’s three-season porch, increasingly disappointed with the uselessly obvious and unhelpful advice. Talk to your crush! Get to know him! Be direct! Nothing about how to stop being a repellent, awkward nerd, which we both understood to be our primary roadblocks. It was a proto-Facebook scam for the nineties nerdy girls, an early lesson in not trusting claimed quick fixes for anything, especially if it made you part with your hard-earned allowance.
Noelle and I kept each other company throughout middle school, passing notes and gossip about our crushes and talking shit about the popular girls we wished we could be friends with, perhaps both understanding that we'd easily abandon the other should any of them suddenly decide to accept one of us as their own. We were like unspoken placeholders for each other, biding time until we blossomed and could go our separate ways.
Always on a quest to self-improve, we started trying to level up our appearances in any way accessible to us, starting with more fashionable clothing, which for Noelle meant girly flared pants and skirts with ribbed shirts and chunky-heeled shoes, and for me meant JNCOs and band t-shirts with Airwalks, Marilyn Manson or Alanis Morissette in my Walkman.
Noelle's new wardrobe did little for her but mine seemed to have bought me at least a little credibility with slightly cooler people, perhaps cementing for me the suspicion that adopting a more alternative persona would be an easier path to social acceptance than trying to fit into the mainstream. I had more friends now, and we were a group, a real friend group. The kind who you looked to for weekend plans and with whom you'd coordinate Halloween costumes, the people you could count on to come to your birthday parties.
I learned how much your clothing really made a difference to other people and felt perpetually like a poser, which I literally was in the way the word was used back then, with my adopted skater aesthetics and no skateboard, but worse because now I'd have to keep up the ruse and I didn't think I could.
Noelle never spoke to me again after 8th grade graduation. She was going to South, a high school clear across town, and I was going to Henry, the obvious nearby choice for us both, but she wanted a real fresh start. She informed me that she'd be buying more trendy clothes and getting a makeover and that she was going to completely reinvent herself for high school, become popular, finally get a boyfriend. I wanted the same but I didn't have it in me to reinvent myself, not entirely. She didn't answer my calls after that summer and I never saw her again, even trying to catch glimpses of her while riding my bike past her house, periodically looking her up on Facebook and Instagram over the years that followed, her unique name never yielding any results on any social media.
Amber grew into herself in the drama club at her high school and I ran into her again, after years apart, in college in 2003. I saw her name on a box in the mailroom, shocked. We exchanged notes and met up once or twice, nothing much left to talk about after mutually freaking out at the insane coincidence of us both being at the same small private art school at the same time. She was shorter than I expected as an adult, chubby, thick glasses, looked just like her mom. She was an illustration major and worked at an animal adoption center. She left me a printout of one of our TMNT stories in my school mailbox and a photo I've come to see as whatever is still inside of me, the real me, the frizzy hair and stirrup pants and big glasses and typewriter. Sitting in a dated room making my thoughts come to life on the machine I thought may as well be magic, like the purse I hopefully filled with treasures on the concrete side steps, like the ziploc bag with the letter that I knew wouldn’t ever make it to Donatello because none of it was real, not really, but it was a good send-off for the whimsical ideas of childhood, making way for the updated, only slightly more mature magical thinking and hopeful transformations of adolescence and adulthood.
This brought me back
Beautiful story!