Second Star

I met Megan in the fourth grade, which is also a lie but feels like the truth to me. I suppose I merely glimpsed her then, doused in makeup and fitted into a pink nightgown, the white frills enclosing her neck and finishing out her puff sleeves. However, I don’t know that glimpse is a strong enough word for it. I experienced her, as she took to the stage as the lead character, Wendy, in Symmes Elementary’s production of Peter Pan Jr.

10-year-old me had never been to a musical before and my awe was shiny and full. The sets were glorious (hand painted cardboard), the costumes were stunning (mothers showing off their feeble sewing skills) and the acting and singing was some of the best I had ever seen (for that age, this might just be true). But what captivated me most of all was the likeness that the leading lady had for her character. Whoever was playing Wendy was absolutely killing it.

The playbill was printed on neon green paper, and I still remember cradling it in my hands as I watched the scenes shift and the characters shout and the sets flip around with speed and grace. The front featured a student drawing of Peter Pan and the lost boys, and I remember thinking I could have done a better job, which likely would not have been the case.

The back of the playbill was blank, save for the word “autographs!” printed at the top in some font that I recognized as commonly used but couldn’t remember the name. As the show progressed, I found myself enamored, a film I had so reverently watched as a kid coming to life right in front of me. Wendy’s big song, “Your mother and Mine” had always been my favorite, and it was after this number that I turned to my mother and whispered, “I want to get Wendy’s autograph.”

I did not end up doing so, for Wendy was played by a fourth grader just like me who had to go home because it was nearly her bedtime, and my mother ushered us out of the theater because I had an early swim practice the next day. But I didn’t forget about the girl who played Wendy in Symmes Elementary’s Peter Pan, and I tell this story with fondness whenever someone asks how I met my best friend. She blushes a little when I elaborate on how she stunned me, and I tease her for her theater-kid era that seemed to come to a fizzling halt in the years after. I thought of her as a celebrity, and she likes to claim that this sentiment has now become mutual. Then it is my turn to blush, and we go on to talk about when we actually became known to each other. The lights in our eyes brighten as we talk about those early days, when the atoms in our bodies swapped with one another and our auras first found themselves.

Megan is the first person I call when I find out. She picks up the phone and she is crying. She already knew. It takes me a minute to say anything.

I wonder if I even should.

Megan fit me like a glove on a stick— far too big and incongruous, and yet perched on top just the same. This isn’t a lie at all; in fact, I quite like this metaphor. Over time, I learned to grow within her, watching shy and arguably lame Deeya grow to fill the space of confident, boisterous, encapsulating Megan. We were fifth graders, sixth graders, then seventh and eighth-graders, the braces on our teeth reflecting the shine of our teenage aspirations and the number of pets we wanted when we were older. She wanted a goldfish named Fred and a golden retriever named Carol. I hadn’t quite decided yet, but I liked the idea of a kitten.

I give Megan a lot of credit for who I am as a person now, which I believe she deserves. Megan was a riot of color, reds and blues and greens following after her as she chased opportunity with the tip of her tongue stuck out in concentration. I, on the other hand, enjoyed sitting on the bench and reading a book, and while I very well could have simply done as much, I was magnetized to the true force that she was. And so I ran with her, sneakers stained by the rainbows at my feet and protective walls shattering as I learned to live outside of the corner.

She asks me if I’m okay. I think I say yes, and I think she says she doesn’t believe me. I think I then whisper no, and she cries harder on the line. The world is so, so big. I am swallowed by its vastness, and it’s the sound of her sobs that keeps my swaying body from hitting the floor.

“Deeya, are you okay? Are you going to be okay?”

I am struggling to find words. Megan is crying. Crying.

“No.” I say softly.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She sniffles. I swallow.

We listen to each other breath for a bit, hers ragged and catching, mine even and numb.

I give it a minute, and I hang up.

Megan has been my best friend since fifth grade, when my jaw quite literally dropped after discovering Wendy from Peter Pan Jr. was in my math class on the first day of middle school. This is a lie, but it makes my story a bit easier to tell. We didn’t actually become best friends until high school, but whatever we were, it was good. Math class became a game of how-do-I-become-friends-with-this-girl, which proved to be much easier than it seemed due to Megan’s desire to be friends with everyone. A trait I have since absorbed myself. Opposites attracted; we are however as inseparable as two college-goers on opposite sides of the country can be.

We drive aimlessly. Gossip unabashedly. Discuss profoundly. Laugh shamelessly. Judge slightly. Smile broadly. Love naively. Live cautiously. Dream audaciously. Share deeply.

I believe Megan and I are the way we are because of small things. I believe it’s the way I make fun of her for eating pizza with applesauce and how she talks me down from a precipice of anxiety after an exam gone wrong and how I tease her for her ugly ex-boyfriend and how she pities my dry sense of fashion and the way I yell at her as she tries to backseat drive me and the way her hair is never brushed and mine is never not and how I wear her sunglasses every time I’m in her car and she fidgets with my rings when she’s nervous and how we communicate through our eyes alone and know exactly where and when and how the other is at exactly every and hour and minute and second of the day. I believe it’s nestled in the details, each overlap catching and holding until we’re an intertwining web of each other, no one able to let go.

And we really, really don’t want to. And we really, really cannot.

Megan watches as someone’s life is cut from mine. She cries, and our threads tighten to a suffocating chokehold, blood escaping our extremities and merging between the two of us. I hold her close and swear to stay wrapped around her forever.

She tells me that it’s okay to mourn. I know it is. I tell her that I’ll break if she leaves.

She tells me she really doesn’t want to. She tells me she really can’t.

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Megan never leaves. She sits on my bed as I read this to her. She laughs at all of the funny parts. My words are rushing together and I’m only reading her the good parts because just because I always think about it doesn’t mean she has to and I think perhaps she doesn’t until I remember that one time she saw dandelions blooming in the school courtyard and touched the edge of my shoulder as if to whisper “I’m here for you” and I recall that once in a school assembly and the speaker said something and she made immediate eye-contact with me from across the gymnasium and mouthed “are you okay?” and just moments ago when I’m sitting in my room on a Zoom call and the panelist’s name is Delaney and I can feel her wariness like a prickle on my skin.

It is then that a terrifying thought crosses my mind– maybe the only reason she ever thinks about it is because I’m a walking f**king reminder. That maybe my constant black hole swallows her too.

She debunks these sentiments with a rub of my back, a surprise ice-cream date, a lets-go-for-a-drive. She sticks her head out the window. She yells over the cliffs back home. She tells me there is beauty to sadness and that it’s okay to cry and that it is also okay to laugh and smile and scream and tell the world how much fun it is to be making noise. I see the way she cradles my insecurities and tosses out my self hatred and smacks me in the face with the regret that I seem to always be wearing on my sleeve. Guilt has no place on the altar that she worships, tossed to the floor under the tapestries of memories and giggles and “do you remember when?” I see the way she paints sunshine where she walks and am inspired to live on, my dark spots swallowed by her rays of persistence.

I am working towards living like her.

Peter Pan is a story about growing up, or rather the naive concept that one shouldn’t. Wendy is enamored by the idea of a land with made up fantasies and stunning escapes and a beautiful boy who stays young forever. However, she soon comes to learn that we all have to grow up. Some faster than others.

Megan watched me grow up faster than she could say “lost boy” and I fumbled with the keys and chipped the paint near the ignition and nearly broke my wrist but started the car all the same, her annoying backseat driving and incessant conversation a lullaby to my tormented ears. But I drove. I’m driving. It’s working. She is loud and insufferable in the passenger seat but I need every damn word.

From the girl who played Wendy. Who, to this day, continues to guide me home.

She is going to think this is so corny. I’m smiling just thinking about it.

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