I never told.

I never told anyone how scared I was that night. Scared to die; more scared to live with the consequences. Just flat out, honest-to-God, first-time-watching-a-scary-movie, power-outage-at-night, pee-your-pants scared.

in fourth grade, I had switched schools. Two days in, I had already sought refuge with the girl placed alphabetically beside me, Lauren. With dark hair, glasses, and a natural tan, she shaved her legs and owned several 'bras' years before I would even be allowed to. She was the epitome of what I wished to see in the mirror when I awoke every morning but instead was faced with abrasively scattered freckles, gangly fingers stemming from trunk-like shoulders that, instead of resting on pa with Lauren's, hit closer to eye-height than anywhere else.

"Tuscawilla," Lauren had replied, turning her shielded eyes to meet my glassless gaze in response. I had chosen my ice-breaker carefully, knew that making friends was an important step to growing up, something I heard about on a daily basis, it seemed. So, I aggressively asked a question that by adult standards would appear not mere awkward conversation but threateningly forward. "Where do you live?" I bravely questioned. I had lived there too.

Lauren began dating an older kid named K.K. whose name transformed as soon as it creased my outer ear into 'free weed'. Known as one of the biggest dealers in town, Lauren and I knew we had reached our peak of popularity. my breeching of this wall, however, rested solely on our friendship the continuation of her relationship with 'free weed'. We snuck out one night to meet him and were picked up in a cliche high school boy's dream driven recklessly by some of his friends whom we'd never met nor see again. Lauren waltzed up to the car and casually leaned, seeming perfectly content with spending upwards of days in such a position. She flowed like water sometimes. At this thought, she shot out a brief glance of borderline fear disguised effortlessly with a quirky shrug. This look was meant solely for me and me alone. In my mind, her fear justified my own irrational thoughts and kept us continuously glued to the same page. I stood back and admired her before being coddled into the backseat and taken away.

I stayed in Tuscawilla Hills my entire life whereas Lauren had only the pleasure of enduring a few years. The founded-out street corners, dented signs, chain-link fences that masked cookie-cutter houses as if in Halloween attire that we grew to adore translated inherently into our sketchings, our conversational starting point, and our plot leads in future sitcoms where Lauren would instantly win the role of 'party-girl'; i, the 'cynical safe zone'. These roads, homes, and families all became our own.

One starless night in the dankness of my basement, that today remains adorned with overly creased game boards and monopoly themed pillows, the disturbingly crisp chill of the night resonated from the concrete floor beneath the area rug as we counted out the pills. we had captured twenty five for me and the equivalent for Lauren from the upstairs medicine cabinet. The darkness shielded our borrowed shame as the resounding quiet kept nudging us towards the inevitable. Lauren had never gone back on her word. And consequently enough, she began to dwindle away at her pile of assorted medicines. We had gone through a similar routine earlier; only that instance had been laced incessantly with fear riddled teenage nightmares and focused more on the persuasion of an act as opposed to the allowance of once.

The safeness inherently felt in my basement would, unbeknownst to us at the time, lead to our immediate demise. I choked down my own chemically perforated pile, displayed in front of us in color-coordinated groupings. We were toxically determined to remain close.

"Everyone has an alcohol stash," Lauren stated smugly, brilliantly displaying her street-smarts in direct comparison to my book-knowledge. we began to search, freezing instantaneously at the most minute sound. Lauren, having had experience with this sort of thing, located a bottle whose flavor remains foreign to me now. She then proceeded to weigh out two shots into glasses on the counter.
"Best friend shots!" She exclaimed with her usual seducing smile that had first drawn me in but was more regularly saved for cute boys or push-over professors. Earlier that same evening, whilst we babysat for a family a neighborhood away, we became best friends.

It had been my idea to take the pills. I figured surpassing Lauren's level o danger could assist in quickly sealing the 'best friend' title for good. Once we got to my house, we began with the prescription bottles; already wise and aware enough to know that strength would be a key factor in our experiment. Drunk and dangerously impaired, we found our own version of peace in the seclusion of our secret. This secret was ours; the first of many. The secrets that ensued and were immediately locked away were ours, too. The streets, homes, and families we werote into our movie plots remained ours as well. It had all become ours; and without each other, we knew we had nothing.