Part 1~Friends: Melinda

Melinda

Melinda was my closest friend. She nearly became a true friend to me. Nearly. For like everyone else, she failed the test as well.

* * *

Melinda was popular. Everyone wanted her attention and she was nice enough to give it to them. When I first met Melinda in first grade, I was her first friend. She had just moved and he happened to sit at the same table. Our first meeting was by dropping a crayon. Perhaps it was fate. Perhaps it was not.

After that first crayon incident, we became friends. I just happened to make best friends with the person who would soon become the most popular girl in the school. Aren’t I just lucky?

After a couple months, Melinda was very popular. People wanted some time with her. At school, she devised a system so everyone got equal amounts of time with her. Except for me. I was special so I got more time. However even though I was special, I only had half an hour with her every week.

Being her friend, I had agreed and went along with it. We were the best of friends and had sleepovers every month or two. I changed myself to be more like her. Not that it was necessary. In those thirty minutes, we discovered that we had so much in common. We were so similar and it created a stronger bond between us.

I clung on to those precious thirty minutes. We played lots of different games together. She sang songs for me and we talked a lot. Our bond was seemingly unbreakable.

Later in the year, I began to realize that not everything was rolling as smoothly as I had thought. People were jealous of me. I was closest to Melinda after all. The first accusation came a few weeks later. I was standing behind a wall as I overheard the conversation:

“This is not fair Melinda! Jane is spending more time with you!” Alexa stated.

“But she’s my closest friend,” Melinda replied.

“But I only get to spend about five minutes with you!”

“You get twenty minutes!”

“But there are four of us so I technically only get five minutes! She gets a whole half hour!”

“Okay. Okay fine. I’ll give you guys thirty five minutes and I’ll give Jane fifteen minutes. Okay?”

“Okay! Thanks Melinda! You’re the best!”

And my time was cut even shorter. I was down to only fifteen minutes a week and Melinda and I didn’t do a lot together. When we were together, we would be happy and laugh and be… friends. But Melinda soon became happier with other people. She told other people things she hadn’t told me. Back then, I was a lot kinder and didn’t mind it too much.

It was a mistake, I should’ve minded more.

Melinda knew that I knew she wasn’t telling me things. When I didn’t bring it up during our conversations, she thought that I just didn’t care enough. Our fifteen minutes became dull and unexciting. My last face-to-face conversation with her was:

“Hey Melinda.”

“Hey.”

“Do you like your teacher?”

“Yeah, she’s nice. You?”

“I guess.”

“Do you want to have another sleepover sometime?”

“…sure.”

And we spent the rest of the time standing and watching the playground. Maybe it was my fault, and maybe it was hers. But when Melinda moved away, out once iron-strong bond was reduced to a taunt strand of rubber that threatened to break at any moment.

I used to think of our friendship as a thriving meadow of flowers. The sun was shining and the grass was green. There was an abundance of flowers and trees and no weeds. Now, it was a barren landscape where only the toughest of weeds dared live. Melinda moved on. She had other friends besides me. She made new ones, she became happier.

Melinda was at the top of the hill where the sun was always shining. I was at the bottom, deep in a hill where not a single ray of light penetrated. And why was that? When I had once stood at the top as well, why is it that I was now in this hole? It was because of Melinda.

People were jealous of our time together, they had started to hate me yet love Melinda. When Melinda moved away, most people already hated me. Isolated from the rest of the grade, I bottled up my feelings inside of me. I entered neutral mode. I didn’t make friends. I learned, I worked, I breathed, I saw, I listened, I felt. But I did not smile, or laugh, or talk.

Every so often, I would just cry. My mother asked me why and I would tell her, “I don’t know.” But in truth, it was plain as day. Every day I suffered. Every day I would bottle those pains up. But even the strongest of people cannot keep their feelings inside forever. And those feelings came out in tears.

I never got really made at anyone. But when I did, my anger would dissolve into tears. I found all the flaws and faults in everything. I was frustrated. With no social life, all I did was learn and work. I was grades ahead of my class. And yet they all thought so lowly of me. It was one of the most frustrating things I had ever experienced. I was lonely and frustrated. I couldn’t keep a straight mind.

Until a year later when I met two other people. My next spark of hope.