You Can't Choose Your Friends

Jace sometimes has trouble realizing what a great friend she has in Delaney.

“Wait, so your mom actually supports us going to see Dirty Dancing?” Delaney scoffs in disbelief as she lies on her stomach and skims through a girlie magazine on her bed.  I’m sitting next to her trying, and failing, to paint my nails.

“Yeah,” I say, and I get purple nail polish on my finger. “S**t.”

“You’re really bad at that,” she giggles and looks over at my somewhat purple fingers.

I glare at her. “Shut up. This is harder than it looks on TV.”

“It’s actually not,” she sighs and sits up to assess the damage.  She smiles and takes the hand I’m working on and takes over for me.

            Delaney Samuels is my best friend by default. Our moms are good friends, so when we were born, we spent all of our time together while our moms chatted and dads made awkward small talk. Because of all the time we were forced to spend together, we were automatically best friends. It’s like that saying “you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends.” Except, I didn’t really get to choose her., and vice versa 

There’s nothing wrong with Delaney. In fact, I’m pretty sure she’s a good friend. She listens to me when I complain, and she is always up for going out and doing things.  And that one time in fifth grade when I cried for hours because Evan Lancaster told me that my freckles were ugly, Delaney came over and brought some of her mom’s ice cream and told me that she always thought my freckles were pretty.  I feel like she offers me way more in the friendship department than I do her.  But that doesn’t change the fact that we didn’t get to choose each other, which I think is a big part of growing up that we both missed out on.

The other thing about Delaney is that she has a group of friends outside of me, and I don’t really have that.  I’ve spent time with a couple of other kids in my class over the years, like Remy Biggs and Charlotte Montgomery. And they’re fine, I guess, just not very interesting.  Their lives are just as boring as mine, except at least Charlotte and Remy each have extracurriculars that might make colleges think they’re interesting.  But Delaney has an actual group of people she hangs out with and enjoys. She’s invited me to hang out with them on several occasions, but I’m sure she does it because she feels obligated to, so I never accept.

 “Anyway,” I continue and let her fix my handiwork, “She’s completely okay with it, so we should go tomorrow.”

“Why do you want to go so badly?” she doesn’t look up from my hand.

“Obviously because Patrick Swayze is supposedly shirtless for half of it.”

Delaney laughs and switches over to fix my other hand, “It’s also probably because you want to be able to talk about it at school and seem like you know what’s going on in the world.”

I pull my hand back in surprise, “That’s not why!” I don’t even know how to defend myself properly, because she’s right, and she knows I know she’s right. I constantly feel left out at school for various reasons, but this is one I can change. I can see the movie and then seem like I’m up-to-date on really unimportant pop culture. Damn it. She is so good at catching me when I’m being stupid sometimes.  Though, I think half the time she lets me figure it out instead.

“Of course it’s not,” she gives me a half smile and reaches for the hand I pulled back, “What should we make for dinner?”

She’s a better friend than I give her credit for.

Author's Note

The third and final "scene" involving Jace. This series of scenes is an assignment for my senior project.