(Ages "One Through Six" can be read here. Ages "Seven And Eight" here. Age "Nine" over here. Age "Ten" here. Age "Eleven" here. And, finally, ages "Twelve And Thirteen" here.)
1996, age fourteen
I wrap up eighth grade and head off to California for the summer. I baby-sit my way through my dad's neighborhood, so I can buy as many back-to-school clothes as possible for my freshman year of high school. At our freshman orientation, Natalie and I find out we have four classes together, including Debate, which will make standing in front of ridiculously critical upperclassmen and offering my point-of-view on such topics as the death penalty actually possible throughout that year.
High school officially starts and I wear a chocolate-brown dress on the first day. Natalie and I meet after every class, although we make new friends, too, through drill team and classes. We dance on the junior varsity drillteam every Thursday night at the JV games, and we wave our pompoms in the stands each Friday night, at the varsity games. As groups of middle-school friends fracture and fall apart (high school is a completely new battlefield and some people are rocketed to popular status and some people just aren't, as you probably remember), it seems to amaze everyone—Natalie and myself included—that she and I have managed to stay friends through all of the hard and awkward transitions. We're foolish to think we've dodged the ultimate bullet (starting high school) and that there won't be some serious obstacles up ahead for us.
This Christmas—December 1996—will be the last Christmas my mom, sister and I will spend living together and we celebrate by driving around, looking at lights, dancing in the street to the turned-up radio and laughing, just the three of us, which is something I will miss every day after my sister moves away, six months later.
1997, age fifteen
The night I turn 15, I'm in California for the second half of my holiday break. My step-mom has promised to take me driving around their neighborhood in the middle of the night—my first time behind the wheel. When she wakes me up, at 3am, she's positive I'll roll over and wave her away as I've always been a girl who loves her sleep, but I bolt out of bed and practically run to the car. Elece will tell the story for years to come—at my wedding reception even—of this night she teaches me to drive and how halfway through the tutorial I will turn to her and say, "Does your left foot ever stop hurting?" Confused she asks, "What do you mean?" "Well, it's kind of painful to hold your left foot up in the air until you need to press the break." (If she reads this, I know she'll snort out her coffee, just thinking about it.)
Sometime this spring, I decide to try out for the varsity drill team, even though Natalie has opted not to. And, somehow, I make it. I begin practices and over the summer I show up for drill team camp, which is miserable and seemingly never-ending and I swear I lose five pounds over those four long, treacherous days. Oh, and I also love every second of it.
My sister moves back to California over the summer, and I write a poem in my head to her in the back of my dad's van one hot afternoon. When I finally put pen to paper, I remember almost every line, and I send it to her in a card after hundreds and hundreds of miles and also hundreds and hundreds of regrets separate us. (We haven't lived in the same timezone since.)
As I start my sophomore year of high school, with hours of drill team practice and a new, shorter haircut, my mom tells me she's leaving me home for a weekend in late September to go on a church retreat. Since I'm a teenager and therefore equipped with awful decision-making skills, I decide to throw a small little party while she's away. Just a few close friends and a few illegally purchased bottles of Boone's. Natalie and I set about inviting a handful of people but, as most things go when you're fifteen, we weren't entirely prepared for what would happen that night. By the end of the party there ends up being quite a few people sleeping on my couch whom I have never met before. One particular uninvited guest was named Jason, a boy I had developed a crush on the year before in my biology class. He smelled like Tommy cologne and he walked kind of funny, limbering and heavy.
A week after that night—and after my mother totally found out about the party because it turned out I was awful at making decisions and lying—Jason stopped me in the hall outside of my history class and asked if he could call me sometime. My heart beat out of my chest for the next ten hours, until the phone rang, and a few days after that I went out on my first official, honest-to-goodness date, a date I forced Natalie to go on with me because I was more nervous than I had ever been. He also brought a friend. We saw The Game and then ate at Chili's, and we couldn't have known it then—we were far too starry-eyed and filled with buzzing excitement—but from then on our lives would never really be the same.
That Christmas I went back to California, anxious about leaving Jason for an entire week because, honestly, I didn't fully trust him. The day I got back to Texas, Natalie broke the news to me over the phone: my boyfriend of three months had cheated on me. That should have been it, and I hope if any 15-year-old girl is reading this and going through something similar it will be it for you (although I'm sure it won't be). But, I was so young and, for the first time, so in love with a boy who could change my mind/mood/day with just a look. I didn't talk to him for a week after our one and only "How could you do this to me?" conversation. I spent those seven days with my stomach twisted into roughly nine million knots, listening to the whiniest and saddest of songs.
I rang in 1998 at Natalie's house, watching The Fifth Element and crying softly into the pillows on her couch, just gut-wrenched over what he had done to me. My heart was unequivocally broken, and all these years later—more than ten, in fact—it's still an aching, physical pain I haven't forgotten.