Sky Harbor

Janine Laney White was my best friend. She had been for the better part of my life.

As children, people always confused the two of us. It wasn’t just because we were practically attached at the hip. We were both extremely short and had thick, dark brown hair with dimples. She and I were stick thin and didn’t fill into our curves until we were twelve. We had full, pinkish lips. I had the button nose, she had a long, narrow one. But the one most prominent aspect that differentiated the two of us was our eyes. Janine had these piercing blue eyes, crystal and light. They always held a sparkle that you could only compare to that of a child’s on Christmas morning. Mine were brown, dark like night. You could only ever really see the color when I stepped into the sunlight, and then it would shine a bright auburn color.

We were four when my family and I moved into the white house across the street. Her mother brought us cookies to welcome us into the neighborhood, like the kind lady that she was. I was a shy kid, always had been, and hid behind my parents while they spoke with Mrs. White. It was all fine when they made small talk, and slowly became friends, until my parents invited them inside and Janine and I were forced to share cookies. We fought over the last one. Janine had pulled my hair, so I stabbed her with my Barbie. After the crying and the yelling, and the childish apologies our parents made us say, we agreed with pinky-promises that we would be best friends forever. From then on, it was like she’d never ripped my hair from my head and I hadn’t ever hit her with my blonde Malibu Barbie.

Janine was the first of the two of us to lose a tooth. We were six. She had been so excited. I remember her bragging to me that she would be rich come morning when the Tooth Fairy came. That night she laid it down on her bed underneath her pillow with a wide smile on her face before she fell asleep. She had come running at my doorstep the next morning, screaming with joy. After she’d shown me the dollar-bill, we'd both devised a plan to get more money. We found anything and everything that resembled a tooth, from small pebbles to nutshells, to fruit seeds and little cracked shells, and shoved them under our pillows before we slept at night. We didn’t get rich and it came to a point where our parents scolded us for making a mess in our beds.

In the second grade, Janine learned how to ride a bike. She told me it was a piece of cake, and then insisted that I could take off my training wheels and it would be fine. We climbed up a street that sloped downwards in our little Phoenix neighborhood. I’d been hesitant, and shook my head at her when we reached the top, refusing to go down. She laughed and told me how easy it was. She gave me a starting push and I tumbled down. I broke my arm and scraped my entire left side. She decorated my cast with red hearts and blue stars.

In the sixth grade, Janine was there when I had my first kiss. The boy’s name was Josh Montgomery. He was a dorky boy with dirty blonde hair with light blue eyes. He liked to skateboard and knew how to play the guitar. He was one of the few kids in Scottsdale whom we hung out with. Janine and I had known him just as long as we’d known each other. We were playing Spin-the-Bottle in Jess Bowen’s basement one Saturday night when her parents were out to dinner. It was his turn and he had spun it. It landed on me. They pushed us into the closet and we sat down on the floor in the dark for all of six minutes until Janine burst in and yelled at him to kiss me. He did with a red face.

Freshmen year, we went to our first big party together and had our first experience being piss drunk. We both had our first serious boyfriends. And we played side by side on our school’s varsity soccer team. In our sophomore year, we got our first full-time jobs at the ice cream shop down in Tempe. And when we turned sixteen, we both got our noses pierced and both came home to parents who were just about ready to murder us and bury us six feet under after they had found out. When we were juniors, we both got matching hearts on the inside of our wrists and got into our first car accident, totaling the new black BMW she had gotten for her seventeenth birthday. In our senior year, we were both princesses in the Homecoming court. We both got our acceptance letters into Arizona State University that March. And in June, we were voted ‘best friends’ for the Senior Class Superlatives.

After all this history with her, with Janine, my “twin” sister, my best friend, my confidante, my right hand (wo)man, you’d think that nothing could come between us. You’d think that nothing could separate Janine White and Gwendolyn Pierce.

You’d never think that one boy could ever do that. You’d never think that he could separate the most inseparable pair, the girls connected at the hip like Siamese twins. I never thought that would ever happen. I never thought that one boy could turn the best of friends, me and the girl that I had known for almost all my life, into the worst of enemies, to the point where she and I couldn’t even be in the same room together. I never thought that one thing that would ever, could ever, break us apart would be over one lousy boy.

But I guess I never thought when we were four and pinky swore our loyalty to one another that we would even fall in love. Boys had cooties back then; boys were mean and gross. They picked on us and were dirty.

I just never thought that when we finally learned what love felt like, what love was and experienced it first-hand like in fairy-tales and cheesy movies, it would be with the same boy.

I never thought that that boy would ever be Kennedy Brock.

I never thought that Janey White and I, Gwen Pierce, would both fall in love and would both let Kennedy Brock tear our friendship apart.