This Is How It's Supposed to Be.

Garrett Nickelsen and I had been best friends for as long as I could remember. We met in middle school, if I remember correctly. I sat next to him on my first day, partly because I was new and the seat on his right was the only open one, and partly because I saw he was wearing a U2 shirt and that automatically made him pretty cool in my book. I waved a little, because regardless of whether or not he was cool, he still might have been mean. He said “hey,” and then I complemented his shirt, and that was the entirety of our first conversation. From that day we had this kind of unspoken agreement to sit together in classes, at lunch and sometimes on the bus. We never really talked all that much; I was unbelievably shy, and he seemed content with the silence. We did learn a lot in the few soft conversations we did have, though, which amazes me even now. He liked a lot of the same music as I did, he had an older brother, and he wanted to be in a band one day. He was learning how to play bass, his favourite colour was blue, and when he was two he had a fish named Teddy that died when it jumped out of its tank.

Garrett, in turn, learned a lot about me, too. I never said much of anything to anyone, but in one way or another he was able to coax almost anything out of me. He learned about my younger sister, who was the complete opposite of me, that we had a golden retriever named Bonnie, and that I moved from Massachusetts because my grandfather was able to convince my mother to move cross-country for what was essentially no reason at all. He learned that I loved the dry heat that came with Arizona and that my favourite colour was green, that my bedroom was in the basement (the coolest room in the entire house), and that I was really bad at making new friends and talking to people I didn’t know. We kept our relationship at school and on the bus, because we weren’t sure if we’d run out of things to say outside of them. I didn’t know his life at home, and he didn’t know mine.

That summer, after 6th grade, I was walking Bonnie, promising my mother I wouldn’t go farther than the end of our street, even though we both knew it wasn’t true. That was the first time outside of school I’d seen him, outside in his driveway with an older boy that I assumed was his brother, washing a car. I waved and he called me over, and so I pulled Bonnie over with me, where I told her to stay in the driveway and then I helped Garrett and Trey finish washing the car. I told him that I lived a few streets over, in the tiny yellow house with the cornflower blue shutters, #32. From that day on I’d go walking to his house with Bonnie, or he’d come over to mine. My mother loved him instantly, even though she thought he was a bit moody sometimes. She was right, I suppose, because he’d get mad or annoyed or what-have-you for what seemed like no reason at all, and you just had to deal with it. My grandfather was much harder to impress –he’d never say it aloud, but I knew he either just didn’t like Garrett or didn’t like that my one and only friend was a boy and not a girl.

That same summer I was introduced to John, Pat, Jared and a boy name Eric who everyone called Halvo. I hit it off with all of them almost right away, and we grew closer, even though Garrett and I were still the closest. I knew Garrett liked having a group of guys to hang out with, though, even though I was most definitely considered to be “one of the guys”. I assumed it was nice to talk about girls or other guy-type subjects with others who’d share the same opinion, so when I wasn’t invited to the ever-frequent boys’ night, I wasn’t too upset. And as much as I preferred to be friends with them rather than the bunch of girls I’d befriended in Massachusetts, I still enjoyed my occasional alone time. Even though the boys gossiped just as much, if not more, than that group of girls, there was way less drama and way more joking around. I knew they didn’t care if I dressed up or wore makeup or did my hair, and I liked that. I was most comfortable around them, especially because I knew they’d seen me in only my underwear on more than one occasion. We were closer than family.

But the summer between junior and senior year brought changes. The boys had started up a band, with Pat’s brother Tim telling John he needed to sing, and so Pat played drums, Garrett, bass and Jared and a boy named Ryan that I’d only met once, played guitar. Tim was managing them through his management firm and guiding them with anything they needed help with.

Garrett had had a girlfriend, his first serious one, for a couple of months now, and since none of us (other than Garrett, of course) really liked her and she was hanging around more and more, it was stirring up new tension between all of us. We were afraid to say things, in risk of offending either the she-devil or Garrett, and so most of the time we chose to say nothing at all. It was all something that made a change, in me, at least, that wasn’t necessarily good or bad, just completely unexpected. I was caught unaware, and it left me completely shocked and confused, and for once I had no one to go to. For the first time ever, I had to rethink everything I’d known since I’d moved from Massachusetts to Arizona, and to be honest, it scared me to death.