I once read that the greatest miracle Jesus ever performed was having twelve close friends in his thirties. In midlife, friendships tend to be casual and convenient, with polite hugs and congenial small talk. And then there are those rare friendships, the ones that matter.
It was the spring of our senior year in high school. Katie was in the passenger seat of my Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale, dancing across the maroon velour upholstery, her hands tapping the vinyl roof. Katie was a dancer and a former competitive artistic roller-skater, graceful and limber, whereas I was tall and awkward behind the steering wheel. “Tell You Why” by The Pietasters blasted from the speakers, upbeat ska music with horns blaring.
I pulled my tank of a car into the elementary school parking lot, lit by pole-mounted yellow lamps. We were welcomed by a chorus of skateboards gliding across pavement, punctuated by the loud clacking of wheels hitting the ground. We waved to our guy friends, busy perfecting their kickflips, and walked past the playground with the blue double slides where we often lay, gazing up at the stars. Katie was sensitive and passionate, frequently moved to tears by music or the beauty of nature. She was always reminding me to pause, to stop whatever I was doing and study the night sky. We headed for my favorite spot, an oak tree that had seemed sprawling and insurmountable when I was a kindergartener, but now, at eighteen, I easily hoisted myself onto the lowest branch, my Converse One-Stars dangling. Katie sat on the branch opposite me, tucking and re-tucking her short brown hair behind her ears.
“I want to come visit you in the fall. And maybe for Mardi Gras too,” she said.
“Come in December when it’s freezing here, and we can lie out in the sun and be tan for Christmas,” I said.
I had just gotten the call I was waiting for, informing me of my full scholarship to Tulane University in New Orleans. I had been talking about leaving home since I was twelve years old, my wanderlust inspired by books and movies. Katie shared my love of travel but wanted to put down roots near her family. She would be attending the University of Maryland, an hour away from our suburban hometown.
From our vantage point in the tree, we could see inside the nearby classroom. Brightly colored pocket folders and black-and-white composition notebooks were stacked along the windowsill, an exact replica of the second grade classroom where Katie and I first met, with our turtlenecks and unflattering bowl cuts.
“You’re going to have the best time. I’m so freaking proud of you,” Katie said, without a trace of jealousy. My teenage experience had been rooted in female friendship, the stress and drama of those years overshadowed by the feeling of being loved and accepted. There was a group of us, but it was Katie who I turned to the most.
I smiled. If I closed my eyes, I could still smell New Orleans’s humid air from my visit as a prospective student, an earthy mix of jasmine, olives, magnolia, and sweat. But when I opened my eyes, all I could see was the summer stretching in front of us: graduation parties, road trips to Ocean City, music concerts in D.C., camping in the woods behind our houses with stolen beers, loitering on the elementary school playground at night, holding on tight to the end of childhood.
“When you’re my age, you’ll be lucky if you have one friend left from high school,” my father remarked shortly before graduation. As an only child, my friends were everything. I had yet to experience how a friendship could dissipate over the years, how you could outgrow a friendship, or worse, how a friendship could spoil and turn rancid. I hoped Katie would be the exception.
After I left for college, Katie and I sent each other care packages stuffed with sentimental surprises. She visited twice my freshman year, once by Greyhound bus because she couldn’t afford the airfare. We sang cringeworthy karaoke on Bourbon Street, lagging several words behind during our rendition of the “The Love Cats” by The Cure. We drank Hand Grenades, a lethal, melon-flavored concoction served in a neon green yard glass with a base shaped like a grenade. I flew home at Christmas and made Katie beignets that came out flat and tough like overworked pancakes.
Our sophomore year, we celebrated the millennium wearing floor-length gowns in a friend’s basement in Delaware. That summer, Katie visited me while I waitressed at Big Peckers restaurant in Ocean City; I was living in a pink shack on the bay and smelled constantly like fried jalapeño poppers.
I spent my junior year at the London School of Economics and sent Katie long-winded emails from Internet cafes. Phone calls were expensive and impractical, so I mailed her postcards from Greece and Budapest and Prague. Katie had grown close to her college roommate, Valerie, and I sometimes worried I’d been replaced. But when I saw Katie again that summer, we fell back into our old rhythm, lip-syncing to Jamiroquai’s “Cosmic Girl” as if we were at an outerspace disco party instead of my childhood bedroom.
When Katie and I finished college, we threw graduation parties on consecutive days, a two-day kickoff to our summer together back home. Katie was mourning the end of a serious relationship, and I distracted her with wild parties and walks in Rocks State Park. I told her she was a flawless pink diamond among the pebbles and that her ex-boyfriend’s blond highlights looked stupid.
In August, Katie helped me move into my graduate school dorm room at NYU. We rode the Megabus back and forth between New York and Maryland – discount rides on a double-decker bus that smelled like body odor and week-old takeout. She celebrated with me when I got my first real job in finance. I modeled my ill-fitting suit, purchased from the sale rack at Banana Republic. My dark blonde hair was gathered into a respectable low ponytail.
“I’m such a grown-up, I own cufflinks,” I told her.
Katie had been working multiple jobs at a dance shop and a department store but was about to spend a month in Charleston, South Carolina. She and Valerie would be working the Spoleto Festival, a celebration of art, music, dance, and theater. I wanted to go, but I was tethered to a cubicle. It was too soon to explain to my boss that I was in a long-distance relationship with my best friend and that two weeks of vacation was simply not sufficient.
Katie came to my 25th birthday party at my apartment in a former nuclear fallout shelter, the faded black-and-yellow sign still displayed on the brick facade. My roommates had planned a March Madness-style beer pong tournament and had crafted a trophy out of a classic NYC souvenir: King Kong balanced on top of the Empire State Building, a ping-pong ball super-glued to his hand. Katie and I wore matching t-shirts, each emblazoned with a hot pink skull and crossbones. We lobbed ping-pong balls into red plastic cups of beer. She danced playfully against me to “In Da Club” by 50 Cent. We lost the tournament, but my new boyfriend (and future husband), Jeff, stole the trophy for me as a romantic gesture. Katie approved.
Greeting cards were an essential part of our friendship. I was always walking into stationery stores and scouring the shelves for the perfect card. Over the years, I kept all of the cards Katie sent me wrapped in white tissue paper, her loopy half-cursive handwriting filling the inside of each card and the back, crowding the Hallmark copyright and barcode. She wrote loving words that couldn’t be contained: “I hope you’re happy and healthy.” “I hope you’re living the life you’ve imagined.” “You’re a beautiful person.” “Never give up on yourself.” “Everything is more fun when you’re around.” “Take care of yourself.” “Remember you are loved and missed.”
Even though we hadn’t lived in the same city since high school, she was always there. Every city I lived in, every boyfriend I had, every job I quit. She was my standing date for New Year’s Eve for over a decade, and she was standing next to me as maid of honor at my wedding. She gave a speech about Jeff fitting in, how I’d brought him to Maryland and how he’d sat in the backseat of Katie’s car at the end of a night out, the three of us talking for a long time in my parents’ driveway.
The year I got married, Katie and I turned twenty-eight, and my parents sold my childhood home in Maryland and retired to Florida. Going to see my parents had always meant spending time with Katie. Now, for Thanksgiving and Christmas and summer holidays, I’d be cruising around a retirement community in my dad’s golf cart, while Katie was a thousand miles away.
As my parents sealed my childhood belongings into cardboard boxes, Katie called to tell me she was engaged. Katie and her fiancé, Mike, seemed blissfully, annoyingly happy. They spoke to each other in baby voices, read romantic books aloud to one another, and were prone to spontaneous dancing. Jeff and I were prone to spontaneous complaining, until one of us would say, “Katie and Mike wouldn’t be complaining. They’d be weeping at the beauty of this moment.” We laughed, but really I wanted us to be more like them.
Katie and Mike had met on a Green Tortoise adventure bus tour. I called it “the hippie bus.” Passengers slept on the bus at night while the driver covered long distances to national parks and other natural wonders. Katie had become a Green Tortoise enthusiast, completing numerous trips that ranged in duration from a week to an entire month. I had the bold idea to take Katie on a three-day Green Tortoise trip from San Francisco to Yosemite National Park, just the two of us, to celebrate her engagement.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Katie asked me.
I was now living in a high-rise building in Midtown, and my idea of communing with nature was a visit to Central Park.
“It may be a bit rustic for my taste, but the hippie bus has been life changing for you! I need to experience it firsthand,” I said.
Katie and I booked the trip and met in San Francisco. The bus depot transformed into a crowded backpacker ghetto, an endless sea of bandanas and giant packs.
“They can’t possibly fit all of these people on one bus, right?” I asked anxiously.
Katie shrugged, unconcerned. She hadn’t stopped smiling.
It was dusk by the time the big green bus pulled up to its bevy of adventure travelers, and I had succumbed to second thoughts. The bus driver, a surly blonde woman with biceps like softballs, introduced herself as Deb. I silently questioned whether a woman could handle driving the bus on curvy mountain roads, and then berated myself for doing so.
Deb chucked our bags into the luggage compartment and performed “the Miracle,” the process of preparing the bus for sleep. The back half of the bus was already one giant cushion – a daybed built for five to twenty-five depending on your need for personal space – so the process amounted to folding down a half-dozen top bunks and tossing a sketchy cushion over the dinette tables at the front. I had hoped for something more miraculous. Deb designated sleeping spots for all thirty-six passengers, lining us up head-to-toe like a zipper in the back of the bus. Katie and I had the hairy feet of a French teenager in between our faces. It was probably best she couldn’t make out my expression. As Deb drove and everyone else slept, I regretted not bringing any Xanax.
The bus eventually parked, and the sun came up on a rustic campsite in the Yosemite Valley, surrounded by granite peaks rising out of the woodlands. The peaceful quiet of the early morning was broken by Deb bellowing for our assistance cooking breakfast. Useless in any kitchen, I was relegated to the dishwashing station, dunking mismatched bowls and mugs into a bin of murky water while I daydreamed about room service. Katie was promoted to the sandwich assembly line, doling out wilted lettuce and packing the sandwiches into Ziploc bags for lunch.
Our first activity was a six-hour round-trip hike to Glacier Point. Katie did pirouettes up the mountain, and I trudged behind her, sweating profusely and cursing each switchback.
I tried to make the most of our quality time, but when day two brought more hiking with it, I resorted to heavy sighs, complaints, and the instigation of fights. I was jealous of Katie’s faith and her optimistic view of the world. Katie was planning to walk down the aisle to “Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles. If she was the sun, then I was the darkness. Katie had had the more stressful childhood, with her parents’ divorce, her mother’s drug addiction, and her brother’s depression, and yet I was the one riddled with anxiety.
I had just quit the six-figure investment banking job I’d worked so hard for. I’d grown jaded. Was this really what I wanted to do with my life? I’d walked into the office one morning with a promising career and left with nothing but lofty soul-searching ambitions. It had only been a month and my soul-searching had already mutated into daytime television watching and eating Oreos with the curtains drawn.
As Katie and I neared the summit, I spouted self-pity, stopping every few minutes to dump rocks out of my hiking sandals.
“Maybe you should turn your focus outside yourself. Do something to help someone else,” Katie said.
Katie volunteered teaching adults how to read and had recently gotten a job as a teaching assistant in a special education classroom. She danced as a showgirl in charity fundraisers, a saint in an ostrich feather headdress.
“Are you saying I’m selfish?” I said, my voice accusatory.
“I just think it would be good for you.”
“Well, we can’t all be Mother Teresa.”
Although Katie was ahead of me on the trail and I couldn’t see her face, I knew she was rolling her eyes.
I was constantly challenging Katie’s worldview. “Look how terrible everything is!” I’d say. When she wasn’t convinced, I felt a mix of anger and relief. Deep down, I wanted her to convince me.
During those tense moments, I sometimes wondered if we were too different to be best friends. Our shared history gave us an advantage, grounding us in understanding. A relationship built on eight years of whispering to each other during orchestra class. Katie remembered when my one front tooth eclipsed the other, when I first held hands with my middle school boyfriend, and the summer I’d spent in a wheelchair with a metal rod inserted in my tibia. I remembered her beloved golden retriever, her championship picture hanging in the since-demolished roller rink, and when her mother embraced sobriety.
That night was freezing. Rather than sleeping on the crowded bus, Katie and I set up our two-person tent and crawled in, wearing all of the clothing we’d brought with us. I had a dozen Thermo-Pad hand warmers that I activated and placed strategically over my entire body, against the advice of the warning label. It took me ten minutes to get situated.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Katie whispered. “Will you come with me to the outhouse and hold the flashlight?”
I pretended to be asleep.
“You know I’m scared of bears,” she said.
“Ugh, fine,” I mumbled. “There’s no way I’m letting you get eaten by a bear. I can’t be left alone with all these hippies.”
In the morning, we skipped hiking and went to Mono Lake instead, plunging into the frigid water just long enough to loosen the dirt caked on us. That night, while Deb drove us back to San Francisco, Katie and I stayed awake in the back of the bus, drinking lukewarm cans of Bud Light.
“I went to see a career counselor, and it was a total waste of my time,” I said. “I Googled her name and found a book of her poetry – self-published I’m sure. The poems had these horribly clichéd titles. I’m sorry, but I am not taking career advice from someone who titles her love poem, ‘Love.’”
“I think you should keep going with the writing classes,” Katie said. “I loved your screenplay. And remember all those funny poems you wrote for us in high school? You’ve always been my comic relief.”
Katie had a way of reminding me who I was. I chased her encouragement with another beer, feeling warm and hopeful. As the night went on, we dissolved into laughter at the filthy feet next to my head, the hook-ups going on in the top bunks, and the frequent stops to pee along the side of the road. As we squatted with our backs against the bus, peeing in the moonlight, Deb played “On the Road Again” by Willie Nelson, a song about best friends traveling down the highway.
Katie’s hippie tendencies must have rubbed off on me, because I soon found myself moving to Austin. My husband was starting his own finance company, and the two of us wanted a change of pace from New York. Katie visited twice in the first few months. I picked her up from the airport, and as we waited at baggage claim, I burst out, “I’m pregnant!” Katie immediately teared up and tried to caress my stomach, ignoring my protests.
A few months after I gave birth to my daughter, Katie came to see me in my new role as mother, bestowing sentimental gifts: picture books from our childhood with handwritten inscriptions. Our lives were moving in lockstep; Katie was now pregnant with her first child, also a girl. She wanted to keep the name they’d chosen a secret.
“Is it Audrey?” I guessed.
“No, it’s not,” she muttered, avoiding eye contact.
“It’s just, I know how much you love Audrey Hepburn,” I explained.
“Yeah, no, that’s not it.”
Later that night, I bragged to Jeff that I could read Katie’s mind.
Audrey was born five months later. Caught up in the chaos of motherhood, our visits became more infrequent.
When I started trying for baby number two, I struggled with miscarriages and infertility. After a year of not seeing each other, Katie and I ended up crying outside of a fancy cocktail bar in downtown Austin, our rosemary grapefruit gimlets abandoned on the bar.
“You don’t understand,” I told her.
“Then tell me,” she said.
Katie sat on the curb and listened as I released all of my repressed anger and sadness.
She visited Austin a few months later and brought Mike and Audrey with her. We took our girls on the kiddie train through the park, raising our arms and screaming as we went through the tunnel.
After that day, we went two and a half years without seeing each other, during which we both had another daughter a month apart.
When we finally reunited in Maryland, Katie gave me a tour of her new house. It was a Cape Cod home built in the 1940s, quaint and charming with red brick and weathered gray shingles, the type of house I’d always imagined Katie raising her family in. She walked me out back to her garden.
“When parenting becomes overwhelming, I come out here and kneel in the dirt and pull weeds,” she said.
Huge clumps of blue hydrangeas bloomed around us, with not a weed in sight.
“I’m guessing you get overwhelmed a lot,” I joked.
“Oh, you know how it is. Sometimes I strap the girls into their car seats and take the scenic route to nowhere in particular.”
Katie and I had remarkably similar parenting styles. We were both stay-at-home mothers committed to filling our children’s lives with adventure, books, music, art, and nature. Our days were spent taming tantrums, building forts, coaxing ladybugs into makeshift habitats, reading books aloud in animated voices, and cutting sandwiches into triangles for tea parties.
That evening, we drank wine in Katie’s cozy kitchen and dreamed about having our own travel show: tired moms explore the country, one long weekend at a time.
“My mom made a comment about all of my trips and nights out. She thinks I should be at home with Mike and the girls every night,” Katie said.
“What is this, the 1950s? You deserve to have a break,” I said.
“It’s not just my mom. There are a lot of raised eyebrows when I go to bars by myself.”
Katie was an enthusiastic follower of the local music scene. While other women clung to their barstools, Katie was fearless on the dance floor, often attracting male attention.
“Live music and dancing is your happy place,” I told her. “You need to stop worrying what other people think.”
Katie was a people-pleaser who internalized criticism. My instinct was to throw my bulky body over hers to shield her from the impact. I wanted to scream, “Don’t you dare break my perfect friend!” Of course, she wasn’t perfect. She was never on time, her house was a mess, and she couldn’t carry a tune. But she was exactly who I needed her to be.
That night in Katie’s kitchen, we listened to Brandi Carlile’s “Wherever Is Your Heart,” a folk-pop love song written for the unexpected family she’d created for herself. Meanwhile, our four daughters played together in the basement. They formed an all-girl rock band, screaming incoherent lyrics into toy microphones.
We vowed to see each other more often.
Two months later, Katie and I were each other’s dates to our twenty-year high school reunion. She giggled behind me as I caught up with an ex-boyfriend. As was our custom, we sat in Katie’s minivan after the evening ended and talked for hours. Katie’s dark brown hair was streaked with grey, and her post-pregnancy belly had never completely gone away. “Am I still pretty?” she asked me. I answered with an emphatic “Yes.” We talked about the challenges of marriage and about dreams that had gone unfulfilled. “Will I ever be more than a mother?” I asked her. “You already are,” she answered. Katie played Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” an inspiring song about resilience.
Three months later, when Katie and I were thirty-eight, I was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. I sent Katie a text because I couldn’t say the words out loud. Afraid of dying and leaving my young daughters behind – would my two-year-old even remember me? – I made Katie promise to tell them stories about me, about us.
Katie made a playlist for me to listen to during chemotherapy. As the nurse administered “the Red Devil” – a drug the color of cherry Kool-Aid and feared for its toxicity – I pressed repeat on “Everything is Awful” by The Decemberists, a song that remained stubbornly upbeat when it was supposed to be somber. It reminded me of Katie.
A few months into treatment, Katie surprised me by bringing three of our high school friends with her to Austin. I stepped outside with my dad, who was in on it, and there was Katie, sitting on my daughter’s orange swing in the front yard. Flustered, I hugged them all tightly and said, “Should we go get tacos?”
A month later, I met Katie in New Orleans for Jazz Fest. I’d first attended Jazz Fest during college, and Katie and I kept coming back. As we strolled through the French Quarter, Katie stopped to take photographs of old cars, flowers, street art, lacey wrought-iron balconies, things I never would’ve noticed. We took a shuttle bus to the festival grounds and reminisced about the time I’d lost my wedding ring at Jazz Fest and Katie had spent an hour digging through a heap of vile trash, only to have the ring turn up in Lost and Found.
In the blues tent, I sat on a folding chair, a leopard-print scarf covering my bald head, and watched Katie dance to The War and Treaty’s “Set my Soul on Fire,” a sensual song with a touch of hand-clapping, foot-stomping gospel. I’ve always lived vicariously through Katie’s dancing and the way she loses herself in movement.
Katie flew to Austin for my last dose of chemotherapy, pressing confetti into my daughters’ hands to throw as I rang the end-of-chemo bell. She encouraged me to participate in Art Bra, a charity event where breast cancer survivors modeled bras designed by local artists. She sat in a crowd of almost a thousand people, but I swore I could hear her screaming as I stomped down the runway in a green-and-black-beaded bra, parading my left breast around one last time before my mastectomy.
“You were like a gorgeous Amazonian badass,” Katie told me later.
The last phase of my treatment took me to the Dallas Center for Proton Therapy. Katie drove with me for my last two doses. We reserved a hotel room and planned to do some sightseeing. On the way to Dallas, I started experiencing severe chest pain and had to pull over to let Katie drive. She drove me straight to the nearest emergency room. As I lay in a triage room, convinced I was dying of a heart attack, I could hear Katie storming up and down the hospital corridor, screaming, “We need help in here!” After a litany of tests, Katie settled onto my hospital bed and curled up against me like a cat. Under a heavy dose of morphine, I patted her head and said, “We always have the best girls’ trips.”
After I was discharged with suspected inflammation from radiation – a false alarm – we retreated to Austin and repeated our road trip the following day. Katie sat in the waiting room of the Proton Center while a cyclotron weighing 220 tons accelerated proton particles through a beamline directly into the lymph nodes near my heart. I joked, “I’ll try to stay still.” After my last dose, she cheered as I banged the ceremonial gong. As we drove back to Austin, Katie blasted "Bang a Gong (Get It On)" by T. Rex, windows down, the wind whipping through our hair – well, her hair.
Even more than surviving cancer, I consider my friendship with Katie a triumph. Recently, she sent me a video of the two of us pushing each other on a rope swing during my treatment, playing like kids. She wrote, “We’re lucky to have each other.” But it wasn’t just luck. Our friendship, which has spanned more than three decades so far, has been defined by mutual effort and a desire to watch each other grow. When I picture her chocolate brown eyes and dimpled smile, I feel loyalty coursing through my chemo-damaged veins.
The COVID-19 pandemic began four months after I finished active treatment. The physical distance between us had never felt greater. We fantasized about living down the street from each other and merging bubbles. How I’d walk across her lawn to bring her one of my famous oat milk lattes. How she’d serve me her gumbo, perfected during quarantine. How she and Mike would re-watch all eleven seasons of Cheers with me.
I haven’t seen Katie in person since I banged the gong in Dallas. Instead, we have Zoom dates. We string up Christmas lights and dress up as if we’re going out for the night. She makes a White Russian, and I make a margarita. Jeff knows not to wait up for me.
Katie has been the soundtrack to all of my best and worst moments. When too much time goes by without seeing her, my world falls silent.
This month, we celebrated becoming fully vaccinated by booking flights to Colorado. We have tickets to see The Avett Brothers at Red Rocks Amphitheater, rescheduled from 2020. We’ve started counting down the days until we’re together, singing along to “Nothing Short of Thankful.”
Jami Bonyun is a stay-at-home mother with an M.S. in Mathematical Finance. She spent her brief career in finance sneaking out of work early to attend recreational writing classes. Her nonfiction work has appeared in HerStry, Cure Today, Listen to Your Mother, Skirt Magazine, and Underwired. She is the author of a personal cancer blog, MommyMoondragon.com. She lives in Austin, TX with her husband and two daughters.