As I look to my right, I see my best friend, Abby, running towards me as fast as she can. Holding on to each other, we do not want to say goodbye. After a long period of time, she quietly began speaking, saying, “I really don’t want to leave, so here.” I notice her head is pointing in the direction of our feet so I look down to see her slipping off one of her red,
white, and blue, striped flip-flops as she tells
me, “Give me one of your flip-flops so I have a
reason to come back.” I did exactly as she asked
and then I look up to see tears running down her face. I start to cry as well; then out of no where, she reaches over to me for a hug one last time and got into the back seat of her dad’s dark, tan colored company car, which he was going to go turn in later on that day. She rolled down the window, and as the car pulled out of the cul-de-sac, that held many memories from the first time I met her to the time I had to say goodbye, she yelled, “See you this summer!” Watching the car pull away made me realize that I no longer had my best friend there with me.

My third grade year was an exciting year for Abby and me because it was our first year to go to school together. I knew Abby before third grade because she lived one house over from me; however, they ended up moving a few streets down because her family was going to move to Oregon and they needed a temporary house to stay in until then. Her family was like my second family and my family was like her second family as well. Her mom was the nicest person and would do anything for her kids. She would always take us to the barn, and we would ride horses and play with all the other animals there. For a while, we were going to the barn almost every week. One day about a third into the school year, my mom came to pick me up after school so I could go to the doctor. On our way back, her phone started ringing and when she answered, a calm but firm voice spoke. Her response was, “What’s wrong?” After the person on the other end of the phone answered her question, her response was, “O my gosh! I will be there in a few minutes.”
When she hung up the phone, I quickly asked, “What’s wrong? What happened? Is everything ok?”
Her answer was, “Well Mrs. Marie was in a car accident and her husband needs to go make sure she is ok, so we are going to go pick the girls up, and they will be staying with us for a while.” I could tell the calm and worried crack in her voice meant that she was trying to hide the fact that Mrs. Marie was not doing as well as we would hope. It turns out that while she was driving, something fell down into the side of the door and when she went to grab the object; she accidently turned the wheel and veered over to the side railing of Highway 290. As the large, old GMC SUV flipped several times, she was thrown out of the car. The heartbreaking part of the situation was knowing that if she would have just worn a seat belt, things could have turned out better than they did.






As we pulled into the old, crackly, slanted driveway of my friend’s rental house that they had just recently moved into, I could see the frightened and worried look on my friend’s face. The droopiness of her eyes screamed out questions she wanted answers to, but knew she could not receive them. Immediately she came running to the car and as I got out, she squeezed me as tight as she could, but she remained silent. Then, she ran over to her dad squeezing him and quietly said, “Please make sure mom gets better.”
His reply was, “I will do the best I can.”
As they exchanged “I love you,” Abby and her older sister got into our car and we drove back to my house for dinner. The car ride was silent as everyone was having many mixed emotions. As we drove into our driveway, Abby watched the garage door go up. As it did, she started giggling because we would always hold on to the heavy garage door so it could pull us up. This time, the four of us remained in our seats until the car pulled completely into the garage. There was a sense of unusualness, and it worried me. The quietness made me feel alone and the sadness in everyone’s faces made me feel like I needed to do something.

The next day at school was difficult for Abby and Emily because her mom would always take us to school in the morning, but that is not how it went that morning. Everything was normal except when we were working on an assignment, all of a sudden; Abby runs over to the teacher with tears pouring out of her eyes and throws herself onto the teacher’s lap. She then wrapped her arms around Abby and asked, “What’s wrong?” Abby could hardly speak so I came up to the front of the desk and began explaining what had happened. She asked me what Abby’s father’s phone number was, and as I gave it to her, I could see the appreciative look on Abby’s face. When her father finally answered the phone, the teacher said, “Ok, I will keep all of you in my prayers.” She sent me down to take Abby to the office to wait for her dad. As we walked down the narrow sidewalk with metal polls on each side the same distance apart from each other, she talked to me about all of her worries and all I could do was listen. I could not tell her anything because I did not know the conditions of her mom. If I had told her, “Your mom is going to be ok and she will be out of the hospital in no time,” I would feel like I was lying to her because something was telling me Mrs. Marie was not beginning to recover. When her dad came to get her, she gave me a hug and she and her dad both thanked me. The walk back to class was full of my thoughts and worries of healing and staying strong for my best friend, her family, and her mom. I was not curious about her mom’s condition; I was more worried than anything.

One afternoon when Abby and Emily were back with their family, I was sitting at my kitchen table working on my homework, and my mom walked back into the house from outside. I looked down and saw that she was holding the house phone. I felt my throat get tight and my heart felt like it sank into my stomach. I felt my eyes burning while I was trying to hold back my tears hoping good news would come from that one particular telephone call. I slowly looked up at her face and saw a sense of horror and fear as tears welled up in her eyes. I immediately knew what she was going to say. At that moment, I knew exactly how my friend was feeling but I couldn’t imagine how she was going to take the news after she and I had been praying every minute of the day it felt like. Praying gave Abby a sense of hope and encouragement. I could almost picture the look on her face as her dad told her that the doctors had to take her mother off life support meaning she was no longer living. The thought of Mrs. Marie gone forever was hard for me to process through my mind. I felt the need to go see Abby and Emily; however, I knew that they would need time to discuss the whole situation. I understood that the girls would have many questions and expect to hear the true answers. Thoughts did not go through my mind about how Abby was going to be able to return to school; they were thoughts about how she was going to get through the next few days. How would she wake up and not immediately start crying? How would her family have the occasional family dinners and feel happy and normal?

When it came time for the funeral, it was a sad morning and no one wanted to have to say goodbye to her for the last time. As we sat in the church, I realized the casket was not open. I asked, “Why isn’t Mrs. Marie’s casket open so we can see her.” The response I received was, “When she was thrown out of the car, her body was scraped up so bad you cannot recognize her.” Knowing this, I realized that the last time her girls would have ever seen her, was the morning of the incident. Mrs. Marie had a lot of people who loved her, and seeing them all at the funeral crying gave me a strange sense of relief. I did not feel relief because people were crying or because she was gone, but because I knew that she had left good spirits with people. After the funeral was over, it was hard for me to watch my best friend, who just went through a hard time in her life, standing outside the church crying her eyes out while she hugged everyone who attended the funeral. I could only hope that she would have taken the experience and used it to make herself a stronger and more knowledgeable person. From the whole experience, I learned that you cannot ask for someone to be a good friend to you if you are not a good friend to others. Friendships are about honesty, and always being there for someone. Every friendship I have, I cherish it and treat it like it is sacred. I will always be there for my best friends, and I hope they will be there for me when I experience hard times.



The second piece of writing I composed was my big narrative. I wrote this about my friend’s mom who tragically died in a car accident and how the situation affected their family and friends. The strengths of my paper were my ability to show emotion of the main characters. I was able to describe how they felt and their actions in result of their feelings. The weaknesses of my paper were my lack of thoughts in certain places. I could have given a few more thoughts to make certain things clear.