In middle school, eating Nutella out of the jar with a spoon and watching TV is enough to make anybody happy. My house was the biggest, so, naturally, it was everybody’s default hangout on the weekends. Our favorite thing to watch was always That 70’s Show - it was light and relatable and it had a lot of that stupid humor that’s always so appealing when it’s late and you’re exhausted. We would sit around comparing our friends to different characters on the show: Amanda was just like Jackie because all the boys liked her, Carter was just like Kelso because he was so vain. We loved That 70’s Show so much because we saw ourselves in Donna, Jackie, Kelso, Eric, Fez, and Hyde.
But middle school is fickle, and we gradually created partitions amongst ourselves through petty disputes and misunderstandings. When we went off to high school, our group was dissolved and everyone made new friends and forgot about each other. The only person I stayed in touch with was Simone, a girl I’d never fought or argued with in the three years that we had been friends. Our closeness carried on into high school, and while I was uncomfortable in my new environment and having difficulty with relationships with peers at school and parents at home, she was still there every day, the only constant and trustworthy friend that I had. We knew we would be like that for a long time - even in college, we swore, we would not grow apart. We planned on being roommates and when I tried to run away from home my sophomore year it was her house I was headed for.

In those first two jumbled years of high school I watched That 70’s Show even more than I had in elementary school. It made me happy and hopeful after returning from a day of failed social attempts to a home that I didn’t really want to be in. I knew the characters of that show better than I would ever know myself - they, along with Simone, were my consistency, my rock. I could depend on them to be the same people they were the day before in a way that I could no one else.
Until I woke up before Simone one summer day to find, on her little cracked iPhone screen, a text message, and its content landed in my stomach like a rock. Because she was promiscuous and a little bit of an airhead, I had made sure to specifically tell her not to talk to this boy. Ever. She had promised not to and, since she was my friend and I’d never had cause to distrust her, I’d thought nothing of it.
But now they were holding an extensive conversation. They were planning to meet up next Thursday and, though not explicitly stated, it was obvious that they were both expecting sex. She’d been lying to me about this for weeks. I could feel these primitive, beastly urges crawling up my throat and swarming in my chest and distorting my stomach. I couldn’t look at her after that for fear of what they might do or say.
After a few months of stubborn hiatus, I let it go. Kelso forgave Hyde for dating Jackie. This was just a small bump in the road and I couldn’t throw away three years of complete trust and dependence. In a few years, when we would be college roommates, this would seem so petty and stupid and we would look back and laugh at her selfishness and my overreaction.
A few weeks later, in September, I was walking home when I saw Simone lolloping down the street towards me. We stopped, said hi to each other, and I was genuinely shocked and excited to run into her, until I started wondering what she could possibly be doing near my house. And why wouldn’t she tell me that she was there? Wouldn’t she want to see me, at least stop by? She was doing this nervous bouncing thing that she always did when she was uncomfortable, rocking back and forth, ball to heel, on her fat little feet. There was an excess of fidgeting, playing with her hair, moving her hands behind her back, trying to figure out where she should put them. She gave me the half hearted, fake little smile that she used with people she didn’t know very well and her eyes kept flitting back and forth, never resting on my face. I was suddenly up to my eyeballs in hesitant suspicion, but my childish smile lingered in the vainest hope.
I took a mental step back and looked her over. “What are you doing here?” I knew the answer, I just wanted to see if she would lie again. She fiddled with her fingers and looked up at those untamed eyebrows, and she did. She lied.“Oh, I was just hanging out with Jerome.” Jerome lived about an hour away from here. His cousin, a rather sensitive subject, lived a block away. It was the same as with the boy she had been texting before - she had promised me again and again that she was not talking to or, more importantly, meeting up with him. And here she was coming straight from his house. As mean as Jackie was to Donna, she never would have done this to her. And she certainly wouldn’t have lied about it.
I could never look at Simone the same way again - I knew what she’d been doing in that house. This was one of many fallouts I’d had in those past two years. With each one, I’d tried to the best of my ability to fix the relationship and failed. I’d begun to question myself. It seemed that everyone around me had a trusty handful of very good friends - friends whose houses they practically lived at, people they went home with after school and crashed with every weekend, with whom they shared so many inside jokes and memories that an outsider could rarely participate in conversation with them without being left out. My relationship with Simone had been like that for three years and now that was gone, among countless other promising people with whom I’d clicked so well for such a brief period of time. I realized that I would never have a relationship with anyone like the ones I saw on That 70’s Show. I would never be able to completely trust or understand or know someone the way those characters do. There would be no basketball games in the driveway, no nights spent spray painting the water tower, no circle traditions in anyone’s basement, and no tearful goodbyes when I left for college. I would always be alone, floating from wispy friendship to wispy friendship, always by myself in the end.
A month after that, I asked her to come to my house. I was giving her a third chance, so desperate I was to restore that rare connection that only good chemistry and time can build. When she got there, I felt no pleasure or relief or excitement in seeing her. Everything she said was trivial and obnoxious. She tried to act like nothing was different. Her clothes were too small and she had to sit in an awkward position and constantly shift herself and pull her straining, suffocating Barbie t-shirt back over her bursting gut. She sat down on my bed right by my pillows, with her grease and her dirt and her oily hair and her tongue piercing that was infected and yellow and even the sound of her voice made me sick to my stomach. Everything had changed. The bond that had been constructed through years of integrity and experience had suddenly been snipped with a handful of petty lies.
I suggested that we go outside for some air - God knows I needed some. As we walked, she prattled on about anything she could think of to fill the silence, and I occasionally responded with no more than a few phrases. I couldn’t help myself: an insult or a reference to her disloyalty snuck its way into nearly everything I said and eventually these snide remarks became the conversation and she immediately got defensive and told me cover stories that were entirely different from those she’d told me before and accidentally revealed things I’d known all along but had refused to believe. And suddenly she had inadvertently told me everything about all the deceitful things she’d done behind my back all while telling more lies to cover her a**. It was pathetic.
I shut out her voice and continued my walk, ignoring her ungainly bulk trailing just behind my peripherals. The trees were still a deep, desperately clinging shade of green. I could feel the late summer sunshine smoothing out the back of my neck, the breeze carrying the slight, chill reminder that fall was nearly upon us. Winter was creeping up again. And just like every other year, I would be going into it alone. I took in a deep breath of brisking, wistfully warm air and allowed it to swirl through my lungs and dance in the solitary emptiness that was reopening in my chest. Maybe I didn’t really need a Kelso or a Hyde, or even a Jackie. Just walking like this, with the beeping, the rustling, and the whistling sounds of the world soaking into my ears, the breeze kissing the tips of my fingers and the backs of my knees, and the sun - the indispensable sun - stroking my hair and thawing the rigidity that had seized my jaw, I may not have been ecstatic, but I was at peace.