Hold My Life

“Brandy” in the middle and “Beth” on the right.

Facebook is wild. I have a theory that it reconnects you to people you were probably never supposed to see or talk to again. In my case, that would be pretty much everyone I went to high school with. 

I started high school with the best of intentions, but it quickly became obvious that things just weren’t going to work out. Somehow over the summer from 8th to 9th grade, everyone changed and got so serious about everything. Long gone were the days of stealing six grader’s lunches and hiding dissection frogs in Mrs Miller’s filing cabinet. We were in the real world now and what you wore, what you said, what you listened to, what you drove, who you hung out with, and everything else, mattered a lot. 

Being high strung by nature, if I can’t be the best at something, I prefer to give it up and that was how I felt about high school. It quickly became apparent to me that I was not going to be popular or have the kind of fun middle school offered, so I faked it for a while before ultimately deciding to fuck it. 

I have had this fuck it experience with many things in my life, incidentally: playing the piano, Girl Scout camp, baton twirling, softball, and track, to name a few. I realize that high school is not an activity, but I would propose that it is a horrible social experiment and that was the part that I chose not to participate in. 

Realizing I needed to be free to be me for the next four years, I went about changing my honors classes to general ones: I would not be taking chemistry or anything that involved a lot of thinking. Fuck that. 

I also quickly realized that most of my middle school friends seemed to be adapting better to this new environment than I was. They seemed to enjoy the daily fashion show and cliques or they at least faked it better than I could. If you look at pictures of me freshman year, I look like a normal suburban high school girl. I even hosted the freshman homecoming float at my house. I tried really hard, but I am convinced that the girls I knew had some kind of secret handbook or information that I simply never received. 

The two friends from middle school who also didn’t seem to have gotten this handbook were Brandy and Beth (I have a long and storied history with women named Beth, but that’s a tale for another day). 

Brandy and Beth were a package deal. They had been best friends for a long time and I was the monkey in the middle. Brandy had this great short 80s hair that was hairsprayed to the sky and she dressed like a Benetton ad and she was the alpha who pulled me in. 

In contrast, Beth was the beta who soothed my soul. Shorter and a little stockier, she had dark hair with complicated 80s bangs and the palest skin I’ve ever seen. She was funny and personable in sharp contrast to Brandy’s snarky sarcasm. If you fell down, Beth would help you back up, whereas Brandy would laugh and call you a dumb ass. 

Before becoming friends with this duo, I had mostly hung out with good girls. These girls, however, were far from good. I don’t know when they started smoking and drinking, but I had my first cigarette with Beth in my backyard that freshman year and soon after, my first drink with the two of them in a house that was under construction back behind Brandy’s house. We split a two liter of Sun Country wine cooler (malt, tropical, nasty) and the next thing I remember is waking up in the hallway of Brandy’s house, passed out between her bedroom and bathroom. Upon waking, I knew two things: I felt like shit and I wanted to do that again the next night. It turned out alcohol is an excellent way to say “fuck it” and really mean it.

Somehow after that night, we were a 3 person unit, which for 15 year old girls, if you don’t know, is a recipe for disaster. I had arrived late to the party and would always be the third wheel, but in the beginning, I really didn’t mind. 

Brandy’s father had peaced out several years before and her mother worked at the Ace Hardware and was never home in the afternoons. So after school we would head to Brandy’s house and watch Days of Our Lives on her huge rear projection screen, smoke, eat Lipton flavored noodles, and drink the syrupy sweet tea that was always in their fridge. 

The house in general had an air of neglect, of things needing cleaning and fixing. Brandy’s rec room, however, was the 80s bomb: pool table, huge TV, papason chair, bathroom, and exterior door. Everything you needed for an afternoon of soap operas or for a rager and we had plenty of both. 

We were allowed to drink at Brandy’s house when her mom  was home and her mom loved to drink with us. At the time, I thought that was super cool and I now know that was super sad. After that first Sun Country wine cooler night, there were a lot of nights of drinking Jack Daniel’s with Brandy’s mom. Sometimes she bought us beer and wine coolers and one night she even made us a blender of “Sex on the Beach,” which we thought was the coolest thing ever. 

We sometimes hung out at Beth’s house, and although I know I must have met her parents, I have no memory of them. I knew her father liked to drink and there was sadness there, but she also had a kick ass waterbed and we never got in trouble for coming in at 2 am and crashing on it. 

Sometime around sophomore year, Brandy and Beth went out with Brandy’s cousins, who made us look tame by comparison. They drank a lot of PGA and Tahitian Treat (a favorite of ours), and wound up flipping her cousin’s car into a random dude’s driveway in Nashville. When the dude came out and said he was going to call 911, Brandy told him to just help them flip the car back over and they would get out of his way. This obviously didn’t happen. 

I don’t know why I didn’t go with them that night, but I got lucky. No one was hurt, but everyone was super grounded. All this really meant for us was that we now had to drink almost exclusively at Brandy’s house, as Beth was allowed to go there and Brandy’s mom, as mentioned, hated drinking alone. It wasn’t a terrible punishment. 

And it meant I got to spend a lot more time away from home. It is no coincidence, in hindsight, that my father was getting sober at the time I felt like I could no longer cope with life. Things were changing around my house, but not in a way that felt good or safe. The more uncomfortable I felt at home, the more being at Brandy’s house seemed like a good idea. 

Brandy started dating the high school drug dealer sometime after the Super Grounding, which was convenient for all of us. She was also the second girl I knew for sure who had had sex, which I thought was amazing. I had kissed two guys and was wary of telling her the truth about the limits of my experience. Good girls were mocked mercilessly.

Because Brandy had a steady boyfriend and they spent a lot of time doing “it”, Beth and I spent a lot of time together. We drove around, drinking Michelob lights that I would buy at various seedy convenience stores,. At 15, I was already 5’9” and wore more make up than I ever would in my adult life. This made me the procuror of alcohol. Beth just looked too young. 

Incidentally, my ability to obtain alcohol became somewhat of a cottage industry for me. Popular girls, desperate to get those wine coolers, would suck up their pride and ask me to buy them some. I always told them that a four pack cost $20. In 1988, this allowed me to buy them their poison and also a twelver of Keystone Ice for me and the girls. I apparently came by this entrepreneurship honestly, as my father used to do roughly the same thing at the bootlegger’s in Rutherford County, but I digress. 

One night Beth and I just parked in a friend’s driveway who we knew was out of town and drank MD 2020 and listened to Let it Be by The Replacements. The Replacements was far and away our favorite band. Another night we went out with a guy from my youth group and all split a bottle of Malibu rum while listening to Appetite for Destruction.  I remember thinking life couldn’t get much better than those nights. And I won’t lie, some of them were pretty awesome. 

And some nights were just awful. Separately, we were each hot messes, but together, we were a parking lot of dumpster fires.  Brandy could be a mean drunk and Beth could join right in with her. I had a bit of a victim complex, so this all worked out about as well as you would imagine. 

We always made up. We played hard, fought hard, and dried up fast. I don’t know who I considered my better friend, but I do know that when Beth’s dad, who apparently had been out of work for quite some time, got a job in Kentucky and announced their family was moving there Sophomore year, I felt like I was going to die. 

Brandy didn’t seem to take it as hard. Maybe it was because she had a steady boyfriend. Maybe it was because her dad had left and she had learned how to pretend not to care. For whatever reason, I was the one who pined and mourned and who eventually wound up driving to Paducah to visit Beth. 

Their new house was shockingly nice and large. I had never really realized how dark, small, and shabby their old rancher was. This was a newer build and Beth had the huge bonus room over the garage. Disintegration by the Cure had just come out and we listened to it on her brand new stereo. 

There had been a lot of upgrades in her life and the biggest one was a steady boyfriend. I can’t remember his name, so we’ll call him Todd. This was first love, crazy love, first sex love. 

If we had been back home, it would have been fine, but it was hard to watch all by myself. Todd had a pick up truck, so I spent the weekend riding in the half back seat, while they snuggled in the front cab. Awkward. 

One of the perks of that weekend was the beer laws in Kentucky: they had drive-through beer marts where you could buy literal buckets of beer. And we bought a lot of buckets. Beth, Todd, and I would get through a bucket, and Todd would drive the truck out to a field somewhere and leave me with another bucket while they retired to the truck bed to do “it.” 

This was not the reunion I had hoped for. I would drink by myself, listen to the noises from the truck bed while listening to The Cure, and generally become hopelessly maudlin. I don’t know if Brandy actually said this later, but I can imagine her saying, “What the fuck did you fucking think was going to happen when you fucking went up there?”

There was, however, trouble in paradise. Beth’s parents, who had always been so absent before, were now paying attention to what their daughter was doing. Todd was older than Beth, like already graduated from high school older, and this did not sit well with them. There were already rumblings while I was visiting that they were not going to allow her to see him anymore. 

If I had a teenage daughter, and I do have nightmares about it sometimes, I would tell her to definitely date older guys and even take them to prom and do a lot of drugs with them, because in my experience as a teenage girl, they are going to do the exact opposite of whatever you tell them to do. 

Just a few weeks after I came back from Kentucky, my mom asked me if I knew where Beth was. I had no idea what she was talking about. Beth and Todd had apparently run away together, after her parents said they had to break up. See my advice above. 

And that was that. I never saw Beth again. I never talked to her. I never heard anything about her. I was devastated. 

I would listen to The Cure and  The Replacements by myself and cry, wondering where she was and why she had left me, ME. Brandy said Beth could go fuck herself, but I took it personally. I missed her. 

My mother later said that I mourned Beth’s disappearance for too long, that it wasn’t healthy. But how do you handle something like that with no closure when you’re that age? It’s the thing people write young adult novels and bad TV shows about. I personally wrote a lot of terrible poetry about it. I had a broken heart. 

Most of Junior year is a blur for me. It turned out that Beth had not only been a buffer between me and Brandy, she was also somewhat of a tempering influence. Without her around, we drank more, fought more, and generally got in a lot more trouble.. It was like we were competing to see who could self destruct first. Maybe we were.

I got a boyfriend of my own, more as something to do than anything (again, sorry Steve) .  He made the recurring mistake of buying me a fifth of tequila every Friday. I don’t think Fridays ever ended well for either of us. 

One night while out on a beer run, Brandy broke down and told me she and my boyfriend had been doing “it.” I didn’t want to do it with him, but I really didn’t want her doing it with him. I kicked her out of the car on that dark country road and our friendship didn’t survive the weekend. 

As it turned out, I wouldn’t survive Junior year. It’s hard to survive your Fuck It Plan for High School all by yourself and and even though I still had a few friends, none of them were as committed as Brandy and Beth had been to giving up with me. 

Feeling all alone at school and at home can take a toll on a teenage girl. Especially when she’s starting skipping school and ingesting all of those substances she used to share with her friends by herself. By April of that year, I wound up going to a place by a pond to recuperate. I never saw any of those people in that high school again. Well, until Facebook. 

After Facebook became a thing, all my high school classmates found me. I think they were surprised that I was not only alive, but seemed to be a functional member of society. I mean, it’s still a surprise to me some days too. 

As interesting as it was to see how all of those people had aged, I just wanted to find  out what happened to Beth and Brandy. I had thought about it a lot over the years. I searched on Facebook, to no avail. My other classmates also had no idea where they were or what happened to them, assuming that I would know. I didn’t. 

Every year or so I go down a rabbit hole, looking at possible mutual friends, doing Google searches, checking obituaries, but I’ve never found anything about either of them. If they didn’t get to go to a place by a pond, I don’t know how well their lives could have turned out. We were living pretty rough for teenage girls and the fun had already started to wane by 1990. 

Even though things weren’t always sunshine and daydreams with us, they were my people at a time in my life when I thought I was going crazy and no one else was like me. Brandy and Beth were two other people to help me give the middle finger to high school bullshit and life in general. We did it well for a while. 

But, to paraphrase Paul Westerberg, we were getting no place, quick as we knew how. We were never going to be lifelong friends. So, maybe, Facebook or no Facebook, we were never truly meant to see each other again. As sad as I am thinking about them then, thinking about where they wound up makes me even sadder. I like to think they are both happy somewhere and just social media averse. Maybe they married and changed their names. Maybe they moved to other countries and had fabulous adventures. I like to think that, but I don’t believe any of it. So where did they go? To quote Mr. Westerberg directly, “I suppose your guess is more or less as bad as mine.”