On Childhood Best Friends and Grief

Losing someone to the right wing

When I was in high school, I had a best friend. She was brilliant—how many high schoolers do you know were reading Foucault and Nietzsche? Not many, in my case. She was dryly funny, and the kind of friend whose intelligence felt like a flint on mine, sending out sparks, making me better. We were in different arenas and activities—she on the debate team, me on newspaper staff—and so while we were competitive it didn’t ever override our friendship, the way that we could be sharp and sometimes mean alongside but rarely to each other. Her family was more conservative than mine—I remember debating the existence of global warming with her dad, a doctor, on a car ride home—but I always felt welcome in their house. She was sensible, smart, plainspoken and bold in a way I wanted to be. She defended me in the face of bad friends and unjust teachers, wanted better for me than I knew to ask for. She was the kind of friend I thought would always be in my life—that she would be at my wedding and I at hers, that we would know each others’ children.