‘Please Get Help. I Can’t Imagine Life Without You.’
I lost my best friend to addiction, but I’ll never stop wondering if she’s okay
Note: The names in this piece have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.
The first time I saw her, we were in seventh grade. She was the new kid at school, and she stood up in chorus class and challenged another student to fight her. While smiling. It was love at first sight.
Lauryn was everything I was not — fierce, blond, utterly unafraid. Of anything. She oozed the kind of confidence that grown women twice her age wish they had. She wasn’t cheerleader cool; she was above-it-all cool, like she’d just walked off the set of Degrassi High.
I don’t know why she wanted to beat the shit out of everyone but me, but we became BFFs the likes of Thelma and Louise. (Or maybe C.C. Bloom and Hillary Essex. I’m really more of a Hillary.)
She tried to drag me into strangers’ cars to smoke weed and get Mountain Dew at the Taco Bell drive-thru at 3 a.m., and I tried (and most often failed) to say no. We’d sneak out her basement window to go find whatever trouble we could. Once, we TP’d the house of her brother’s football coach. When he came outside, screaming at us, Lauryn stood in the middle of the road with her hands on…
