Saturday, July 22, 2006 | by nathan

The School of Life is, you take the test first, then you get the lesson.

When I was in junior high I was friends with a girl who was funny, pretty, and smart. Everyone loved her, and everyone wanted to be her friend. In junior high I was awkward, nerdy, undeveloped, and sad almost all the time. I was hormonal and scared, I was living in a new town, going to an overcrowded public school and living in apartments in bad neighborhoods, with cockroaches.

And yet this girl was my friend for a time. We both wrote, and walked around feeling like E.T. three days out of rehab almost all the time. And so I got to be friends with her.

Until we weren’t all of a sudden. I never knew what happened, except that she didn’t like me anymore, and neither did a lot of our friends in common. Being the person I am - and exercising significantly less control over my temper then than now - I decided I was not going to take this lying down. I trashed her behind her back. I spilled all the secrets she had told me. I all but took out ads in the local media. I trashed her like I assumed that she had trashed me, and it was good.

And we went to high school after that. There were a few flare-ups in the conflict, but mostly we avoided each other. We never had to work together on any group projects, and we mostly ran with different crowds, despite belonging to the fairly incestuous "honors class" crowd. I did my lame journalism/be-in-every-club-you-can thing, and as I remember she did a lot of science fair stuff. Our paths rarely crossed. The drama between us, which had been such a fascination among students, teachers and counselors alike in junior high, faded away as other dramas took their place. I became friends with some lovely people who are still in my life today. I also became friends with some rather awful people of whom I was glad to be shed come graduation day. Life continued apace.

So the other day I checked MySpace and whoom - there is a message in my inbox from this girl, to whom I have literally not spoken one word in ten and a half years. She apologized for what happened between us - twelve years or so ago in the ninth grade - and told me that she has gone through her life having to learn a lot of things the hard way.

Yeah - do I know something about that?

So I wrote her back and said hey, no problem. What is past is past, we all have to learn and grow and be stupid and go through that horrible awful time called junior high.

The whole situation between she and I is so far in the past as to be almost nonexistent. The fact is, it was good to hear from her, to see what she is doing with her life now, to see pictures, and to find out that she seems more or less happy with the person she is. Is this what growth feels like?

The internet has magical powers, and I don’t understand how life can be so incredibly funny at times.