I met my friend Hayley when we were a month away from being seventeen years old. I had come back from Japan the week before I started back in American high school and had been given a week by my parents to adjust to the seventeen-hour time difference. In going back to my high school, I would be in a very different situation then the one I had left. Before, I was apart of the International Baccalaureate program and, in taking a year off in foreign exchange, I was no longer in that educational course and would instead have to take AP classes and take seven classes in the remainder of the year to play catch up.

Oh boy, was I glad to be home.

Hayley had, the week before, re-entered American high school after studying in Sweden for six months through the same exchange program. My fellow classmates were interested in me when I reentered the high school scene, but the interest only went so far and I kind of drifted through my junior year without anyone really to talk to… except Hayley. We had one class together and would run into each other in the halls, both stuck doing online classes to make up the first part of American history class we had missed in our time away.

“So, what point in history are you at for the class?”

“Oh, I’m still about the Puritan times. What about you?”

“About the same.”

“We should probably stop slacking.”

“Yeah, probably.”

That was about the extent we’d talk between classes as we both rushed off in different directions. It was on the last day of school, junior year, when we both didn’t skip school (the way most of the student population did) that we really talked and got to know each other. Getting each others phone numbers, we promised to potentially hang out but nothing really came of that.

First day of senior year we found ourselves in a class together, Algebra II. In my junior year experience, I had decided I didn’t fit into the high school scene anymore and, instead, enrolled in the community college in “Running Start” to do high school part-time and college the other part. In my senior year, I used to not suck at math (I managed to forget all my math education in the month between high school graduation and entering art school) and happened to be really good at Algebra, something that we ended up competing at to be the best in class. We made a notebook to write notes to each other and quickly became best friends.

Hayley was the one I’d hang out with every Friday night with, who dragged me (kicking and screaming) to the prom since “you have to experience at least one high school function in your life!”, and was my best pal through thick and thin. She went off to college in eastern Washington and we communicated the best we could. When she moved back to western Washington, we picked up the pattern of hanging out and generally being each other’s social outlet. Hayley forced me to stop being a tomboy and, occasionally, appreciate the art of dressing up and being a girly-girl. She drove down with me to Phoenix when I decided to go back to college and listened to me whine about how homesick I was a month later.

Last Thursday, she came into town to visit me at my current location in Florida and take a break from the cold of the northwest. We did our Jane Austen hair while watching chick flicks, visited a Civil War battle site, and hit up St Augustine to check out some of the first coast history.

I know I have a friend for life who makes me be the girl I know I am, deep down inside. Someone who will veg out with me and travel great distances just to be a nerd and check out our mutual love of history and good times.

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