A Brighter Tomorrow: My Journey with Julie

I tell Julie that we can explore more. After all, now that there are three of us, we can face those Water Fountain Girls if we need to. Ivy goes to ask her parents if she can go off with us. When she comes back, we wave to Ivy’s parents and head down a greenhouse path arm-in-arm, with Julie in the middle. Julie tells Ivy all about confrontation with Stinger at the basketball court, and about our daring escape from the Water Fountain Girls. At one point, we spot the girls on another path, but they don’t see us.

We continue along the path, admiring the flowers and exotic plants, and Julie and Ivy talk about the petition to play on the basketball team. Julie says that she gave it to the coach, but he crunched it up and threw it in the garbage. Ivy gasps. Julie had 150 signatures. All that work and he just threw it away? Julie nods. He said the basketball team is for boys only. But Julie and T.J. fetched it out of the garbage and gave it to the principal. Principal Sanchez said he’d consider it but can’t make promises. He has to talk it over with the school board. But he said he would let Julie know the decision next week. Julie says that she’ll call Ivy as soon as she finds out.

I remember that Julie said that Ivy lives in her old neighborhood, so they must go to different schools now. But unlike Chloe and me, at least they’re in the same time zone. I think about the question Chloe asked me earlier today, about whether I replaced her with a new best friend. Maybe she’s truly worried about it. Now that I think about it, maybe I’m a little worried, too. How can Chloe and I stay best friends if we live so far apart?

I turn to Julie and Ivy and ask if it was hard for them to stay friends even though they go to different schools. They share a knowing look and say that they actually just made up after a big fight. Julie says that it was all because of her basketball petition. She wanted tons of signatures. Ivy chimes in to say that Julie was obsessed. Julie agrees and says that she felt like everything in her life was spinning out of control. Her parents were getting divorced, her mom moved them to a new neighborhood, and now she’s going to a new school. She just wanted this one thing to go her way.

Ivy adds that they were having a sleepover at Julie’s new house, but all she wanted to do was collect signatures. After a while, Ivy got tired and wanted to stop. So Julie kept going without her. Julie looks at Ivy and says that she didn’t realize that at the time, but she was being kind of selfish. Ivy shakes her head and says she didn’t understand how dedicated Julie was.

Julie explains that she was crushed when she found out that Ivy left and went home. But later, Ivy mailed a petition of her own back to Julie. It was a petition to be her best friend. And Ivy signed it herself. 150 times.

So being friends at a distance is not always easy. They don’t always understand each other right away the way they used to when they saw each other every day. If one of them changes, it can take the other person a little while to know something has changed, and even longer to get used to it.

I think of how much easier it is for Chloe and me to keep in touch, even though we live farther away than Julie and Ivy. If I want to hear her voice, I can call her on my cell phone. If I want to see her face, I can video chat with her. If I want to tell her I miss her, I can send her an email or a text. Half of the effort is literally at our fingertips. But the other part, staying close trying to understand and accept the other person even when they change, makes being long distance best friends more of a challenge.

Julie lifts her foot to show me her shoe. It’s a black high-top with doodles all over the thick, white edge on the sole. She points to the rubber toe where someone has written A.F.A. with a marker. Ivy says it stands for “A Friend Always.” She wrote it. Ivy raises her shoe in the air to meet Julie’s. Her sneakers are a different color, red, but the toe has the same initials.

After a while, we run into Ivy’s family again, and it’s time to go home. I give Julie and Ivy hugs before saying goodbye. After they leave, I take a seat on the bench in the park. I spot a pretty yellow dandelion and, thinking of Chloe, pick it and put it in my hair. I can’t wait to video chat with Chloe tonight. I’ll ask her to tell me all about our friend’s birthday party, and I’ll tell her all about meeting some new girls and exploring San Francisco. But maybe I’ll leave out the part about traveling back to the 1970s. That might be a little too hard to explain.