A Brighter Tomorrow: My Journey with Julie

I tell Julie we can explore more. Now that there are three of us, we can face the Water Fountain Girls if we need to. Ivy goes to check with her parents, and 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 fills Ivy in on our confrontation with Stinger at the basketball court and 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 basketball petition. Julie gave it to the coach, but he crumpled it up and threw it in the garbage. Ivy gasps. All those signatures, 150 of them, and he just threw it away?

Julie nods. He said the basketball team is for boys only. But she and T.J. fished it out of the garbage and gave it to the principal.

Principal Sanchez said he’d consider it, but he can’t make promises. He has to talk it over with the school board. He said he would let Julie know the decision next week, and Julie says she’ll call Ivy the moment she finds out.

I remember Julie said Ivy lives in her old neighborhood, so they must go to different schools now. Unlike Chloe and me, at least they’re in the same time zone. I think about Chloe asking earlier today if I’d replaced her with a new best friend. Maybe she’s really 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 once they went to different schools. They trade a knowing look and admit they’d just made up after a big fight. Julie says it was all because of her basketball petition, and she wanted tons of signatures. Ivy chimes in that Julie was obsessed.

Julie agrees. She felt like everything in her life was spinning out of control, with her parents divorcing, her mom moving them to a new neighborhood, and now 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 Julie wanted to do was collect signatures. After a while, Ivy got tired and wanted to stop, so Julie kept going without her. Julie admits she didn’t realize it at the time, but she was being kind of selfish, and Ivy admits she hadn’t understood how dedicated Julie was.

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

Being friends at a distance isn’t always easy. They don’t always understand each other right away the way they did when they saw each other every day, and it can take a while to notice something has changed, let alone 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 apart 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. Half the effort is at our fingertips, but the other part, staying close enough to understand and accept each other as we change, is what makes long-distance friendship 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 of 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 herself, and raises her shoe to meet Julie’s. Her sneakers are a different color, red, but the toe carries the same initials.

After a while, we run into Ivy’s family again, and it’s time to go home. I hug Julie and Ivy goodbye, and 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 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.