Chapter 1
NADINE
My sophomore year of high school, I had a short-lived friendship with this girl named Kiana Valenciano.
She was nice enough.
A little too much purple eyeliner, a few too many likes sprinkled throughout her constant chatter, but we had every class together our first semester, so we kind of became friends by default.
Anyway, Kiana was forever yammering on and on about how her best friend on the entire planet was Sam Concepcion, a boy she’d known for all of four weeks before promoting him to BFF status.
Apparently it was, like, ohmigod, like, the best thing ever to have a guy she could talk to without complicating things with romantic entanglements.
Please.
Real best friends can generally go more than a couple hours without mentioning each other’s name, but Kiana found a way to fit Sam’s name into every other sentence.
Just friends my ass.
I guess technically they were platonic for a while. Sam had a girlfriend named Jasmine Curtis, or something unfortunate like that, and Kiana had this on-again-off-again thing with her junior high boyfriend.
But anyone who’s ever seen a movie, or watched TV, or just had basic awareness of human interaction saw exactly where Kiana and Sam were heading: Humpville.
Even though Kiana swore up and down that she didn’t like him like that, both of their significant others were long gone by Thanksgiving of sophomore year.
By Christmas vacation, Kiana wasn’t uttering quite so many likes. Why? Because Sam's tongue was in her mouth before school, after school, and every freaking weekend.
But we all know how this ends, right? Just a few short months later, not only were Kiana and Sam no longer dating, they sure as hell weren’t best friends.
Their short-lived romance and ensuing breakup barely even registered a blip on the gossip chain, but I’d like to think it taught some of us high school girls a valuable lesson:
Guys and girls can’t be just friends. Or not best friends, anyway.
Shit gets too complicated.
But let’s fast-forward a few years, shall we?
I’m now twenty-four, and I have a public service announcement to make: I was wrong.
Guys and girls really can be best friends.
It is possible to have a platonic relationship with a guy where there are no romantic inklings, no sexual fantasies, and no naïve proclamations of I don’t like him like that in a torturous attempt to hide an agonizing unrequited love.
How do I know this? How do I know that a guy and a girl can be best friends without romantic entanglements?
Well, let’s see, I’ve been on the female end of one such platonic relationship for six years now.
Six. Years.
!
True story:
Robert James Reid and I met the summer before our first year at University of Oregon during freshman orientation. We were assigned to the same group in one of those terrible ice-breaking activities where you have to put a sticky note on your head and guess what kind of safari animal you are, or something, and we just…
Clicked?
I don’t know why we clicked in the Hey, you’re cool but I have no interest in boning you kind of way, but we did.
