Did you have a best friend in high school who was your partner in crime? I’ve been thinking about mine lately. An essay about the good old days of youth and bravado.
She lived across the street and one house down from me. We met days before we began our freshman year in high school, in mid-August 1980. Dixie’s family moved to Plano from Indiana a year earlier, while my family had only called the Texas town home for a couple of months. A well-intentioned neighbor introduced us, assuming because we were the same age that we would become fast friends. I resented the meddling from some stranger.
Dixie showed up at my front door for our first play date. She sported long, light brown hair, was a few inches shorter than me and seemed amiable enough. We decided to go see a movie together, taking in Airplane at a local theater, and got past our initial nervous chatter. Terrified on my first day of high school, she invited me to sit with her and her friends at lunch, proving to be my saving grace on a day that made me feel like such an outsider.
From there, she became my best friend. I had another best friend in my hometown of San Antonio, but Dixie became such a constant source of camaraderie and like-mindedness that we quickly became tight enough that I promoted her to co-bestie. I began to spend a lot of time at her house, even becoming close enough to her mother to call her “Mom”. Diane, her mother, made me feel welcome in a way I strongly needed because my own family life had become chaotic for a multitude of reasons.
My mother came to adore Dixie. Even in her later years, my mom would occasionally bring up her favorite memory of my high school friend. My mom had taken us to shop for gym class clothes the first week of ninth grade. The store had unisex dressing rooms with doors that didn’t go up very high. A boy about our age took a stack of clothing into a dressing room and, to the delight and amazement of my mother and myself, Dixie waited a minute and made her move. She stood on tippy-toe in front of his dressing room, leaned her head over the top of the door, and yelled, “Peekaboo!” His scream echoed throughout the store.
Dixie and I perfected our teenage girl looks together. Each morning before school, I’d head to her house and we’d rendezvous in her bathroom. The two of us would stand side by side, staring into the mirror, using our curling irons both to style our hair into the wings popular at the time and to melt the tips of our black eyeliner to make it easier to apply. We never became fashionistas interested in girlie dresses and high heels. Our daily clothing choices consisted mostly of t-shirts advertising bands like Scorpions, Iron Maiden, and REO Speedwagon. If we felt fancy, we’d tuck our shirts into our Levi’s.
I remember the first concert we attended together. We screamed and cheered while Cheap Trick played Reunion Arena in Dallas. From there, we went on to take advantage of our parents’ liberal policy on seeing concerts, standing on our chairs, and rushing the stage for a host of shows over the next couple of years.
A few months later, Dixie got me a job waiting tables at a Bonanza restaurant where she worked. During my first shift, she spied that a table had left me a tip and told me with a sly smile to go bus the table, knowing I’d be delighted at the coins they left me. The health department closed the restaurant down soon after, but it taught me an indelible lesson that waitressing is hard work, and people who don’t tip probably go to hell.
After our freshmen year ended, we entered what I think of as our Summer of Corruption. We started smoking cigarettes, smoking pot, and drinking. Our taste in music shifted more towards heavy metal, and a real rebellion began, although more so on my part. That summer also provided one of the best vacations of my life. Dixie and her mom planned a two-week trip home to Indianapolis and invited me to go along. I remember her mom driving all night and through the day in her white Continental to get us there. Dixie and I sat in the backseat wrapped in a blanket pulled over our heads, gossiping about boys. Somewhere around the Oklahoma state line, we dropped the blankie and confessed the details of our crushes to her mom.
Dixie and I stayed mostly at her grandmother’s house, but also spent time at her sister’s apartment and her dad’s place. We went roller skating, where I discovered just how revered the singer Bob Seger was in that part of the country. My most poignant memory of this trip took place after dark. Dixie and I excused ourselves to go for a walk, but the real plan was to get away from the adults so we could enjoy a smoke. Dixie led me to a nearby elementary school playground, and we sat on the warm earth with our backs to a jungle gym, sparking up our Marlboros.
Boy howdy, did I feel grown up. No nagging parents or annoying brother for half a month. Able to enjoy a nicotine stick I still couldn’t properly inhale and no one could tell me to knock it off. Freedom! We puffed away, watching traffic lumbering by, unaware until later that one of the cars belonged to her mom. On her trip to the grocery store, Dixie’s mom spied us misbehaving, but she proved too cool to tell us until later. No punishment. The feeling of that night stuck with me in such a tangible way that I built a short story around it called Roller Girls.
When we got home, Dixie saved her money and bought a beat-up old car. I don’t remember the model, but it was green and felt like freedom to us both. We’d get in that clunker, fire up our cigarettes, crank up Q102 or KZEW on the radio or a cassette tape, and lumber off to whatever errand or adventure was on the agenda. We felt such joy when we could escape our homes and hit the streets of Plano and nearby bedroom communities in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex.
We held court during a million discussions about whatever boys we developed crushes on in the ninth and tenth grades. Now that we both had our driver’s licenses, we’d wait until dark, and then begin a ritual drive past their homes, slowing down to see if we could spot any of the boys in the yard or through a window. That sounds a tad creepy now, but at the time it was just goofy teenage girl fun.
When I think of Dixie, I see the midwest girl with braces and a delightful sense of humor who became like a sister to me. We’re playing mall rats at Collin Creek Mall or Richardson Square Mall, always heading to the record stores first to see what vinyl goodies we could add to our collections. We’re sneaking outside her house late one night to smoke a joint by the pool. We’re goofing on what a dork our geometry teacher was, and we’re quitting choir after freshman year because we became too cool for it.
Our friendship began to fall apart near the end of our junior year in high school. Dixie met a boy who became the center of her life, and my best friend from San Antonio moved in with my family for several months. There were disagreements and hurt feelings on both sides as each of us sometimes felt ignored by the other one as our lives began to shift. I don’t remember a specific conversation or argument that was the last one, but at some point, we just stopped talking to each other. I dropped out of high school, my friend returned to San Antonio, and a few months later, my family moved back there, too.
On my last day in Plano, I took my cassette player and a book and sat in my front yard, reading and listening to tunes. It was a move designed solely in the hopes that Dixie would pull up in her car, see the moving van loading up my family’s belongings, and maybe we could make peace. She didn’t make it home before it was time for me to leave. I had too much pride to call her down the road, but truthfully, I also feared rejection if I tried.
I learned through the years through a friend who knew them and an internet search that Dixie went on to marry her high school boyfriend, and they had a son. Pictures on social media showcased a woman who aged with beauty, and a marriage that seemed to be one of those that beat the odds that are usually against high school sweethearts marrying each other.
The last time my friend came to mind was a week ago when I opened yet another storage tub during my Great Garage Cleanup Project. I found a collection of correspondence Dixie and I shared, and I felt immediately transported back to the time in which we wrote it. Back then, we established a habit of buying a spiral notebook in which one of us would write a note to the other during the school day. We’d pass the notebook back and forth to each other between classes throughout the week, each one reading the latest note to us and then writing one back. We filled a good fifteen or so notebooks in two years; she kept half of them and I got the other half.
I also found a bunch of those one-page notes teenage girls write to a friend and fold up in a way that I cannot emulate now. I forgot Dixie signed all of her correspondence to me with a simple “Me”. I also found letters written to me during times of boredom on her trips home to Indianapolis.
Finding all of these treasured written words made me grab my phone to Google her. In my mind, I was already telling myself it might be worth it to contact Dixie just to say hi and see if she was game for talking. The first search result that came up was her obituary. She died less than two years ago from a type of cancer I didn’t even know existed. I burst into tears, which seemed silly but, then again, it felt completely appropriate.
My sweet friend. Gone. Not fair, not fair, not fair. Why the fuck didn’t I try to get in touch with her ten, twenty, thirty years ago?
As I sit here trying to encapsulate what a friendship that ended almost forty years ago meant to me, I wonder if I can do it justice. We may have parted ways under difficult and juvenile circumstances, but I have always credited Dixie with keeping me sane when I lived in Plano. I can’t help thinking about how much time has passed since I spoke to my partner in crime, yet the memories flood me easily. The feelings overtake me. The energy of being fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. The audacity of feeling like you have unlimited time, and the innocence of not yet being hit by the harsh realities of being a grown-up with bills, dashed dreams, and medical catastrophes.
I think about Dixie’s husband and son, who have suffered an immeasurable loss, and I wish I could offer them comfort. I wish I could get in a time machine and spend one more morning laughing and applying cheap cosmetics in her bathroom. One more night cruising around town in her car, making plans for the future while every single goal seemed so obtainable. Hell, I’d take one more cigarette and a six-pack.
Farewell, my friend. See you on the other side. I suspect our meeting will take place in a celestial Indiana playground with Journey’s Any Way You Want It playing on a loop.
River Writer Eve 
Thank you for writing this. I’m glad that you had each other in your lives. I can’t describe what it was like to read childhood stories about my mother. You don’t have to wish about comforting us; you just did.
She wouldn’t often speak of her childhood, so ill cherish these stories. I hope you know she had great love in her life and feel that she would’ve welcomed you in her life to share that.
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Chris, your reply has moved me beyond words. I cried like an infant after reading them, from knowing I have provided some comfort for you and your dad, and also because I can’t believe I am in contact with you. What a gift it is to hear from you. I did worry that my attempt to encapsulate a friendship from so long ago might not be well received by Dixie’s family, but I see those fears were unfounded. Thank you so much for your comment.
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