Posted By startswithanx on August 18, 2008

*** This is the second of three posts about Shelby. The last will be a week from today. Have fun getting to know one of my best friends.

There are secrets and then there are Secrets. When someone entrusts you with the latter for the first time, you never forget it. For me, it was ninth grade. The bell had just rung for first period and I was lingering in the main hall when I saw Shelby rush through our junior high’s front doors. She made a beeline for me, grabbed my shirt sleeve and ushered me into the girl’s bathroom.

I figured it was boyfriend trouble but she threw me a curve. I watched my best friend crouch down to peak under each and every stall as I stood waiting. It wasn’t the kind of secret I was used to.

I don’t know how late I walked into first period that day but I know my mascara was gone. I remember washing my face in the sink to get rid of the tear traces. I also remember sitting through all seven periods that day but not being there. All I could think about was Shelby, what she told me and how it put everything into perspective.

In the fifth grade she started burning her forearms with her curling iron. By seventh grade she was using a razor. I never understood what plagued her with such deep depression. Half the time I consoled it. The other half I wrote it off as a ploy for attention. Guys thought she was hot. Girls thought she was a bitch (probably because of what the guys thought). Her parents spoiled her with clothing labels and lenient curfews. Her life did not a manic depressive make, I thought. But I learned that day that it did.

Toward the end of high school and post-graduation, she wasn’t self-inflicting the pain anymore, she was numbing it.

She knocked on my front door when we were 18 wearing a backpack. We were headed to a party, not a camp site. “Uh, what’s that for?” I asked, pointing to her gear. She opened the backpack to reveal about 12 cold beers. She looked around my room for something sharp, found a pen and punctured the first can. I watched her shotgun it empty. She looked up at me with watery eyes, handed me a beer, then the pen. I think I took care of one, maybe two. Her backpack was empty by the time we left.

Fast forward several years and we’re legal, at the bar with a group of girls. A stranger sent over a round of Jagermeister shots for us: six total. The night had worn on us and we all, but Shelby, pushed the shot away. She tipped hers back, plus the five remaining. Several bystanders cheered her on as I killed the buzz with a grip of her arm and an escort into the bathroom. No one else knew she’d just washed down two Xanax.

That was one of the last times I hung out with Shelby in that context. We both moved. She had kids and her life took a turn. Let me rephrase that: Her life took a sharp turn, hung a quick left and flipped a bitch.

Shelby stopped drinking. She was teaching Sunday school and she’d come to terms with her Secret. When she proudly informed me of all this on the phone four years ago, I congratulated her. And then I hung up the phone suspecting all but one part was true.

I did a lot of suspecting, in fact. When I could hear the rattle of a prescription bottle in the background of every other call. When she had a minor surgery scheduled every six months. When I called her that time and wondered if a zombie stole her phone, she was so out of it.

I don’t dwell, I wonder.

The term “better place” usually makes me want to punch someone. But when it comes to Shelby, my dear friend who never stopped trying to make the pain go away, I can’t help but think it truly applies.

Categories: characters, memories