Best Friend

This writing prompt comes directly from the National Blog Posting Month website:  Who was your best friend when you were 10.  Did you still know them at the age of 20. 

My best friend was Jean Ann.  Here we are in her driveway.  I'm on her left side, the shorty.  I know I've written about her before but she pops into my mind often.  We lived next door to each other and were just about inseparable at the age of 10.  She only spent the night at my house probably once or twice but I spent the night at her house probably 5 nights out of the week in the summer.

She had the coolest house with tons and tons of room.  There was a huge basement that was totally redone, like a bar with pool table and everything.  At that time her grandmother stayed with her and her brother (they were twins) while their parents worked.  They called her Nanny and so did every kid that came over.  The house is huge, huge, huge (Daddy still lives next door) and had a wonderful enclosed screen front porch that we played on most of the time, especially during rainy days.  We were so very close and then in the 6th grade, age 11, I broke my leg, severely.  It was October and I was out of school until January with the leg.  (Back then they didn't put in rods or pins, it just healed.  It was a bad, bad break.)  In a child's timetable that kind of distance does funny things and our relationship was forever changed.  She found new friends at school and by the time I came back to school, with a wheelchair and crutches she had moved on.  Even though Jean Ann lived next door we were not as close anymore.  We were friends but her circle of friends changed and she became very "popular".  When we moved on to junior high all the 7th graders were divided into sections.  She was in section 7-3 and I, 7-5.  I was alone and found a new friend that became my new best friend until we graduated from high school.  That is another story.  Jean Ann's new circle of friends were of the popular crowd and by the time we were in 9th grade she was football queen and I was the wall flower.  She acknowledged me but the relationship as best friends definitely was ended.  The popular path for Jean Ann was not kind and by the time we hit 10th grade she became pregnant.  It broke my heart but our friendship came around again.  Her parents rented her a tiny house to move into at the age of 15, by herself and I often stayed the night with her as we watched her belly grow.  I remember her bedroom wall had a life size poster of Mark Spitz with his 7 Olympic medals and his speedo bathing suit.  She was trying to be a grown up person but she was a child having a child and the lesson here was not lost on me.  I'm not sure why she moved out but I think the family needed a break.  She and baby BC moved home but tragedy was not far away.  Shortly after moving home she and her father were close again and he was very proud of that grandson.  He was a truck driver and was killed in a horrible accident involving fog down south.  Jean Ann was distraught and I think that was then end of her sanity.  The baby's father soon after got custody of the baby.  I don't know what transpired to make that happen but it did.  She left to move to Texas and got mixed up into bad drugs that eventually cooked her brain.  Someone with so much hope and promise, a very, very bright girl, done in.  I've heard some bits and pieces of her life and about the age of 23 she called me from Texas, married to a wonderful guy, she said, and they were trying to have a baby.  I think she did have another boy and a few more children after that but what I know of what happened to her is a bit of rumor.  She passed away a few years ago in a nursing home from a heart attack.  I miss that fun girl of 10.