I’ve been really lax in keeping up with the #52stories project writing prompts from Family Search but this one caught my eye and I knew I had to tell the story of my first best friend, Kristi Petty. We have been friends ever since we were wee bitty things in kindergarten at Walnut Elementary School in Ashville, Ohio. Brownie Troop, softball, school plays, band camp…. been there, done that with her.
If I had to pick one word to describe our friendship, it would be “epic.” There is just practically no other word that encapsulates the sheer magnitude or scope of shenanigans and misdeeds that we have experienced and/or perpetrated together. To this day, if you ask her, I even tried to kill her at one point. Seriously, she even recently posted horridly graphic hand drawn Get Well cards from fellow first grade classmates as a reminder of this incident on my Facebook feed, which you can see below in the gallery. I will be reminded of this even when we’re 90, gray and feeble. (If you’re wondering, she fell off the slide onto the pavement and was seriously injured. She wrongly asserts I pushed her to go down the slide first.)
If they ever had made a female version of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure movie, they could of used our lives as the basis for the script. Stolen cars (we nearly wrecked), sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, sitting in cake, sneaking wine coolers while floating in the pool at night, an aggressive driving and tailgating incident, my boyfriend who refused to drive any further till she drank some booze, using a ouija board in the mall parking lot and so on. I think the comedic high point of our friendship was on New Year’s Eve at a club with a drunk little Asian man dancing in between us (i.e., groping) while yelling “Girrrrrrls, I loooooove you!” Yeah. That happened, true story. Seriously. There is so much more I could go on about but honestly, I’m seriously trying to save our reputations at this point. ♥
I can’t tally how many broken hearts, bad boyfriends, rumors and lies we’ve weathered together. Don’t get me started on how many of the same boys we dated in high school. (She’ll know EXACTLY whom I’m referring to if she reads this because he dated half the band girls.) How many awful 90’s hair trends did we experience together? Bad fashion trends? I’m sure if you added it all up, we likely wasted a good five years of our lives on the telephone and burned through three reams of notebook paper passing notes.
Aside from the crazy, drunk and semi-naughty things, there’s also been a ton of good times and lots of laughs. I fondly remember her taking bread from our lunch at Spaghetti Warehouse and stuffing it in her purse to take back to work! Hilarious! And there was meaningful moments too… she was there at the hospital after I had my babies, she was there through my divorce, she saved me from an abusive boyfriend trying to strangle me, she came when we had my daughter’s baby shower last September… she’s just always been there in my life and I can’t imagine her ever not being there in some capacity. My dad has this theory that people only have three “true” friends in your life that you can ever really count and that no matter if it’s been five years or twenty-five years, you could call those people and pick up right where you left off. She is one of those people for me.
I don’t have much left from my elementary and high school years since my ex burned all my yearbooks, etc. But I do have a few scant pieces of our past together. Enjoy the flashback!
