Boy And Girl Friendship Quotes

Girls will get together just to get together. Guys need an activity as an excuse. Otherwise it’s too homo for them to handle.

I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live - if I’m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love.

Sometimes you want to say, “I love you, but…” Yet the “but” takes away the ‘I love you’. In love their are no ‘buts’ or ‘if’s’ or ‘when’. It’s just there, and always. No beginning, no end. It’s the condition-less state of the heart. Not a feeling that comes and goes at the whim of the emotions. It is there in our heart, a part of our heart…eventually grafting itself into each limb and cell of our bodies. Love changes our brain, the way we move and talk. Love lives in our spirit and graces us with its presence each day, until death. To say “I love you, but….” is to say, “I did not love you at all”. I say this to you now: I love you, with no beginning, no end. I love you as you have become an extra necessary organ in my body. I love you as only a girl could love a boy. Without fear. Without expectations. Wanting nothing in return, except that you allow me to keep you here in my heart, that I may always know your strength, your eyes, and your spirit that gave me freedom and let me fly.

[novan]: bassists are very good with their fingers [novan]: and some of us sing backup vocals, so that means we're good with our mouths too... (~ IM chat with Novan Chang, 18, bassist)

In these fast and fickle times, it’s nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby; the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls”; and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

Who are you anyway? What are you even doing here?” “Haven,” she said quietly, peeking at him. He gazed at her peculiarly. “Heaven? No, this definitely isn't Heaven. But I get why you’re confused, since I'm standing in front of you.” She stared at him, and he cracked a smile. “I'm kidding. Well, kinda… I have been told I've taken a girl to Heaven a time or two.” “Haven, not Heaven,” she said, louder than before. Nothing about the conversation made sense to her. “My name’s Haven.

I’m gonna take a nap, Heaven,” he said, wanting away from her to clear his head. He didn’t like feeling uncomfortable in his house. “Haven,” she corrected him as he started to walk away. “I know,” he said. “I kinda like Heaven though.” She turned to him, and their eyes met for the first time since he’d walked into the room. “Me, too.

A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone.

Boys can break your heart and betray you, but not in the same stinging way girls can.

As juvenile as we sound, sometimes the most fun thing in the world is laughing with girls about boys.

Every kind of relationship needs encouragement from both parties. Be it marriage, dating, friendship, enmity etc.

Being friendzoned is like standing near fire. You stand there to seek some warmth, but get burnt instead.

Nate stared, slack-jawed as the cab merged with the traffic and became impossible to spot. That was it. They chose each other. Just then, the dark sky lit up with fireworks. A cab sailing the street honked in celebration . In the night air , Nate thought he could hear Serena and Blairs' laughter, though he knew that was impossible; they were too far away by now. But as we know, in this city anything is possible

Something that’s bothered me for a while now is the current profligacy in YA culture of Team Boy 1 vs Team Boy 2 fangirling. [...] Despite the fact that I have no objection to shipping, this particular species of team-choosing troubled me, though I had difficulty understanding why. Then I saw it applied to Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy – Team Peeta vs Team Gale – and all of a sudden it hit me that anyone who thought romance and love-triangles were the main event in that series had utterly missed the point. Sure, those elements are present in the story, but they aren’t anywhere near being the bones of it, because The Hunger Games, more than anything else, is about war, survival, politics, propaganda and power. Seeing such a strong, raw narrative reduced to a single vapid argument – which boy is cuter? – made me physically angry. So, look. People read different books for different reasons. The thing I love about a story are not necessarily the things you love, and vice versa. But riddle me this: are the readers of these series really so excited, so thrilled by the prospect of choosing! between! two! different! boys! that they have to boil entire narratives down to a binary equation based on male physical perfection and, if we’re very lucky, chivalrous behaviour? While feminism most certainly champions the right of women to chose their own partners, it also supports them to choose things besides men, or to postpone the question of partnership in favour of other pursuits – knowledge, for instance. Adventure. Careers. Wild dancing. Fun. Friendship. Travel. Glorious mayhem. And while, as a woman now happily entering her fourth year of marriage, I’d be the last person on Earth to suggest that male companionship is inimical to any of those things, what’s starting to bother me is the comparative dearth of YA stories which aren’t, in some way, shape or form, focussed on Girls Getting Boyfriends, and particularly Hot Immortal Or Magical Boyfriends Whom They Will Love For All Eternity. Blog post: Love Team Freezer

The friendship of two young people,' says Goethe somewhere, 'is delightful when the girl likes to learn and the boy to teach.' It will perhaps be said that this virgin curiosity is no more than unconscious physical desire; but what does it matter, if this desire sharpens the mind and deadens conceit?

I consider telling my brother, asking him for help. But tell him what exactly? I have no black eyes, no bloody noses to report: Cordelia does nothing physical. If it was boys, chasing or teasing, he would know what to do, but I don’t suffer from boys in this way. Against girls and their indirectness, their whisperings, he would be helpless.

Females and boys are the only creatures that propose others for friendship. As for the rest of us, friendship sort of just happens.

If I could have one friend, just one in all the world, I know that I would not seek out a boy or pretty girl. The friend I’d dare to choose to stand by me each day would be a dragon fierce enough to scare the world away.

On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on. Scarlet sumac had passed and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember sakes and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings. Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one's limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey. I think I can still do it - one thinks many foolish things when November's bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze. A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that? Maybe not. The last few years of my life have been characterized by stripping away, one by one, loves and communities that sustain the soul. A young colleague, new to my English department, recently asked me who I hang around with at school. "Nobody," I had to say, feeling briefly ashamed. This solitude is one of the surprises of middle age, especially if one's youth has been rich in love and friendship and children. If you do your job right, children leave home; few communities can stand an individual's most pitiful, amateur truth telling. So the soul must stand in her own meager feathers and learn to fly - or simply take hopeful jumps into the wind. In the Christian calendar, November 1 is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas - saints - who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one - who annoys you so - pretends for a day that he's the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday. Imagine a hectic procession of revelers - the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind's eye, these old firends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints; but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or notice, the feast, indeed, of most of us. It's an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet. Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: "nothing special," as Buddhists say, meaning "everything." Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral. All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along. A feast of being.

In Tariq's grimace, Laila learned that boys differed from girls in this regard. They didn't make a show of friendship. They felt no urge, no need, for this sort of talk... Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

Tis true what Hemingway says--if we're lucky enough to live our dreams in youth, as Ernest Hemingway did in 1920's Paris and I did with the Beat poets, then youth's dreams become a moveable feast you take wherever you go--youthful love remains the repast plentiful; exquisite, substantive and good. You can live on happy memories. Eat of them forever.

Peter never wore underwear, Connie had complained, and the fact grew in my mind, making me nauseous in a not unpleasant way. The sleepy crease of his eyes from his permanent high. Connie paled in comparison: I didn't really believe that friendship could be an end in itself, not just the background fuzz to the dramatics of boys loving you or not loving you.

Even without much experience in friendships, the lonely girl and the castaway boy filled the time as two friends should.

Kindness and empathy are the magic colors that paint our world with love, turning every heart into a masterpiece of compassion.

I didn’t realize it was possible to obsess over a girl as much as you can over a boy.

For a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl to become good friends was not easy under any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the world.

It sucks enough when girlfriends break plans with each other for a boy, but at least that’s not against the natural order of things, like when a boy blows off his girlfriend for friends. . . . Or maybe I’ve had it wrong all along. Since friendships usually outlast relationships, why shouldn’t friends receive preferential treatment? Because you don’t sleep with your friends!

HEY NERD BOY! I KNOW YOU THINK YOU'RE SOMEHOW BEING MADE FUN OF, BUT THAT GIRL IS GENUINELY REACHING OUT TO YOU! YOU KNOW ABOUT FRIENDS, RIGHT? INSTEAD OF CONDESCENDING TO HER IN A PREEMPTIVE SHIELDING OF YOUR BRUISED AND BATTERED EGO, MAYBE JUST TALK TO HER ABOUT THE BOOK YOU BOTH LIKE? DO THIS NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE AND YOU'RE WRITING A COMIC TO DEAL WITH ALL THESE FEELINGS YEARS LATER!

Some compelling proof that women are indeed not born any more capable of empathy or connection than men comes from psychologist Niobe Way. In 2013 Way published a book called Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, which explores the friendships of young straight men. Way followed a group of boys from childhood through adolescence and found that when they were little, boys’ friendships with other boys were just as intimate and emotional as friendships between girls; it wasn’t until the norms of masculinity sank in that the boys ceased to confide in or express vulnerable feelings for one another. By the age of eighteen, society’s “no homo” creed had become so entrenched that they felt like the only people they could look to for emotional support were women, further perpetuating the notion that women are obligated by design to carry humanity’s emotional cargo.

And then he leaned forward and my stomach collapsed, taking in that last breath. I closed my eyes and watched in awe as all the butterflies flew up into the sky, free, mingling with the exploding lights.

He reached out and took her hand. Neither cared that someone might see. They had been taught all their lives that the only deep feelings between men and women were sexual, but now they knew that it was a lie. They were friends and they loved one another, and their hand-holding was perfectly innocent. It was one more thing to rejoice in, one more way in which they had risen above the system, above the machine.

We just stood there for a few seconds. Back when we were friends, we'd have already been laughing and joking. Now things were tense and awkward. There was no way I could ever be relaxed around this person again. To me, Sage would never be just Sage. She'd be Sage-the-boy-who-pretended-to-be-a-girl-and-who-I-kissed-that-one-time. No friendship could survive with that many hyphens.

What was it about needy girls? Jules wondered. They felt like they had the right to be needy, because they knew that other people would be interested in—although annoyed at—their needs. … They got all the attention. Boys turned their focus toward them, and messy situations results.

It's about the ways in which girls deal with anger and aggression, as opposed to the ways in which boys do. The premise is that boys tend to be more direct in their aggression - physical confrontation - while in contrast, girls use an indirect approach known as relational aggression. Relational aggression is a form of aggression where the group is used as a weapon to assault others and others' relationships. It uses lies, secrets, betrayals and a host of other two-faced tactics to destroy or damage the relationships and social standing of others in the group.

Liza Hempstock, who had been Bod's friend for the last six years, was different in another way; she was less likely to be there for him when Bod went down to the nettle patch to see her, and on the rare occasions when she was, she would be short-tempered, argumentative and often downright rude. Bod talked to Mr Owens about this, and after a few moments' reflection, his father said, "It's just women, I reckon. She liked you as a boy, probably isn't sure who you are now you're a young man. I used to play with one little girl down by the duck pond every day until she turned about your age, and then she threw an apple at my head and did not say another word to me until I was seventeen." Mrs Owens stiffened. "It was a pear I threw," she said, tartly, "and I was talking to you again soon enough, for we danced a measure at your cousin Ned's wedding, and that was but two days after your sixteenth birthday." Mr Owens said, "Of course you are right, my dear." He winked at Bod, to tell him that it was none of it serious. And then mouthed "Seventeen" to show that, really, it was.

It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist's real problem--a problem still incompletely imagined and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o'-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts, no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.

The girl. Was that who I was? I was the girl just like they were the boys. Was that how we were going to address each other for the entirety of this year? How family-feeling.

As a rule, she didn’t like boys very much, but she had to admit, Charlie was actually pretty nice.

If I was a boy, we'd run away together, and have a capital time; but as I'm a miserable girl, I must be proper, and stop at home. Don't tempt me, Teddy, it's a crazy plan.

It's all right for me to have boys as friends.

The corners of my mouth twitched. Wait. Did this boy just make me smile in the middle of the apocalypse?

This is a landscape of dreams cemented in the past, of hopes gone cold, of girls and boys for rent in officially empty tower blocks, where none is truly so.

I didn't really believe that friendship could be an end in itself, not just the background fuzz to the dramatics of boys loving or not loving you.

I love you, Ayesha. What would I do without you?" Zorawar said in the platonic way he'd always told her that he loved her. "I love you too, Zorawar. Always have always will." she said ambiguously.

We continued dancing as a swift gale wheeled through the hills of Santa Cruz. Xuan leaned down to whisper into my ear, his lips lightly brushing the helix. “Once upon a time there was a boy, and he loved a girl very much. He was sad because he didn’t think the girl noticed him. Until one day the uni- verse intervened and a beautiful comet brought them together after a tragic accident occurred that day. The boy and the girl found comfort and friendship in each other that night. And something new and extraordinary began to blossom under the heavens, something that would burn with such bright- ness that all the stars would be in awe. And the boy fell madly in love with the girl and promised to always find her, in this life and the next.” “That’s my favorite story.” Xuan smiled. “It’s the best one I’ve ever told, Ms. Steel.

Boys and girls,” he shakes his head, “they aren't friends, not really, unless they’re both gay. At least one of you is in the friendship because you want more from the other, but you either can’t or won’t ask for what you want.

You see what I am driving at. The mentally handicapped do not have a consciousness of power. Because of this perhaps their capacity for love is more immediate, lively and developed than that of other men. They cannot be men of ambition and action in society and so develop a capacity for friendship rather than for efficiency. They are indeed weak and easily influenced, because they confidently give themselves to others; they are simple certainly, but often with a very attractive simplicity. Their first reaction is often one of welcome and not of rejection or criticism. Full of trust, they commit themselves deeply. Who amongst us has not been moved when met by the warm welcome of our boys and girls, by their smiles, their confidence and their outstretched arms. Free from the bonds of conventional society, and of ambition, they are free, not with the ambitious freedom of reason, but with an interior freedom, that of friendship. Who has not been struck by the rightness of their judgments upon the goodness or evil of men, by their profound intuition on certain human truths, by the truth and simplicity of their nature which seeks not so much to appear to be, as to be. Living in a society where simplicity has been submerged by criticism and sometimes by hypocrisy, is it not comforting to find people who can be aware, who can marvel? Their open natures are made for communion and love.

I should have learned how to tell another girl she’d hurt my feelings or understand I’d hurt hers. I should have been able to figure out how to say that I didn’t know how to turn down a boy’s attention, or that I’d rather not come along, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still your friend.

I don’t want to have sex with Lydia. But I think maybe other kinds of touches would be nice. Maybe there’s some subset of being in love with someone that doesn’t involve having sex with them but just involves hugging. Maybe we can figure out how hugging works by practicing on each other.

And then there was the illogical art of female friendship itself, the way it seemed to demand an ability to both keep and reveal secrets using precise timing. Whenever she moved to a new town, girls would take her aside at Sunday school and breathlessly confide their crushes on certain boys.

A bagel shop isn't the most romantic spot to tell a girl you like her. But that night romance wasn't the priority. Our time there wasn't intended to be mushy. I didn't propose marriage or say I was madly in love with her, and she didn't swoon. What I did tell her was that through our friendship I'd grown to respect her.

It was the first time I discovered that some girls actually sneak out of the house during slumber parties and meet up with boys. I would’ve never known if I hadn’t gone to the bathroom at midnight and caught Macy and Adrienne climbing through the bathroom window. They had on eyeliner, perfume, and cut-off shorts. Their only goodbye a glare that promised retribution if I didn’t keep my mouth shut.

August 25, 1991 Dear friend, I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn’t try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have. Please don’t try to figure out who she is because then you might figure out who I am, and I really don’t want you to do that. I will call people by different names or generic names because I don’t want you to find me. I didn’t enclose a return address for the same reason. I mean nothing bad by this. Honest. I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands and doesn’t try to sleep with people even if they could have. I need to know that these people exist. I think you of all people would understand that because I think you of all people are alive and appreciate what that means. At least I hope you do because other people look to you for strength and friendship and it’s that simple. At least that’s what I’ve heard. So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be. I try to think of my family as a reason for me being this way, especially after my friend Michael stopped going to school one day last spring and we heard Mr. Vaughn’s voice on the loudspeaker. “Boys and girls, I regret to inform you that one of our students has passed on. We will hold a memorial service for Michael Dobson during assembly this Friday.” I don’t know how news travels around school and why it is very often right. Maybe it was in the lunchroom. It’s hard to remember. But Dave with the awkward glasses told us that Michael killed himself. His mom played bridge with one of Michael’s neighbors and they heard the gunshot. I don’t really remember much of what happened after that

I know that these things will never come back. I may see the rocks again, and smell the flowers, and watch the dawn sunshine chase the shadows from the old sulphuric-colored walls, but the light that sprang from the heightened consciousness of wartime, the glory seen by the enraptured ingenious eyes of twenty-two, will be upon them no more. I am a girl no longer, and the world, for all its excitements of chosen work and individualistic play, has grown tame in comparison with Malta during those years of our anguish. It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist’s real problem — a problem still incompletely imagined, and still quite unresolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o’-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.

He got into the tub and ran a little cold water. Then he lowered his thin, hairy body into the just-right warmth and stared at the interstices between the tiles. Sadness--he had experienced that emotion ten thousand times. As exhalation is to inhalation, he thought of it as the return from each thrust of happiness. Lazily soaping himself, he gave examples. When he was five and Irwin eight, their father had breezed into town with a snowstorm and come to see them where they lived with their grandparents in the small Connecticut city. Their father had been a vagabond salesman and was considered a bum by people who should know. But he had come into the closed, heated house with all the gimcrack and untouchable junk behind glass and he had smelled of cold air and had had snow in his curly black hair. He had raved about the world he lived in, while the old people, his father and mother, had clucked sadly in the shadows. And then he had wakened the boys in the night and forced them out into the yard to worship the swirling wet flakes, to dance around with their hands joined, shrieking at the snow-laden branches. Later, they had gone in to sleep with hearts slowly returning to bearable beatings. Great flowering things had opened and closed in Norman's head, and the resonance of the wild man's voice had squeezed a sweet, tart juice through his heart. But then he had wakened to a gray day with his father gone and the world walking gingerly over the somber crust of dead-looking snow. It had taken him some time to get back to his usual equanimity. He slid down in the warm, foamy water until just his face and his knobby white knees were exposed. Once he had read Wuthering Heights over a weekend and gone to school susceptible to any heroine, only to have the girl who sat in front of him, whom he had admired for some months, emit a loud fart which had murdered him in a small way and kept him from speaking a word to anyone the whole week following. He had laughed at a very funny joke about a Negro when Irwin told it at a party, and then the following day had seen some white men lightly kicking a Negro man in the pants, and temporarily he had questioned laughter altogether. He had gone to several universities with the vague exaltation of Old Man Axelrod and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness. He had come to take shallower breaths, and the two had become mercifully mixed into melancholy contentment. He wondered how pain would breach that low-level strength. "I'm a small man of definite limitations," he declared to himself, and relaxed in the admission.

It’s such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle—oh, look, we broke down this wall, I’m going to look at you like a girl and you’re going to look at me like a boy and we’re going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About There What About There. And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself that it’s not the middle but will last forever.

Our boys are failing in school. Has it occurred to no one that we have checked them at every turn, perversely insisting that they must not form brotherhoods, that they must not identify their manhood with practical and intellectual skills that transform the world, and that they must not ever have the opportunity, apart from girls, to attach themselves in friendship to men who could teach them? For good reason boys of that awkward age used to build tree houses and hang signs barring girls. They knew, if only instinctively, that the fire of the friendship could not subsist otherwise. But what similar thing can they do now without inviting either reproach or suspicion? Thus what is perfectly natural and healthy, indeed very much needed for certain people at certain times or for certain purposes, is cast as irrational and bigoted, or dubious and weak; and thus some boys will cobble together their own brotherhoods that eschew tenderness altogether, criminal brotherhoods that land them in prison. This is all right by us, it seems. Better to harass the Boy Scouts on Monday, and on Tuesday build another wing for the Ministry of Corrections.

Let’s not talk about girls.” Sirius rolled his eyes, “This might be the most important day of our lives! This is the day we became legends; the day our friendship was forged in the fire of itching powder!” “They don’t know it was us, do they?” Peter asked, nervously, tidying away his chess set. Remus shook his head. “Slughorn reckons it was a Slytherin girl. Or a gang of marauders.” “Marauders!” Sirius sat up, suddenly, “That’s it! Raise your glasses, boys!” “We don’t have glasses.” James replied, amused. “Well, just pretend.” Sirius shook his head, irritably, “From this day forward, we are The Marauders!

The girls - Tallskinnyblonde, Ponytailfreckleface, Shortblackhair, Alwayswearspearls, and Roundchubbycheeks - hung back in a little covey, walking slower, chattering and giggling. Their voices lifted up to Kya like chimes. She was too young to care much about the boys; her eyes fixed on the troop of girls. Together they squatted to watch a crab skittering sideways across the sand. Laughing, they leaned against one another's shoulders until they flopped in the sand in a bundle. Kya bit her bottom lip as she watched. Wondering how it would feel to be among them. Their joy created an aura almost visible against the deepening sky. Ma had said women need one another more than they need men, but she never told her how to get inside the pride.

And then there was the illogical art of female friendship itself, the way it seemed to demand an ability to both keep and reveal secrets using precise timing. Whenever she moved to a new town, girls would take her aside at Sunday school and breathlessly confide their crushes on certain boys. She listened to these confessions, faithfully promising she would never tell. And she didn’t. Which was all wrong because it turned out she was supposed to tell. Her job as confidante was to break that confidence by telling Boy X that Girl Y thought he was cute, thus initiating a chain reaction of interest between the two parties. “Why don’t you just tell him yourself?” she’d say to these would-be friends. “He’s right there.” The girls would draw back in horror.

I reach out and squeeze her hand, and remember everything we’ve lived through together. The normal things we endured as we grew from girls to women. The days in school where boys would line us up in order of our fuckability. The parties where it was normal to lie on top of a semi-conscious girl, do things to her, then call her a slut afterwards. A Christmas number-one song about a pregnant woman being stuffed into the boot of a car and driven off a bridge. Laughing when your male friends made rape jokes. Opening a newspaper and seeing the breasts of a girl who had only just turned legal, dressed in school uniform to make her look underage. Of the childhood films we grew up on, and loved, and knew all the words to, where, at the end, a girl would always get chosen for looking the prettiest compared to all the others. Reading magazines that told you to mirror men’s body language, and hum on their dick when you went down on them, that turned into books about how to get them to commit by not being yourself. Of size zero, and Atkins, and Five-Two, and cabbage soup, and juice cleanses and eat clean. Of pole-dancing lessons as a great way to get fit, and actually, if you want to be really cool, come to the actual strip club too. Of being sexually assaulted when you kissed someone on a dance floor and not thinking about it properly until you are twenty-seven and read a book about how maybe it was wrong. Of being jealous of your friend who got assaulted on the dance floor because why didn’t he pick you to assault? Boys not wanting to be with you unless you fuck them quickly. Boys not wanting to be with you because you fucked them too quickly. Being terrified to walk anywhere in the dark in case the worst thing happens to you, and so your male friend walks you home to keep you safe, and then comes into your bedroom and does the worst thing to you, and now, when you look him up online, he’s engaged to a woman who wears a feminist T-shirt and isn’t going to change her name when they get married. Of learning to have no pubic hair, and how liberating it is to pay thirty-five pounds a month to rip this from your body and lurch up in agony. Rings around famous women’s bodies saying ‘look at this cellulite’, oh, by the way, here is a twenty-quid cream so you don’t get

A friend of yours?” I shake my head but then nod. “I don’t know. I think so.” I tip my head in the direction of the office next door. “It was the guy, Gabe, from the waiting room. He pulled me into the boys’ room so the girls wouldn’t see me cry. Then he helped to sneak me out the visitors’ gate so I wouldn’t have to go back to class.” Laura offers an empathetic smile. “What did it feel like to have someone care about your feelings?” “I think it helped. My mom and sister have been trying to comfort me, but sometimes that makes me feel worse. They worry so much about me and I feel like I need to reassure them I’m going to be okay. I can’t just let it out.” “With Gabe you can?” “I guess. He helped me and then he made me laugh.” I feel my cheeks burn a little with embarrassment

There is always the risk: something is good and good and good and good, and then all at once it gets awkward. All at once, she sees you looking at her, and then she doesn't want to joke around with you anymore, because she doesn't want to seem flirty, because she doesn't want you to think she likes you. It's such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle - oh, look, we broke down this wall, I'm going to look at you like a girl and you're going to look at me like a boy and we're going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About There What About There. And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself that it's not the middle but will last forever.

I missed you." There was a pause. Then Tariq turned to her with a half-grinning, half-grimacing look of distaste. "What's the matter with you?" How many times had she, Hasina, and Giti said those same three words to each other, Laila wondered, said it without hesitation, after only two or three days of not seeing each other? I missed you, Hasina. Oh, I missed you too. In Tariq's grimace, Laila learned that boys differed from girls in this regard. They didn't make a show of friendship. They felt no urge, no need, for this sort of talk. Laila imagined it had been this way for her brothers too. Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly. "I was trying to annoy you," she said. He gave her a sidelong glance. "It worked." But she thought his grimace softened. And she thought that maybe the sunburn on his cheeks deepened momentarily.

I was certainly not the best mother. That goes without saying. I didn’t set out to be a bad mother, however. It just happened. As it was, being a bad mother was child’s play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn’t do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul. Why did I allow Grace to make Mia cry? Why did I snap at Mia to stop just to silence the noise? Why did I sneak to a quiet place, whenever I could? Why did I rush the days—will them to hurry by—so I could be alone? Other mothers took their children to museums, the gardens, the beach. I kept mine indoors, as much as I could, so we wouldn’t cause a scene. I lie awake at night wondering: what if I never have a chance to make it up to Mia? What if I’m never able to show her the kind of mother I always longed to be? The kind who played endless hours of hide-and-seek, who gossiped side by side on their daughters’ beds about which boys in the junior high were cute. I always envisioned a friendship between my daughters and me. I imagined shopping together and sharing secrets, rather than the formal, obligatory relationship that now exists between myself and Grace and Mia. I list in my head all the things that I would tell Mia if I could. That I chose the name Mia for my great-grandmother, Amelia, vetoing James’s alternative: Abigail. That the Christmas she turned four, James stayed up until 3:00 a.m. assembling the dollhouse of her dreams. That even though her memories of her father are filled with nothing but malaise, there were split seconds of goodness: James teaching her how to swim, James helping her prepare for a fourth-grade spelling test. That I mourn each and every time I turned down an extra book before bed, desperate now for just five more minutes of laughing at Harry the Dirty Dog. That I go to the bookstore and purchase a copy after unsuccessfully ransacking the basement for the one that used to be hers. That I sit on the floor of her old bedroom and read it again and again and again. That I love her. That I’m sorry. Colin

Girls in our society share in the masculine hero myth because, like boys, they must also develop a reliable ego-identity and acquire an education. But there is an older layer of the mind that seems to come to the surface in their feelings, with the aim of making them into women, not into imitation men. When this ancient content of the psyche begins to make its appearance, the modern young woman may repress it because it threatens to cut her off from the emancipated equality of friendship and opportunity to compete with men that have become her modern privileges... this repression may be so successful that for a time she will maintain an identification with the masculine intellectual goals she learned at school or college. Even when she marries, she will preserve some illusion of freedom, despite her ostensible act of submission to the archetype of marriage-- with its implicit injunction to become a mother. And so there may occur, as we very frequently see today, that conflict which in the end forces the woman to rediscover her buried womanhood in a painful (but ultimately rewarding) manner.

Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought beforehand chiefly at her own deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it, and something also of the triumph she should have over her mother and her aunts by this very decided course of action; she didn't want her hair to look pretty,–that was out of the question,–she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl, and not to find fault with her. But now, when Tom began to laugh at her, and say she was like an idiot, the affair had quite a new aspect. She looked in the glass, and still Tom laughed and clapped his hands, and Maggie's cheeks began to pale, and her lips to tremble a little. "Oh, Maggie, you'll have to go down to dinner directly," said Tom. "Oh, my!" ...But Maggie, as she stood crying before the glass, felt it impossible that she should go down to dinner and endure the severe eyes and severe words of her aunts, while Tom and Lucy, and Martha, who waited at table, and perhaps her father and her uncles, would laugh at her; for if Tom had laughed at her, of course every one else would; and if she had only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and Lucy, and had the apricot pudding and the custard! What could she do but sob? She sat as helpless and despairing among her black locks as Ajax among the slaughtered sheep. Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken friendships; but it was not less bitter to Maggie–perhaps it was even more bitter–than what we are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life. "Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by and by," is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what happened to him, of what he liked and disliked when he was in frock and trousers, but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what he felt then, when it was so long from one Midsummer to another; what he felt when his school fellows shut him out of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfulness; or on a rainy day in the holidays, when he didn't know how to amuse himself, and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when his mother absolutely refused to let him have a tailed coat that "half," although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life, that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.

My locker. The card is still there, a white patch of hope with my name on it. I tear it off and open it. Something falls to my feet. The card has a picture of two cutesy teddy bears sharing a pot of honey. I open it. 'Thanks for understanding. You're the sweetest!' It was signed with a purple pen. 'Good Luck!!! Heather.' I bend down to find what dropped from the card. It was the friendship necklace I had given Heather in a fit of insanity around Christmas. Stupid, stupid, stupid. How stupid could I be? I hear a crackling inside me, my ribs are collapsing in on my lungs, which is why I can't breathe. I stumble down the hall, down another hall, down another hall, till I find my very own door and slip inside and throw the lock, not even bothering to turn on the lights, just falling falling a mile downhill to the bottom of my brown chair, where I can ink my teeth into the soft white skin of my wrist and cry like the baby I am. I rock, thumping my head against the cinder-block wall. A half-forgotten holiday has unveiled every knife that sticks inside me, every cut. No Rachel, no Heather, not even a silly, geeky boy who would like the inside girl I think I am.

Psychologists who study peer influence ask what it is about teenage girls that makes them so susceptible to peer contagion and so good at spreading it. Many believe it has something to do with the way girls tend to socialize.35 “When we listen to girls versus boys talk to each other, girls are much more likely to reply with statements that are validating and supportive than questioning,” Amanda Rose, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, told me. “They’re willing to suspend reality to get into their friends’ worlds more. For this reason, adolescent girls are more likely to take on, for instance, the depression their friends are going through and become depressed themselves.” This female tendency to meet our friends where they are and share in their pain can be a productive and valuable social skill. Co-rumination (excessive discussion of a hardship) “does make the relationship between girls stronger,” Professor Rose told me. But it also leads friends to take on each other’s ailments. Teenage girls spread psychic illness because of features natural to their modes of friendship: co-rumination; excessive reassurance seeking; and negative-feedback seeking, in which someone maintains a feeling of control by angling for confirmation of her low self-concept from others.36 It isn’t hard to see why the 24/7 forum of social media intensifies and increases the incidence of each.

A Life like Mine: Round and round, round and round, this is how life is feeling at the very moment. Why on earth, would anyone want to live in a life that is never ending chaos? Not me, she thought to herself. Gloria Jacobson, 19 years old, was on her way to a life of success when she was finally looking into a life of school, love, and a family that could look up to her for being the next honor roll student. Well, ok, technically speaking, she wasn’t an “Honor roll” Student, and she wasn’t in love yet. But she did have one thing, and that was a family that loved her. Skeptical or not, as she was, she was headed to sleep after a long day’s journey through thoughts and school. She went to a College Prep school, so it wasn’t exactly the easiest. In fact, sometimes school to her could become one of the toughest things. She rolled up her jean legs and through on her purple hooded jacket then slipped out the door. “Mom will hopefully allow her to go to the school ball tomorrow night”; she thought as she crossed her fingers. It was going to be a school formal, and all the way through elementary and middle school, she wasn’t ever allowed to go. Why on earth wouldn’t her parents ever let her just be a normal teenage girl. After all she only turns 20, towards the end of graduation. Her entire life was devoted to school work, college apps, and volunteer work at different places after school, and church activities. She never seemed to have any time for boys or even friendships at this time. She practically had to beg for the ones that she already had. ~part of my story. :)

She was interviewing one of my favorite television actors, Don Johnson of Miami Vice. As he reclined on a couch in his lovely home, Don told Barbara about the joys and difficulties in his life. He talked of past struggles with drug and alcohol abuse and work addiction. Then he spoke of his relationships with women—how exciting and attractive he found them. I could see his energy rise and his breath quicken as he spoke. An air of intoxication seemed to fill the room. Don said his problem was he liked women too much and found it hard to be with one special partner over a long period. He would develop a deep friendship and intimacy, but then his eyes would wander. I thought to myself, this man has been sexually abused! His problems sounded identical to those of adult survivors I counsel in my practice. But then I reconsidered: Maybe I’ve been working too hard. Perhaps I’m imagining a sexual abuse history that isn’t really there. Then it happened. Barbara leaned forward and, with a smile, asked, “Don, is it true that you had your first sexual relationship when you were quite young, about twelve years old, with your seventeen-year-old baby-sitter?” My jaw dropped. Don grinned back at Barbara. He cocked his head to the side; a twinkle came into his blue eyes. “Yeah,” he said, “and I still get excited just thinking about her today.” Barbara showed no alarm. The next day I wrote Barbara Walters a letter, hoping to enlighten her about the sexual abuse of boys. Had Don been a twelve-year-old girl and the baby-sitter a seventeen-year-old boy, we wouldn’t hesitate to call what had happened rape. It would make no difference how cooperative or seemingly “willing” the victim had been. The sexual contact was exploitive and premature, and would have been whether the twelve-year-old was a boy or a girl. This past experience and perhaps others like it may very well be at the root of the troubles Don Johnson has had with long-term intimacy. Don wasn’t “lucky to get a piece of it early,” as some people might think. He was sexually abused and hadn’t yet realized it.   Acknowledging past sexual abuse is an important step in sexual healing. It helps us make a connection between our present sexual issues and their original source. Some survivors have little difficulty with this step: They already see themselves as survivors and their sexual issues as having stemmed directly from sexual abuse. A woman who is raped sees an obvious connection if she suddenly goes from having a pleasurable sex life to being terrified of sex. For many survivors, however, acknowledging sexual abuse is a difficult step. We may recall events, but through lack of understanding about sexual abuse may never have labeled those experiences as sexual abuse. We may have dismissed experiences we had as insignificant. We may have little or no memory of past abuse. And we may have difficulty fully acknowledging to ourselves and to others that we were victims. It took me years to realize and admit that I had been raped on a date, even though I knew what had happened and how I felt about it. I needed to understand this was in fact rape and that I had been a victim. I needed to remember more and to stop blaming myself before I was able to acknowledge my experience as sexual abuse.

BEST FRIENDS SHOULD BE TOGETHER We’ll get a pair of those half-heart necklaces so every ask n’ point reminds us we are one glued duo. We’ll send real letters like our grandparents did, handwritten in smart cursive curls. We’ll extend cell plans and chat through favorite shows like a commentary track just for each other. We’ll get our braces off on the same day, chew whole packs of gum. We’ll nab some serious studs but tell each other everything. Double-date at a roadside diner exactly halfway between our homes. Cry on shoulders when our boys fail us. We’ll room together at State, cover the walls floor-to-ceiling with incense posters of pop dweebs gone wry. See how beer feels. Be those funny cute girls everybody’s got an eye on. We’ll have a secret code for hot boys in passing. A secret dog named Freshman Fifteen we’ll have to hide in the rafters during inspection. Follow some jam band one summer, grooving on lawns, refusing drugs usually. Get tattoos that only spell something when we stand together. I’ll be maid of honor in your wedding and you’ll be co-maid with my sister but only cause she’d disown me if I didn’t let her. We’ll start a store selling just what we like. We’ll name our firstborn daughters after one another, and if our husbands don’t like it, tough. Lifespans being what they are, we’ll be there for each other when our men have passed, and all the friends who come to visit our assisted living condo will be dazzled by what fun we still have together. We’ll be the kind of besties who make outsiders wonder if they’ve ever known true friendship, but we won’t even notice how sad it makes them and they won’t bring it up because you and I will be so caught up in the fun, us marveling at how not-good it never was.

It wasn't only my friends who suffered from female rivalry. I remember when I was just sixteen years old, during spring vacation, being whisked off to an early lunch by my best friend's brother, only to discover, to my astonishment and hurt, that she was expecting some college boys to drop by and didn't want me there to compete with her. When I started college at Sarah Lawrence, I soon noticed that while some of my classmates were indeed true friends, others seemed to resent that I had a boyfriend. It didn't help that Sarah Lawrence, a former girls' school, included very few straight men among its student body--an early lesson in how competing for items in short supply often brings out the worst in women. In graduate school, the stakes got higher, and the competition got stiffer, a trend that continued when I went on to vie for a limited number of academic jobs. I always had friends and colleagues with whom I could have trusted my life--but I also found women who seemed to view not only me but all other female academics as their rivals. This sense of rivalry became more painful when I divorced my first husband. Many of my friends I depended on for comfort and support suddenly began to view me as a threat. Some took me out to lunch to get the dirt, then dropped me soon after. I think they found it disturbing that I left my unhappy marriage while they were still committed to theirs. For other women, the threat seemed more immediate--twice I was told in no uncertain terms that I had better stay away from someone's husband, despite my protests that I would no more go after a friend's husband than I would stay friends with a woman who went after mine. Thankfully, I also had some true friends who remained loyal and supportive during one of the most difficult times of my life. To this day I trust them implicitly, with the kind of faith you reserve for people who have proved themselves under fire. But I've also never forgotten the shock and disappointment of discovering how quickly those other friendships turned to rivalries.

HEART OF TEA DEVOTION Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And, while the bubbling and loud hissing urn Throws up a steamy column and the cups That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful ev ning in. WILLIAM COWPER Perhaps the idea of a tea party takes you back to childhood. Do you remember dressing up and putting on your best manners as you sipped pretend tea out of tiny cups and shared pretend delicacies with your friends, your parents, or your teddy bears? Were you lucky enough to know adults who cared enough to share tea parties with you? And are you lucky enough to have a little person with whom you could share a tea party today? Is there a little girl inside you who longs for a lovely time of childish imagination and "so big" manners? It could be that the mention of teatime brings quieter memories-cups of amber liquid sipped in peaceful solitude on a big porch, or friendly confidences shared over steaming cups. So many of my own special times of closeness-with my husband, my children, my friends-have begun with putting a kettle on to boil and pulling out a tea tray. But even if you don't care for tea-if you prefer coffee or cocoa or lemonade or ice water, or if you like chunky mugs better than gleaming silver or delicate china, or if you find the idea of traditional tea too formal and a bit intimidating-there's still room for you at the tea table, and I think you would love it there! I have shared tea with so many people-from business executives to book club ladies to five-year-old boys. And I have found that few can resist a tea party when it is served with the right spirit. You see, it's not tea itself that speaks to the soul with such a satisfying message-although I must confess that I adore the warmth and fragrance of a cup of Earl Grey or Red Zinger. And it's not the teacups themselves that bring such a message of beauty and serenity and friendship-although my teacups do bring much pleasure. It's not the tea, in other words, that makes teatime special, it's the spirit of the tea party. It's what happens when women or men or children make a place in their life for the

We dragged Linc along. His current honey is working tonight." "Still the intern?" "Yeah." Helen sat on the curvy velvet chaise, made herself at home. "I'm starting to think he's getting serious about her." "And?" "I don't know. She's a nice girl, raised well. Focused, which he could use, and independent, which I appreciate." "But he's your baby." "But he's my baby," Helen agreed. "I miss the little boy sometimes, with the scabbed knees and loose shoelaces. Still see him in that tall, gorgeous lawyer in the three-piece suit that strolls in and out of my life now. And Jesus,

It's rather the possibility of friendship, unencumbered by feelings of attraction or shyness; the possibility of working on the same wavelength, as it were, with someone who understands you because he's a boy as you are, or a girl as you are. Committee work stifles the imagination, because people have to work down to the common denominator of what would be minimally acceptable to everyone. But friendship exalts the imagination. Indeed it is one of the things that the ancients said friendship was for. Plato suggests in Symposium that one of the highest forms of friendship is one whose love issues forth in beautiful and virtuous deeds, for thus "the partnership between [the friends] will be far closer and the bond of affection far stronger than between ordinary parents, because the children that they share surpass human children by being immortal as well as more beautiful.

That was the moment when Alice knew for sure that she and Charlie Erdling would be friends for the rest of their lives.

Patience is important not only in waiting for the right time to start a relationship, but also in allowing it to unfold at a healthy pace. Impatience rushes everything. It urges us to skip the time and attention a healthy friendship requires and to jump straight into emotional and physical intimacy.

The little boy touched his dust-streaked hand to Loretta’s hair and made a breathless “ooh” sound. He smelled like any little boy who had been hard at play, a bit sweaty yet somehow sweet, with the definite odor of dog and horse clinging to him. Blackbird concentrated on Loretta’s blue eyes, staring into them with unflinching intensity. The younger girl ran reverent fingertips over the flounces on Loretta’s bloomers, saying, “Tosi wannup,” over and over again. Loretta couldn’t help but smile. She was as strange to them as they were to her. She longed to gather them close and never let go. Friendly faces and human warmth. Their giggles made her long for home. With a throat that responded none too well to the messages from her brain, Loretta murmured, “Hello.” The sound of her own voice seemed unreal--an echo from the past. “Hi, hites.” Blackbird linked her chubby forefingers in an unmistakable sign of friendship. “Hah-ich-ka sooe ein conic?” Loretta had no idea what the child had asked until Blackbird steepled her fingers. “Oh--my house?” Loretta cupped a hand over her brow as if she were squinting into the distance. “Very far away.” Blackbird’s eyes sparkled with delight, and she burst into a long chain of gibberish, chortling and waving her hands. Loretta watched her, fascinated by the glow of happiness in her eyes, the innocence in her small face. She had always imagined Comanches, young and old, with blood dripping from their fingers. A deep voice came from behind her. “She asks how long you will eat and keep warm with us.” Startled, Loretta glanced over her shoulder to find Hunter reclining on a pallet of furs. Because he lay so low to the floor, she hadn’t seen him the first time she’d looked. Propping himself up on one elbow, he listened to his niece chatter for a moment. His eyes caught the light coming through the lodge door, glistening, fathomless. “You will tell her, ‘Pihet tabbe.’” Trust didn’t come easily to Loretta. “What does that mean?” A smile teased the corners of his mouth. “Pihet, three. Tabbe, the sun. Three suns. It was our bargain.” Relieved that she hadn’t dreamed his promise to take her home, Loretta repeated “pihet tabbe” to Blackbird. The little girl looked crestfallen and took Loretta’s hand. “Ka,” she cried. “Ein mea mon-ach.” “Ka, no. You are going a long way,” Hunter translated, pushing to his feet as he spoke. “I think she likes you.” He came to the bed and, with an indulgent smile, shooed the children away as Aunt Rachel shooed chickens. “Poke Wy-ar-pee-cha, Pony Girl,” he said as he scooped the unintimidated toddler off the furs and set her on the floor. His hand lingered a moment on her hair, a loving gesture that struck Loretta as totally out of character for a Comanche warrior. The fragile child, his rugged strength. The two formed a fascinating contrast. “She is from my sister who is dead.” Nodding toward the boy, he added, “Wakare-ee, Turtle, from Warrior.” Loretta didn’t want the children to leave her alone with their uncle. She gazed after them as they ran out the lodge door.

   His one friend was the black boy, Pepeu, whom he held in thrall. Together they plucked finches alive, made certain experiments with the flesh of a watermelon, and shouted obscenities at the girls washing tripes in the river.    Once, they tried crucifying a cat, but it got away.

And you don't have to cry about that boy. Boys are silly. The first thing you need is a best friend.

He’s so cute!” I heard her gush. “Don’t you think he’s the best-looking boy in our grade?” They all took turns at guessing who he liked. That was until one of the girls, I couldn’t tell who, shushed the others and mentioned Ali by name. They assumed she—meaning me—was asleep but didn’t want “her” to wake up and hear them talking about Jake. I smiled against my pillow. It had been obvious to everyone that Jake preferred Ali and possibly liked her, well me. It was all so confusing. Maybe it would be best if I told him outright that he’d been hanging out with me instead of Ali. At least we could start our friendship off properly, and he’d see that he really preferred me over her. I was sure Ali wouldn’t mind, she didn’t like him that way anyway.

Token friendships between poor girls. Both of us wanting so desperately for more, our screams drowned out by the wicked silence of the world. Nobody listens when bad girls cry.

Addison is a beautiful woman. That’s an understatement, actually. When I was a young boy, I overheard my grandfather describe a woman, saying, “That one could end friendships, start wars and make a glutton suck in his gut.

for one, thought of different outcomes for stories. You know, the boy doesn’t get the girl; the mountain is too formidable to climb; they don’t find their way home; the battle is lost, their friendship doesn’t develop. Life is not all strawberries and whipped cream after all.

When girls don’t act in the ways they’re expected to or when they are perceived to be acting out, they’re punished.[*2] Any one individual teacher might not be sexist or racist, but the education system is: teachers belong to the same culture as everyone else, and it can shape the way they view behavior and achievement. School can become a place where society’s problems are replicated. Teachers call on boys more often than girls, the Sadkers documented, and pay attention to their students in slightly different ways: they compliment girls on their clothing but boys on their achievements. Girls succeed or struggle in school according to the expectations society sets for them. Sometimes these attitudes are explicit, but more often they’re humming quietly in the background, unnoticed. The hum grows louder and clearer over the years, until we find ourselves singing the same song, uncertain of how we learned it. I

This time, it wasn’t a lie. It was a gift.

While boys are often taught that competition can push them to new heights, cultural stereotypes of competition among girls can be a lot more venomous—cat fights, “queen bees and wannabes,” as the author Rosalind Wiseman so vividly captured in her book by the same title. For this reason, girls especially need help internalizing the message that competition and friendship don’t have to be at odds with one another, said Lisa Damour, and instead can be felt “one right after the other.” Damour suggested that parents model healthy competitive behavior themselves. When playing games with your children, instead of letting them win, which sends the signal that beating them is unkind, teach the benefits of being a worthy rival, playing to win while also encouraging and celebrating their efforts whenever they make a smart move.

Dear Jon, A real Dear Jon let­ter, how per­fect is that?! Who knew you’d get dumped twice in the same amount of months. See, I’m one para­graph in and I’ve al­ready fucked this. I’m writ­ing this be­cause I can’t say any of this to you face-to-face. I’ve spent the last few months ques­tion­ing a lot of my friend­ships and won­der­ing what their pur­pose is, if not to work through big emo­tional things to­gether. But I now re­al­ize: I don’t want that. And I know you’ve all been there for me in other ways. Maybe not in the lit­eral sense, but I know you all would have done any­thing to fix me other than lis­ten­ing to me talk and al­low­ing me to be sad with­out so­lu­tions. And now I am writ­ing this let­ter rather than pick­ing up the phone and talk­ing to you be­cause, de­spite every thing I know, I just don’t want to, and I don’t think you want me to ei­ther. I lost my mind when Jen broke up with me. I’m pretty sure it’s been the sub­ject of a few of your What­sApp con­ver­sa­tions and more power to you, be­cause I would need to vent about me if I’d been friends with me for the last six months. I don’t want it to have been in vain, and I wanted to tell you what I’ve learnt. If you do a high-fat, high-pro­tein, low-carb diet and join a gym, it will be a good dis­trac­tion for a while and you will lose fat and gain mus­cle, but you will run out of steam and eat nor­mally again and put all the weight back on. So maybe don’t bother. Drunk­en­ness is an­other idea. I was in black­out for most of the first two months and I think that’s fine, it got me through the evenings (and the oc­ca­sional af­ter­noon). You’ll have to do a lot of it on your own, though, be­cause no one is free to meet up any more. I think that’s fine for a bit. It was for me un­til some­one walked past me drink­ing from a whisky minia­ture while I waited for a night bus, put five quid in my hand and told me to keep warm. You’re the only per­son I’ve ever told this story. None of your mates will be ex­cited that you’re sin­gle again. I’m prob­a­bly your only sin­gle mate and even I’m not that ex­cited. Gen­er­ally the ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing sin­gle at thirty-five will feel dif­fer­ent to any other time you’ve been sin­gle and that’s no bad thing. When your ex moves on, you might be­come ob­sessed with the bloke in a way that is al­most sex­ual. Don’t worry, you don’t want to fuck him, even though it will feel a bit like you do some­times. If you open up to me or one of the other boys, it will feel good in the mo­ment and then you’ll get an emo­tional hang­over the next day. You’ll wish you could take it all back. You may even feel like we’ve en­joyed see­ing you so low. Or that we feel smug be­cause we’re win­ning at some­thing and you’re los­ing. Re­member that none of us feel that. You may be­come ob­sessed with work­ing out why ex­actly she broke up with you and you are likely to go fully, fully nuts in your bid to find a sat­is­fy­ing an­swer. I can save you a lot of time by let­ting you know that you may well never work it out. And even if you did work it out, what’s the pur­pose of it? Soon enough, some girl is go­ing to be crazy about you for some un­de­fin­able rea­son and you’re not go­ing to be in­ter­ested in her for some un­de­fin­able rea­son. It’s all so ran­dom and un­fair – the peo­ple we want to be with don’t want to be with us and the peo­ple who want to be with us are not the peo­ple we want to be with. Re­ally, the thing that’s go­ing to hurt a lot is the fact that some­one doesn’t want to be with you any more. Feel­ing the ab­sence of some­one’s com­pany and the ab­sence of their love are two dif­fer­ent things. I wish I’d known that ear­lier. I wish I’d known that it isn’t any­body’s job to stay in a re­la­tion­ship they don’t want to be in just so some­one else doesn’t feel bad about them­selves. Any­way. That’s all. You’re go­ing to be okay, mate. Andy

There's no use denying that I fell a little bit in love with Jay, at least as much in love as I've ever been with any body. You see, Nicky, boys are always falling in love with me, but I don't fall much in love with them. I've always wondered if something was wrong with me, to tell you the truth, but Gloria says that's the best way for things to be, for a boy to love a girl faster and more than the girl loves him. And really, I don't know if I was truly in love with Jay, but I got closer with him than I'd ever been. So maybe that was falling in love? It may not have been the great romance of storybooks, but that feeling of someone seeing into the center of you and recognizing you, what else could that be but love? Don't even best friends have to fall a little in love?

Hey, Trevor,” Decker says. “You-uns having a party?” “Nah,” I tell him. “I’m crashing girls’ night.” He wags his eyebrows like a typical high school boy, probably imagining a far more exciting night than the one I’m actually about to have. No one needs to know I’m going to settle in for a romcom in a room full of women on a Friday night. The things I do to be near Lexi sometimes border on mortifying.

I’m not asking you to save the world…” My eyes flooded with tears. “I’m asking you to save your friend!

There are girls who do not like real life. When they hear the harsh belches of its engines approaching along the straight road that leads from childhood, through adolescence to adultery, they dart into a side turning. When they take their hands away from their eyes, they find themselves in the gallery of the ballet. There they sit for many years feeding their imaginations on those fitful glimpses of a dancer's hand or foot which seats in the upper parts of theatres afford. When I was young I too 'adored' the ballet. For me its charm was that one of the dancers might break his neck, but what appeals to these girls is the moonlit atmosphere of love and death which the withering hand of truth can never compromise. During the intervals they hold hands, numbed by excessive applause, with the homosexual young man who is bound to be sitting on their right or left. Even the boys, who have no positive intention of deceiving them, are drawn into a relationship damaging to the girls. After a lot of squeaking at the bus stop when the ballet is over, the young men pursue on the way home other interests, which at least yield a morsel of satisfaction. The girls can do nothing but return to their joss-stick-perfumed nunneries. From this position there is no way back. They can only stay where they are until, in middle age, they awaken to the realization that they don't know a single person who isn't queer. Then they move on to the uncharted quicksands of nudism, Yoga, vegetarianism and other diseases of the soul too terrible to name.

Josh, Topher, and Charlie walked in, each carrying a pizza box. The kitchen instantly filled with the smells of boys, sweat, and garlic.

Dan Dilco- Liv calls him her ‘Dildo’ because he became her new sex toy over the weekend and for now… instead of that. She gives him that pet name, there have been a lot of pet names, that is how we all keep track of them all too. She has one of those also like most of us girls, nevertheless, she’s more cover than me, in not hiding it in a Pringles can. Anyway, this one came about because it rhymes with his last name. I guess she thinks that’s cute. He’s the last one on the list to pick up today, I’m sure next week or maybe tomorrow for all I know it will be someone new, but as for now, he’s the one that is all horned-up for her as she is for him. It won’t last… I think she randomly started making out with him at the bonfire, they have hooked up at least ten times, senses Friday. I don’t think Liv knows what she wants. I think she is too Bi or Bi-curious or something to choose. It seems after they become a dating couple it ends as fast as it starts. I don’t think she’s that hard to get along with, high maintenance maybe, but she’s a sweet girl overall, with a loving and trusting person. Liv already asked me to go out with her… Um- I like her, yet not in that way. I have been there, done that kind of a thing, I have kissed her, yet I never thought about it going anywhere. I don’t want to end a good friendship. Plus, I only want the forbidden boy named Ray!

Laila learned that boys differed from girls in this regard. They didn't make a show of friendship. They felt no urge, no need, for this sort of talk ... Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

A girl does not forget being called the one by a boy.

It wasn’t a girl,” he replied innocently, “it was Viona.

Barely on the verge of adolescence, I was still a shy girl who preferred math homework to boys. I was neither daring nor particularly unhappy, but booze flipped a switch in me I hadn’t even known was there.

The game is Dare.” A Dauntless girl, Lauren, is holding on to the handle on the side of the train car, but she keeps swaying so she almost falls out, then giggling and pulling herself back in, like the train isn’t suspended two stories above the street, like she wouldn’t break her neck if she fell out. In her free hand is a silver flask. It explains a lot. She tilts her head. “First person picks someone and dares them to do something. Then that person has a drink, does the dare, and gets a chance to dare someone else to do something. And when everyone has done their dare--or died trying--we get a little drunk and stumble home.” “How do you win?” one of the Dauntless calls out from the other side of the train car. A boy who sits slouched against Amar like they’re old friends, or brothers. I’m not the only initiate in the train car. Sitting across from me is Zeke, the first jumper, and a girl with brown hair and bangs cut straight across her forehead, and a pierced lip. The others are older, Dauntless members all. They have a kind of ease with one another, leaning into one another, punching one another’s arms, tousling one another’s hair. It’s camaraderie and friendship and flirtation, and none of it is familiar to me. I try to relax, bending my arms around my knees. I really am a Stiff. “You win by not being a little pansycake,” Lauren says. “And, hey, new rule, you also win by not asking dumb questions.