I have a best friend named Avonlea. She is always singing in her beautiful voice. She finds one song and sings it for weeks. It was so annoying to me, but then the songs would get stuck in my head! She has sleek black hair, and she is super protective of me. One time we were at a school event, and she really wanted me to dance, but I didn’t want to. This led her to pull me off of the wall, and I had so much fun with her that night, that I was really glad she made me dance with her. We have been best friends since 5th grade. One of my favorite memories with her was when we went to the beach to see the Chicago Air Show, and we had so much fun swimming and hanging out in the sun.

When I still lived in Chicago, Avonlea and I always had sleepovers. Our last sleepover before I moved was definitely my favorite. I got to her house and her parents had just left, so we decided to make meringues. We made a huge mess, and while she was dancing, I was being responsible and cleaning it up before her parents came home to a giant mess. So I cleaned, she danced, and we heard the oven beep.

We had the first taste and the meringues were so grainy and sugary that we knew we had failed. Even though they were bad, we ate them all anyway. They made us super hyper all night, and we were just laughing and dancing and having fun. I remember distinctly thinking that the word yellow was the most hilarious thing ever. Then we decided to play this game called Pie Face. It is basically where you have a small machine, and you crank a lever, and the lever controls a hand. After a certain number of cranks, the hand launches the whipped cream at your face. We played it, but instead of whipped cream, we used lotion, which soon made us super messy.

After playing that game, we decided to play Twister. The box was all the way at the top of her game shelf, so it took us a long time and a lot of energy just to get it down. Avonlea had to drag one of her kitchen chairs all the way downstairs, and then I had to stand on it and try and get it down. After we realized I was much too short to reach it, she tried, and with her five extra inches on me, she got it down with ease.

It had taken us so long and so much energy to get Twister down that we didn’t even end up playing it. We got out the mat, and then got blankets and pillows and fell asleep in front of her T.V., leaving no traces of meringues in the whole house.

It was one of my favorite memories with her because we just had so much fun. It was also great to make all of these awesome memories before I moved. I was really worried that our relationship was going to change and we were going to drift apart, but that did not end up happening. I thought that we were not going to talk and that we were not going to stay in touch, but we text all the time, and we Facetime a lot. When I went back to Chicago to see her during winter break, it felt like nothing had changed and that we just picked up where we left off. We walked through Water Tower Mall, and she hummed all of the songs playing over the loudspeakers. I am so grateful for one of my best friends, Avonlea.

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