When you're 13 years old, you fall into friendships quickly, and such was the case with my friend Ellen. We had the same snarky sense of humor, we were both just a little too pop-culture oriented. She crushed on Duran Duran while I had a serious thing for the Police and (oh the shame) Bruce Springsteen. We both exchanged eye rolls at each other during health class, paired up during phys ed, and always but always made each other laugh and laugh and laugh.

On the surface, Ellen and I were from two entirely different worlds. I lived in the old Victorian area near downtown, in a rickety old hippy house and my parents drove Volvo station wagons, a car that was relatively rare in the deep Midwest. She, on the other hand, lived on a hillside overlooking the river in the chichi old money suburb and her parents had totally normal jobs and drove plain gray American cars just like every other kid. Ellen's parents were normal. Mine were freaks, and a great deal of my prepubescent energy was spent trying to distance myself from the taint of freakdom as much as possible.

We cemented our foray into best friendship one snowy Saturday over Christmas break in eighth grade. She invited me over to her house to play Trivial Pursuit (it was 1985, so it was very iconic) and we matched pie piece for pie piece all the way around the board. We looked through her seventh grade yearbook and talked about which boys were too cute and which ones were lame and which ones were so tragically clueless that we couldn't be bothered to think about them (i.e. we were crushing on them so much that it physically caused us pain). At the end of our playdate (although if anyone would have called it that back then, we would have withered away on the spot of embarrassment because oh my gawd, as if), I used her phone in her room (!!!) to call my mom to come pick me up. When I heard the knock on the door and then the sonorous timbre of my mother's hippy boyfriend talking to her mother, I wanted to die die die. Why couldn't my mother have picked me up? Despite the crazy Volvo, she actually looked pretty normal, but her boyfriend was a constant embarrassment, with his long beard leftover from Woodstock and his Tibetan Anorak jacket. I was just happy that it was too cold and blustery for the poncho (which he did own and wear in a non-ironic manner). Ellen's mother made polite chit-chat with him while I put on my boots (which she complimented me on), then I thanked her for allowing me to spend the afternoon, thanked Ellen, and tromped back off through the snow. It was a great beginning to our friendship.

A few days later, I had a message to call Ellen. We had begun the teenage ritual of marathon phone sessions about absolutely nothing in particular. When I called Ellen back, her mother told me that she was not at home. And then again, Ellen was not at home. I dutifully left messages and then in school, Ellen would ask why I hadn't called and then she'd tell me that she hadn't gotten the messages from her mom or she'd blame her brother for stealing them.

While teenagers are overly sensitive about some things, they are sometimes blissfully ignorant about others, so it took me about a month to figure out that if I called and her father or brother answered, Ellen would either be home or would get the message to call me back. If her mother answered, Ellen was never home nor would she get the message. What is more, her mother seemed to be angry at me for calling. Finally, one day, Ellen called me and said that we couldn't hang out anymore. Why, I asked. She didn't want to say. After about a half hour of questions while I was in near tears, finally Ellen tells me it's because her mother feels that I am not an honor roll student. This was empirically not true, as we had just gotten our report cards for the third quarter and I was actually doing fairly well in school, despite never doing a stitch of homework and battling the evilest math teacher on the planet (Mrs. Margotto, wherever you are today, I'm sure that you were a wonderful woman outside of class, but in school, you were an evil bitch who should never have been allowed near children). I read her my grades over the phone and asked if she wanted my mom to talk to her mom to prove that I wasn't failing anything or being a loser. No, that's not it, Ellen said, and finally dropped the bomb.

"It's not whether you ARE on the honor roll or not. It's that you don't LOOK like you're on the honor roll."

"What does that even MEAN? Should I be wearing glasses or something? A school uniform? She's only seen me that one time? Was it my mom's boyfriend?"

"No, it's not that. She said he was nice. No, it's because you're...you know."

Slowly, the realization hit.

"Because I'm fat?"  She wouldn't say it out loud but I would and could. And her silence confirmed the truth. Ellen's mom wanted her svelte long-distance track star of a daughter to be around girls who looked just like her. She didn't want her hanging around with a fat girl who might drag down Ellen's popularity or (horror) teach Ellen bad eating habits. I was boggled. This was an adult...a MOM...saying that it doesn't matter what's on the inside, it's the outside that counts. This was an authority figure actually passing judgment upon me not because of something I did or didn't do, not because of something I said, not because my parents were divorced or because my mother was dating Jerry Garcia, but rather because I had to buy my clothes at Lane Bryant instead of the Limited.

Ellen made it clear to me that she didn't care that I "didn't look like an honors student." I made her laugh more than her other friends, we liked exactly the same things and thought about life in exactly the same way. We continued to be best friends, despite the fact that I remained fat (and Ellen remained streamlined and perfectly proportioned with a Princess Diana physique). We'd pretend to be drunk on chocolate milk and lipsync into hairbrushes to Madonna's "Like A Virgin" album. Before school, she'd swing by my house on her bike and then we'd both bike in together and then lock our bikes to the chain link fence behind the junior high, sharing a single combination lock. On the weekends, we'd hang out at the mall or go to see movies, but Ellen always told her mom that she was going to other friends' houses then started making up names of fictional people so that we would be certain they wouldn't call while she was gone. When I called her house, I would say that my name was Darby, and her mother would respond in a chirpy, happy manner that was so different than when I'd identify myself as Weetabix. I almost fooled myself into thinking that I was Darby and that I had achieved her approval, and then I'd remember that Darby didn't exist and instead, she was just a big fat liar named Weetabix. Our friendship was the stuff of legend, but one honest fact remained, I was still Ellen's dirty little secret, the girl you can't bring home to mom.

Then the edict came down from above. During the summer before we entered high school, I called Ellen's house and Ellen's mother answered. I identified myself as Darby and instead of calling Ellen to the phone, her mother's voice turned curt and she responded that she had known that I was really Weetabix and she was aware that we were still friends all along. She sounded so disgusted that my shame overrode the sense of anger I should have felt, given that she drove us to lie in the first place.

In retrospect, I think she was tolerating it while we were in junior high school but now that Ellen and I were entering high school, it was time to think of Ellen's future. The stakes had been raised. It was time to get serious.

She must have given Ellen a very convincing talk because we were very best friends all summer long and then on the first day of school, I waited and waited for Ellen to arrive but her bike never zipped down my street. I raced to class on my 10-speed, hoped and prayed that it wouldn't get stolen during the day (Ellen had the lock on her bike) and walked into my first homeroom sweaty and confused.

I found Ellen at her locker later, chatting with one of the benign but acceptable girls on the track team and asked her what had happened. "Oh, my mom gave me a ride." She said, spun on her heels and walked down the hall with her chin on her chest. I pulled back and waited for her to come to me in the following days with an apology but it never came. We both took two steps away from each other and fell into a nodding acquaintance for the next three years. In my opinion, I had more than enough friends who just didn't care whether I fell inside or out of the societal norm and in a strange twist of fate, I had more friends from every clique and got invited to more popular kid parties than Ellen did. It didn't matter, though. The thread was torn. I had moved on and so had she.

Despite my feelings of being the outcast, when her father passed away unexpectedly during our senior year, I went to the funeral and hugged Ellen hard while she sobbed openly into my shoulder. Her mother watched us with emotionless eyes. Afterward, I turned to Ellen's mother and said, "Hello, Mrs. P., I don't know if you remember me, but I'm Weetabix and I am so sorry for your loss." She looked me up and down, still fat, still unapologetic, then she nodded with her lips pressed tightly together and looked toward the door to watch for more visitors. --Weetabix