Leah and the Green Beetle

Madelyn Chase

My former best friend, Leah, of six and a half years, got into a car accident the summer after we graduated. I found out from her social media and didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what words summed us up better than Damn. You always drove too fast and I’m glad you’re not dead.

But I couldn’t say that, not really, not when her Instagram post was public and we hadn’t spoken in years. My thumbs hovered over the keyboard on my phone.

In high school, ever struggling with being bigger than our peers, Leah and I played leapfrog with each other’s weights. I’d be thinner the first day of school, but she’d win Halloween. I’d win Thanksgiving, but when we came back from holiday break, it was clear she’d skipped the Christmas cookies and I had not. I remember the skinny jeans in sizes ten, twelve, fourteen, swapped between each other every time we tried a new yo-yo diet. She’d subsist on only sweet potatoes and I, only chocolate milk. And then we’d switch, and we’d switch again. On Twin Day, we wore the same blue flannel and black jeans and white converse, and when we looked at the photos we’d taken, I could tell we’d hated ourselves and each other.

“I look massive,” she said, frowning.

“No you don’t!” I cried. “I do.”

It went on like this forever, calling ourselves ugly in a bid to make the other disparage themself further, to dig themselves deeper into self-loathing.

You look so skinny in that hospital gown, I could have commented.

Girls, when we want to be, are the most vicious creatures on earth, antlers locked in a battle to be better than one another, to dominate, to destroy. Leah and I were always competing in funny little ways like that.

Our friendship was good because, in a way, we were mirrors. We’d both been raised nonreligiously, in two-story homes in the suburbs, with fathers who worked and mothers who stayed home until we were ten. Our parents had let us leave public school when we no longer fit in and try other paths. We hiked and wrote and sketched in our spare time. The problem with being so alike, however, was that we were so alike. The littlest things set us apart.

Leah and I met in middle school. She was in the theater program, and I figure skated, and we’d only seen each other in passing. The first time we spoke was in our history class. The man who taught it was a creep who spoke too loudly in the mornings, but let us do whatever we wanted on Fridays, when he no longer felt like teaching. Leah and I worked on our portfolios for the audition-only high school we were vying to get into. We wanted to be part of their writing program.

The agreement we’d settled on was that we would read each other’s pieces and edit them, but never speak about it.

“It’ll be too awkward,” I said, “if you try to talk to me about it out loud. I’ll just email it to you, and you can leave notes like that.”

“I’m sure you’re great! I’m not very good,” she said. “I wrote a scene for theater, but it didn’t get picked.”

“I’m sorry, Leah. I’m sure it just wasn’t the right time.”

Leah took everything to heart, wore all her feelings on her sleeve. Every rejection, every glance, every raised hand that wasn’t hers that got picked in class sent her on a depressed jag. She often mistook my stern expressions for indifference. If I didn’t frown, she’d dig harder at the wound.

“You don’t know that,” she said. “You don’t know everything.”

Leah’s short story was about a shooting at a mall. I’d written about a dystopian future. Hers was, for an eighth grader, remarkably frightening and well-paced and sad. Mine was The Hunger Games. But she’d edited my piece to something workable by the end of the Civil War unit.

Reading the edited piece felt like looking at myself after surgery, cut up and sewn back together, grateful to have had someone with the knowledge to fix me, but wishing there was nothing that needed to be fixed so drastically in the first place. Recovery was gruesome: a grape popsicle and wishing I was Amy March in Little Women, throwing all of Jo’s writing into a fire.

I thought about commenting on her post the way we’d edited each other’s work. Your caption drums up sympathy. Good use of sensory detail. I could really feel the airbags breaking my nose, but maybe cool it on the descriptions of crunchy bones. It feels a little awkward with the pacing.

Our long hours of writing and editing paid off and we ended up at the same high school, in the same writing program. We spent every class together, to our joy or chagrin, depending on the day. It was chagrin, more often than not.

One of the little things that set us apart was lunch. Not what we ate, but how it got there. My mother, a part time preschool teacher, packed my lunches. Leah’s mother, a full time special-ed teacher, did not have the time to pack lunch for Leah and her many siblings. It bothered Leah, my little step above her.

She used to drag my lunchbox across the table to her, in front of our friends, and unzip it slowly.

“Come on, Maddie,” Leah said, fishing something from the bottom. “Your mom pack this?”

Eyeroll. “She packs it every day.”

“Why’s this apple in a bag? You’re destroying the Earth.”

“My mom packed it. I don’t know.”

“Then your mom’s destroying the Earth.”

Saving the Earth was another one of Leah’s things. She was the only defender of our dying planet, she believed. Whether she was genuine, or seeking popularity, she’d brought gifts for the class time and time again. Reusable straws, reusable bottles, Mother Earth Pins.

“You can have it if you stop bagging your apples,” she’d said, holding the straw above my head.

I didn’t reach for it, so she set it on the counter. “I’ll try,” I said, putting the straw in my bag. “I’ll have to ask my mom. You know how it is.”

She stayed silent.

Leah’s and my friendship came to a close in the middle of December, our eleventh-grade year. Our class had taken up the helm of decorating the cafeteria for the December showcase. We sat on the rug in room 312, rolling up glitter tulle and gluing tea lights to vases so other students couldn’t steal them. I was sifting through websites for ideas once my share of the vases was done.

“Look at this,” I said, handing her my laptop. “Little Santa Hat cookies, for the snack table.”

She squinted at the image and turned the laptop to Reagan.

Reagan was the object of our cool girl admiration. Tall, thin, with white teeth and oodles of curly hair, Reagan radiated a type of magnetism we couldn’t in our wildest dreams hope to achieve. Reagan was the type of cool you just had to be born with.

“Look at this,” Leah said.

Reagan hardly glanced up from her vase. “What about it?”

“Maddie wants to do it, but it’s ugly. It looks like a children’s craft!” Leah said. “Like who’s going to believe high schoolers made it?”

“I think it looks fine,” Reagan said. She shrugged coolly and went back to her work. Leah’s attempt at an in with Reagan had failed and so sheepishly, she looked back at me. I took the laptop from her and left the circle.

I looked for Reagan’s comment on the post. Nothing. Where was Reagan when Leah almost died? Does Reagan even follow you? I typed out and deleted.

In our shared anatomy class later in the week, post Strawberry Santa-hat fiasco, she’d sat down beside me.

“Are you seriously not talking to me?” she said.

“You’re a bitch.”

“You’re a bitch.”

We didn’t speak again that year and our silent standoff in the seats beside each other ended when she moved to the table across the room.

When she moved tables, she got a new lab partner. On dissection day, they both had to go to the nurses’ office because they couldn’t take the frog guts. I’d wondered if she fainted at the sight of her own blood when the car crashed. When we were lab partners, I’d promised I’d do all the dissections, so she’d never have to see blood. I felt a pang of guilt.

She got into the car accident the summer after we graduated, two years after we’d last spoken. I looked at the photos and I remembered the first time I’d ridden in that car. She’d driven me up to the waterpark she worked at so we could use her free passes to ride every slide and put a face to the names in her work stories. She kept turning the top forty station louder and louder as she passed cars over double yellow lines, laughing when I’d reach for the grab handles above the car door and yell at her for almost killing us.

Leah felt in extremes. I wonder still, if she drove that fast because it was the only time she felt the same as the people in her life. Her family, her friends, the boys she wanted to date and the boys she didn’t, Leah wanted them on her level. So, in the passenger seat of her car, going seventy on backroads, the people Leah drove were forced to feel the extreme emotions she felt daily. Their fear was just a byproduct of her need for control and excitement. If she ever felt bad, she didn’t slow down.

On the day she crashed, the long stretches of the quick, dark backroads she took to work must have been too quick, and she crashed her Subaru into a pole. The grey metal wrapped so neatly around it that it looked like the car had been built that way. Everything in the car was destroyed, all the glass shattered, the engine was unsavable, the wheels, just a splay of popped rubber. But she’d survived with only a broken nose. I cried when I first saw the photos.

The thing about ending a bad friendship, is you don’t really know what to do with the love you still have for them. It sits there. It’s not alive, but it’s not dead. It’s an inorganic thing. It collects dust.

When Leah and I were still too young to drive, we’d fantasized about our dream car. The green convertible Volkswagen Beetle. We’d argue over who got to get the green one, because it just wasn’t possible for us both to have them. When we got our licenses and starting driving hand me down cars from the early 2000s, the argument had died out. But I remembered.

That looks horrifying, I ended up commenting on the post. Glad you’re okay!

I’d hoped when she read it, she’d know what I really meant was, You can get the Green Beetle now. It’s all yours.

She liked my comment and that was enough. I could live with that. 

Madelyn Chase is a freshman psychology major. She graduated from the literary arts program at the Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts where she developed a love for all forms of reading and writing.