I stole my best friends boyfriend

On being a bad friend, moving to America, and having a lot of sex

Growing up in Canada was wholesome. I was an innocent tween who lived in a house three minutes away from Grouse Mountain. There was a hidden path in my backyard that led directly to a forest- some scenes from New Moon were filmed there. I’d venture out after school or on weekends, and nonchalantly saunter around the woods before miraculously arriving at the place I knew I was headed towards. The tree was charred, barely standing, hollowed out on the inside from a lightning strike that had hit it years before. If I crawled into this tiny space off the side, I could sit in it and look up to the surrounding, lush, green trees, those which billowed over my near dead comfort space.

My priorities consisted of meeting up with my friends on club penguin and running a Klaine blog on tumblr. I did musical theatre and choir, I was on a competitive swim team and spent weekends snowboarding. It was that kind of childhood that kids now don’t really get to have. There was no tiktok or instagram, no pressure to dress a certain way. Those years in Vancouver were probably the most content of my childhood. Things changed when I moved to Oregon a few months after turning 13.

I was awed at as an ‘international’ student even though Vancouver was only 300 miles away. I remember my school urging me to read my blog posts to classes because I was kind of popping off on the internet at that time. I was a ‘successful child blogger’. A few months into my American teenage life, a girl from my school started a fan account for me. It was such a whirlwind. No one in Canada cared about who I was, and I frolicked around like weird, endearing child I was. Within days of starting middle school, it was all eyes on me. That, and I was exposed to things that stripped me of my innocence immediately.

My primary school in Vancouver was very tame, very granola. Before moving to America, the most extreme thing I’d done was hide behind the dumpsters at recess with my friends, whisper fuck, shit, and cunt, and then lose my mind giggling because we were cursing. At my new school in Portland, kids would walk through the halls reeking of weed. This one kid showed me a pipe on my first or second day, and it was such a shock to me. I got invited to hang with kids by the river and it would just be them doing drugs. There was ‘slap ass Fridays’, which is what it sounds like. I’d had silly little boyfriends in Canada at that point but it was more like, we would message on kik and plan to hug at recess the next day. Within 6 months of moving to Portland, I’d both had my first kiss, and had given my first blowjob.

I didn’t handle the new girl attention well. I performed as well as I could, but internally I was stubbing my toe through conversations not knowing the right thing to say, not having a filter. After school each day, I’d mull over each tiny social interaction, wondering where I was going wrong, why I felt so misplaced and misaligned with my peers. 

Social interactions became a frightening and constant game. Even though this one was entirely new and foreign, and I didn’t know the rules, I’ve never been a person to concede. I could restart my trials on the ‘right’ ways to act when developing relationships with new people once I’d turned someone off.

Of course at the time I’d blame it on the other kids for not getting me- but no one stuck around. People seemed to be off-put by me. I made a couple friends, dated some guys, but none of it was substantial and I felt constantly insecure. The fear was either that they were with me because I was an easy, desperate option, or that I had intriguing labels placed on my person, which might make them seem cool for associating with me. I didn’t feel like anyone saw me as a real person, let alone cared what I had to say.

This was the beginning of the freak years, where I was an insane person to know or interact with, beginning age 13, and finishing around age 21.

In eighth grade, there was a new girl at my school. Eliza got the me six months prior treatment. She was pretty and got a lot of attention and we became fast friends. Our humor was entirely compatible. I’d spill the wackiest things in my brain and she seemed to understand entirely. She would say the weirdest shit too and it made perfect sense. We were made of the same stuff- pretty and popular on the outside, strange and turbulent on the inside.

For all the self doubt and shame I had from knowing I was a difficult pill to swallow, she made me feel seen and important. It’s like our brains were operating at the exact same frequency, our emotions about the world in perfect sync. She was the first real best friend I’ve ever had. Thirteen years of feeling like I had to say the right thing so that people would like me- I could say the wrong thing, and she’d still love me anyways. That’s the kind of soul stuff I wasn’t getting with peers, I wasn’t getting at home.

She taught me for the first time what it meant to find life more enjoyable when you experience it with someone. One time we found a pack of cigarettes on the ground and chain smoked them- then immediately rode the screaming eagle at Oaks park two times in a row just because we were 13 and we could. We wore each other’s clothes, we ate dinner with each other’s families, we prank called people, we thought all the same guys were cute, we loved listening to Ariana Grande and Kacey Musgraves and watching Dance Moms together. We sang together and recorded covers of Bon Iver songs and put them on Youtube. I hadn’t really sang at all since moving to the states.

Eliza had come to my middle school because of an incident that happened at her smaller, private Catholic school. Her involvement in that world introduced me to a whole new set of kids- I was only familiar with the public middle school population from my school, but once I became friends with Eliza, I met the more posh, more rich, more catholic-guilt ridden kids in my neighborhood. I ended up going to the catholic all girls private high school and Eliza went our neighborhoods public high school, so in a way we switched places. 

She represented who I wanted to be, who I hoped I was. I was in an entirely unfamiliar landscape, had a new persona attached to me as some clouted up Canadian girl, even though that felt fraudulent and misplaced. She had to switch schools and still kept her head up. I knew what she was struggling with, but at school she was just likable and a cool girl. Beautiful and talented, strong. So fun to be around, finding the humor in everything.

So when high school came around and she began doing things like smoking weed, hanging with ‘weird girls’, I began to judge her. And then we stopped hanging as much. It’s funny I was being so critical of her smoking weed, while I was being outrageously promiscuous, because those things are in similar camps of things kids do which are intended for adults.

I’d look at her social media posts and experience tremendous loss, though at the time it felt something like pity and confusion. When did that stop, that need to be together? There was no ending or fight, there was simply one day we were best friends, and the next day we weren’t. Could circumstances really be so irrevocable- we went to different schools and made different friends, so our friendship wasn’t compatible anymore? Perhaps she never felt as connected as I did, and she was glad to be rid of me. Perhaps I was too afraid to maintain something real because it would prevent me from distracting from the swelling frenzy inside. 

You know when someone asks you what’s your biggest regret in life? 

There was this guy. He was in that rich kid catholic school world that Eliza had always been in, so she introduced us at some point. Andrew lived two blocks away from me and was cute and funny and popular. He wore Golf Wang and rode around on a skateboard. As far as I was concerned, he was the most dripped out boy in all of Southeast Portland.

Andrew had a will they won’t they with Eliza. He was always a guy she spoke about with a reverence. There were the guys she didn’t like, and the guys she liked. Andrew was the main one. 

So I respected it. I talked to her about him throughout our friendship, even though it was harder once I’d met the guy. I completely understood why she was so down bad. He was the best my neighborhood had to offer for potential crushes. He was that guy. My two blocks away neighbor, and I ended up going to an all girls school. Similarly to my friendship with Eliza, I developed a friendship with Andrew that just made sense. We shared that nonsensical, unsettling sense of humor and quirkiness that you really only find in other neurodivergent people.

Will they won’t they- they did. Eliza loved Andrew, like really loved him. He was her first love. They didn’t just casually date. I knew this, and I was supportive of them. But I don’t remember being around it that much because it happened and ended by the time we were at different high schools.

I was still friendly with Eliza. We saw each other around, we’d spend afternoons together in our neighborhood with other kids, but my social world had expanded greatly into my freshman year. The two of us never had some inexplicable ending to our friendship, we just weren’t in the same spaces anymore. That once undeniable, 24/7 bond we had at all times had been severed.

In the last month of my freshman year, I visited my old friends in Vancouver. We all went to a party and got drunk and I was transported back in time, though this time with my newly acquired American rebelliousness. Hilariously, much of the trip was spent going to second base with one of my own will they wont theys. I’d briefly dated him in grade seven, after he played Grampa Joe opposite my Charlie Bucket in our school’s production of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Less hilariously, he had also dated my best friend from Canada, whom I was staying with. I was such a mess.

I walked through my old neighborhood when I visited, but I didn’t go to my backyard forest. When I was a kid, sitting in that tree, most of the time inside it was spent picking at the pieces of bark inside it. I’d rub the wood between my fingers and they’d be dyed by the soot from the charred wood. I soiled a lot of my clothes that way.. wiping my fingers on my pants or my shirt.

The day I was meant to leave, I got lunch at White Spot with aforementioned Canadian best friend, Sexy Grampa Joe, and another one of our friends. Then we all hung out in a playground while I waited for my step dad to pick me up. Grampa Joe and I peeled off from the others, unable to keep our hands off each other. We’d be making out and hiding in one of those slides or platforms, and this pounding, painful reminder of time kept hitting me. I was kissing him to stop myself from crying. I didn’t want to go back to Portland. I liked Vancouver better, I wanted to be there with my old friends. I was hypothesizing how possible it would be to date Grampa Joe long distance, when I could visit again, or if I could convince my parents to move back. I cried on the way home.

Then it was summer, and it was back to my life in Portland. I was going to be a sophomore in the fall.

At the time I’d attributed my promiscuity to being hyper-sexual, which was true, but I was also filling my space with boys to distract from my daddy issues. My family issues in general, my confusion about who I was supposed to be. At night I’d feel so empty, so I’d watch Gossip Girl until I fell asleep to prevent myself from processing too much of it.

I made friends with groups from other schools and homie hopped in every one of them. I lost my virginity and made out with guys I knew other girls liked. There were a dozen unopened snapchats from different boys at any given moment. One in particular thought we were dating even though I was doing all these other shenanigans. I remember him telling me he was heartbroken because of my behavior (re: finding out about all the other boys). It was confusing because I couldn’t understand why he didn’t see life as fun as I did, and we barely even hung out. I couldn’t really keep track of the amount of boys I was talking to, crushing on, or hanging out with. There was a new #1 every week.

It was summer 2014, and that was the vibe I was on. I was a tornado of chaos, I flirted with everyone, and had zero fucks to give about anything. I was listening to Flume, Lorde, and Childish Gambino. I was going out and drinking all the time, sleeping on football fields, smoking cigarettes and taking sexy pictures. I’d leave my iPad at the friends house I lied I was staying at, so my parents could track me and see I was where I said I was going to be. Then spend the night at some boys house instead, after going to a party with juniors and seniors.

Life and relationships were my playground, and I was high on playing. I saw the opportunity to flirt and dance and live in every person, in every plan, every party. Experiencing everything possible out in the world was the only way I could outweigh the hatred I felt at home.

If my behavior that summer was any indication, I wasn’t really in a place to treat myself with respect, let alone the people around me. I was wearing American Apparel babydoll dresses, smoking cigarettes and drinking bubble tea before parties at some rich kids house. Eliza was hanging with people I deemed ‘lame’, because I had become popular and self-righteous, too caught up in my own idea of what was cool, and judging her for her lifestyle choices. For all I knew, she was smoking weed and doing drugs in the forest with the randoms from her public school. I was weirded out by what I heard about her, I thought she had changed. I wasn’t a good friend anymore, too caught up in my own tornado to check in with her and connect. 

Andrew was adjacent to the things I felt I represented- he went to another catholic private school, and he embodied a truly Kyle from Ladybird vibe with a cool instagram. I’d always admired his aesthetic and how I felt I looked when we walked through our neighborhood together.

We were just friends that summer, it was entirely innocent. As we became closer, the crush was there, but I had crushes on tons of guys. I didn’t mean for it to happen. Andrew and his friends and I would walk to the store and get sodas. We’d set off sparklers in front of the mansions in our neighborhood and they’d skate away while I chased them, phone out, recording everything for Vine. I laughed so much when I was with him, and it wasn’t even about how deeply I crushed on him. I loved the convenience. We’d text to make plans, and since he lived 2 minutes away we could hang within minutes.

One day I went to Andrews house, around the end of that summer, and we watched a movie in his basement. We were lying on our stomachs, looking up at the TV. That anticipatory tension filled the air, and my body was heavy and light at the same time. I knew it was coming.

He turned his head towards me and I turned my head towards him, and we inched towards each other. Kissed. It was sweet, soft.. and then it picked up, and turned into something more passionate. A new level of kissing for me, like there was an explosion in my chest and I clung to him in the aftershock. Pure electricity hitting me in my core. Maybe it was because all summer I was hooking up with random guys because I could, and then there was this guy who I’d fantasized about for so long and genuinely liked who was kissing me like he meant it. And it was wrong.

Was Eliza my best friend at that moment in time? Not really. I still cared about her but we’d fallen out of orbit, barely seeing each other towards the end of that summer. Eliza and Andrew weren’t together anymore. I knew she thought I stole him, from things other kids said to me. We never discussed it though. I could’ve argued that wasn’t technically true, but it was the principle. I was doing something unforgivable.

He was that guy for her, I knew it. That sort of thing doesn’t change- I would know, because he was it for me too. I was actively doing something wrong, which made it that much more exciting. Doing something forbidden, and the guilt and horror mixed with the thrill and excitement. The sizzling superiority in being chosen, it was an overdose of energy.

Andrew and I had a conversation about Eliza early on. I think it was something about how she’s gone off the deep end, we can’t help her now, and we’re in such a better place in life. Lol. I remember us discussing cocaine and the possibility of her doing it, because she was friends with someone who had done cocaine. Which is why our betrayal of her was valid? I don’t remember. Something foolish like that, a copout to compensate for how forbidden it felt.

It’s absurd to reflect on this, that we were speculating and giving reasons that would justify doing it. As if it was okay to date him because she was on some sort of moral decline, despite the fact that Andrew and I were both the problem children of our respective households, and doing things that 15 year olds definitely should not have been doing.

Andrew and I were together for most of our sophomore year. I had lost my virginity to another guy earlier that summer but it was more of a half-virginity, we didn’t have complete, satisfying sex. Andrew and I were fucking. All the time. It was kinky, porn inspired, all over the place. Not a month into my relationship with him I went on birth control, and then it was a free for all. Sex with him consumed my mind, and when we weren’t physically together, I was itching to get back to him. This is probably where my sex addiction started.

I spent a good amount of time at his school watching him play basketball. He spent a good amount of time in my basement fucking me on the couch my family sat and watched TV at. His family was ultra Catholic, and when him and his church friends went to mass, I’d wait for him to get back. One time, his mother came to my house to inquire my mother about our sex life. One time, we snuck into his best friends house when no one was home to have sex in his living room because it would be funny. Everything about us was risky because we could, because we were the same brand of impulsive and deranged.

Andrew introduced me to the concept that boys could be interesting. Before him, I perceived boys my age as, at best, attractive objects I could kiss that say nothing of value. He had one of those intense personalities, someone with a million things to say, unpredictable, hilarious, raunchy and edgy, and I could be as weird as I wanted and he didn’t care. It worked for a few months, and then as it does when two unstable people are together, it turned into a clusterfuck of fighting and clinging onto a previous feeling. I couldn’t focus in class because of the ridiculous text fights we were getting into. 

When we broke up, I cried and begged him to not break up with me. I’m pretty sure I broke up with him as an impulsive, desperate test to see if he would fight for us, and then he agreed we should break up, and I backpedaled and begged him to take it back. It was so devastating for like 2 weeks. And then I heard he went and hooked up with Eliza immediately after, which I guess I deserved. 

A few months ago, I was sitting around with some friends at one of their apartments. Someone asked the room what’s your biggest regret, and the Eliza Andrew situation popped into my head, without a second thought. These friends have only known me in my adult life. I’ll tell them stories of how I used to be, but I don’t think it fully registers. I was so wildly different from how I am now, that maybe it sounds exaggerated. Now 25, I spend a majority of my nights at home in my pajamas writing, or watching TV with my friends. I’m guarded and jaded. I avoid clubs and bars, and when I go to parties, I tend to find a couch or a corner of the room and stay there.

It happened a decade ago, but it still comes up at random. It was my answer to that question months ago. Do I think it’s the most evil thing a teenage girl could’ve done? Not really, it’s the exact kind of thing that stupid kids do to each other. Yet… it’s this massive hole in my lore, a time where I did something super cruel to the one person who deserved it least. The guilt has been slowly growing since it happened and it continues to creep up on me to this day.

Why did I do to do that? Why didn’t I stop myself? These are massive question marks in my brain. It doesn’t matter that time’s gone by or that Eliza and I are still friends. I did it and I can’t shake it. It left something in me, raw and dried up. Some might say it’s my canon event.

I wish I say I’ve had such an effortless friendship since, but I haven’t. I love my friends, I feel so lucky to be surrounded by the people I am these days. Eliza, though, was the only time where it was like, 100% of everything in life was with her. Nothing has felt quite like that, quite so beautiful and fun. It could be adulthood and responsibilities getting in the way, but there was something so once in a lifetime about that kind of friendship where everything was together- getting on the bus for school, snickering in class, hanging out after school, going to outings and discussing after, sleepovers, consuming the same media, recording Youtube videos, giving each other those looks in groups, texting constantly when we weren’t together, wearing each others clothes. Singing together took such a vulnerability from me especially. There’s one song by Ariana Grande I still can’t listen to because we used to sing it all the time together, me on the guitar and her on the ukulele.

She was hurt by what I did, though she never directly confronted me. When it happened, she posted a photo on her private instagram of her and Andrew, the caption about how he was stolen from her. Years later, when she allowed me to follow it again and I stalked the old post, I found that one and sobbed my eyes out. One of those moments where you’re saying stupid stupid stupid over and over in your head.

I apologized at some point after, but we were changed. It was stilted and awkward. I still feel the urge to say I’m sorry a thousand more times. That song is still muted on spotify and seeing photos of us still hurts me. It’s a living breathing reminder of how empty and destructive I was, and what my first real friendship felt like. That was the beginning of the end of me, being a wholesome child. My uncontrollable, sexual depravity took the front seat, and joy and connection thrown out the window. I lived like that for eight years.

The emotional economy of that situation is what left me broke in the end. Real, authentic friendships are rare. Sexual relationships can be fulfilling within minutes of introduction. As an imprudent child with emotional issues, there is much less to be desired in having a long term, slowly building friendship than an instantly gratifying romance with a guy that’s proving wrong your insecurity that you’re unworthy. 

Eliza will always hold an important place in the story of my childhood. I’ll always be one of those people for her too, though in her story I’m one that hurt her, and that’s so devastating to me. I had such a good thing and ruined it. I can write this essay and talk to her about the situation years later with wisdom and maturity, but it’s not going to undo what was done, so I’ve had to accept that. I literally still tell myself, no, you were a kid, you couldn’t have known better. Something inside me is still dissapointed in myself for doing that. The fleeting months I spent with Andrew vs. with Eliza are unquantifiable, but there was no way I was going to know that as a child. That’s what I tell myself when I remember I've met interesting men since, men that are passionate and fulfilling since, but still haven’t found a friend I feel comfortable singing with.

I’d tell a younger version of myself not to have done it, to stay away from him in general, but I don’t think she would have listened. When you’re a kid, nothing is going to stop you. There is no older version of yourself inside you to show you what will happen. You have to make the mistake. And then you have to sit with it years later.