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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/brunett3babyd0ll on 2026-05-13 21:04:59+00:00.

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I heard all three syllables of my first name echo from across the Chevron parking lot before I even saw her.

It was early, the morning sun just barely peeking over the horizon. The highway was still quiet. A breeze kept sticking stray hairs to my lip gloss. One hand gripped my car door, the other clutched a sweating Red Bull.

I didn't recognize the voice immediately. But I should have.

It was familiar, but not in a way I could immediately place. By the time I looked up, she was already walking toward me, waving like we’d just seen each other yesterday. I remember squinting at her for a second too long. Not because I didn’t recognize her. Because I did. It was her.

We met in the second grade. It was late September, still hot enough outside for heat mirages to form over the blacktop. She had bright ginger hair cut into a flat bob and her family had just moved down from Chicago. Mrs. Yuele sat her beside me because I was “good at making people feel welcome,” which really just meant I talked too much for her liking. The entire morning was spent whispering and exchanging giggles instead of doing our work. Our birthdays were on the exact same day, down to the year. I remember both of us sort of staring at each other for a second after our discovery, like we had accidentally stumbled into our own secret kingdom.

She’s still the only person I’ll ever truly share my birthday with.

My best friend at the time was a girl named Lily from one of the other second grade classes. We’d only really been friends since the year before, but Lily had already developed a habit of acting like she owned me in the way kids sometimes do. She was visibly irritated when I invited the new girl over to sit with us at lunch, especially once she started noticing the little similarities we kept pointing out to each other. After lunch, we spent all of recess trying to avoid Lily.

Our elementary school backed up against the highway, with this sprawling field beside the playground that felt enormous when you were seven. We hid under the jungle gym, inside the tube slides, behind the equipment shed we weren’t supposed to touch. Every time we thought we’d lost her, Lily would appear. I remember her chasing us down like a foxhound on the grass, shrieking and running as fast as our legs could carry us. She only stopped when the bell rang and we had to go back inside.

It felt funny at the time. Looking back now, I think that was probably the first time anyone tried to pull us apart.

The summer between fourth and fifth grade, my mom hosted our birthday sleepover. She made rainbow cupcakes and bought special unicorn sprinkles so we could decorate them ourselves. We mostly ended up making a mess and staying up too late from the sugar rush.

After my parents had “gone to bed,” we were on the floor in my room playing with the new Breyer horses her grandma had bought her. I was in charge of the stallion, she had claimed the mare and the foals. We were conducting a dramatic escape from an evil stable owner who wanted to sell them all off.

“Shhh! If we go over the fence too loud he’s gonna wake up,” I whispered, trying to deepen my voice the way I thought grown men sounded. I nudged the stallion forward. “Okay, Glitter. Now.”

She lifted the white mare, jumping the invisible fence line between the hardwood and my carpet. Her voice shifted into character.

“Come on kids, you can do it!”

One by one, she moved the foals over the “fence,” careful and dramatic, like their safe landings were of some great importance. When the last one made it across, I followed with the stallion.

“You saved us!” she squealed, too loud for how late it was, her hands flying to her mouth like my dad’s lumbering footsteps would start down the hall any second now. For a second, everything went still. She didn’t move the mare anymore. She just looked at me.

“I love you, Thunder.” The words came out of her mouth quietly, like it was still a part of the game.

After fifth grade, I moved on to the local middle school while her parents enrolled her in a private school. We saw each other a couple of times throughout sixth grade, but we were both busy learning how to be around other people and figuring out what new versions of ourselves fit the changing landscape.

My hair changed first from deep brown to blue, then pink. She grew hers out long. Every time one of us changed something about ourselves, the other usually followed with their own version of it. It didn’t feel particularly painful at the time, I just remember she wasn’t around as much anymore. It was the kind of thing you don’t notice until it’s already over.

By freshman year, my hair had grown back to its natural brown and developed loose, uneven curls. I had pierced my own nose that summer and started a collection of small, poorly done handpoke tattoos across my body.

When I walked into my last period, she was there.

She had kept her hair long, but it was box-dyed black now and visibly damaged at the ends. Her mascara was always clumpy and a little smudged, like she had put it on in a hurry and stopped caring halfway through. She wore her eyeshadow in a similar fashion, a little too heavy for her features and not quite blended all the way.

Our high school was on a block schedule, so we only saw each other every other day, but within a few weeks we had fallen back into it like nothing happened. It felt like picking up a conversation we had paused somewhere back then. Like we had never really been separated in the first place.

She had started smoking weed in eighth grade, and we began to take frequent bathroom breaks between classes just to meet up and disappear for a few minutes at a time. I always let her hit my Juul in exchange for her cart. We’d stand there leaning on the stalls for almost twenty minutes sometimes, talking about nothing important, then walk each other back to class as slowly as possible like neither one of us really wanted to return.

The school year blurred into itself. So did the summer after.

We’d end up on her back porch at night more often than not, passing things back and forth, laughing too hard at things that weren’t that funny. I remember throwing up on the weathered wood after too much of her parents’ Casamigos, the charcoal taste still sharp in my throat when we slipped back inside like nothing had happened. I’ve avoided tequila ever since.

In the morning, when her mom came in yelling about it, we tried to blame it on the dog.

“I know you two are lying because it smells like straight LIQUOR out there!”

She stormed into the kitchen, and we couldn’t hold it in anymore. We just looked at each other and lost it. After that, it became an inside joke. Anytime one of us was stretching the truth, we’d click our tongues and mutter, “It smells like liquor out there…”

In the fall of sophomore year, she’d started seeing a freshman. It wasn’t anything serious, at least not in the way she talked about it, but she kept asking me to go to one of his JV football games with her because she was too nervous to go alone. I eventually agreed, mostly just to stop hearing about it, and told her I’d only go if we could get stoned first.

She came over after school that Thursday and we killed time at my house until it was late enough to leave. We didn’t really talk about anything important. Just let the hours pass between us the way they usually did.

At some point I looked over at her and said, “Hey.. did you still want that tattoo?”

She had asked me for one weeks earlier, after I pierced her nose in the school bathroom. Neither of us had brought it up since.

“Duh,” she replied. “Can you do it at the game tonight? I have to be home kind of early.”

I picked at my nails for a second before answering. “Yeah. What did you want again? I need to draw it out with a Sharpie first.”

“What about a star? Like the one you have, but on my ankle.” She smiled a little. “So we can match.”

She always got a little too excited when we matched. Clothes, jewelry, all the usual teenage things. At the time, it felt flattering more than anything else.

I remember pausing longer than I meant to. Just for a second. Then I shrugged. “Sure.”

By the time spring had rolled around, COVID had started shutting everything down.

After lockdown, I spent most nights at her house. There wasn’t much of a structure to it, just hours blurring into each other. We’d sit on her bed and watch YouTube videos we weren’t really paying attention to, or lie there in the dark talking about nothing until one of us fell asleep mid-sentence. Sometimes I’d catch her answering questions for me before I could speak, like she already knew what I was going to say. She’d started sneaking out to see that boy from the fall, using me as cover more than once. I always hated it, but I never had the guts to fully say it out loud.

By then, whatever we were had stopped having a clear shape. Late-night makeouts, hands fumbling under clothes, moments that felt like too much to be nothing but too ambiguous to call anything else. We started falling asleep cuddling more often than not.

She laughed once and said it was like we were practicing on each other. I didn’t laugh back.

It felt like more than that, so much more than that, but I couldn’t ever find a way to say it that didn’t feel like it would change something I didn’t want to lose. So I didn’t. I just stayed.

We were wandering down to the park one late summer night, intent on getting...

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