This piece was written by Lizz and Rachel together and was originally read out loud during A-Camp 2015 as part of the Staff Reading. It’s reproduced here with some minorly incriminating details removed in honor of Gal Pal Week. 

Lizz: I met Rachel in Professor Samet’s Relativism, Absolutism, Pluralism class spring semester of Freshman Year. That part I’m certain we can agree upon. It was a seminar that was sort of about philosophy and sort of about writing. I spent a lot of time asking myself if the straight girl sitting next to me was flirting with me and when she was going to dump her long-distance boyfriend. Rachel sat across from us and was the smartest person in the class. She was also, quite clearly, the only person doing the reading.

Rachel had impossibly long hair that she brushed into waves but mostly wore pulled straight back in a bun. She looked like Julia Stiles in Save the Last Dance. She wore a lot of olive T-shirts with flared jeans or long skirts with spaghetti strap tank tops. This was back when people said “spaghetti strap tank tops” instead of just “tank tops” and you would worry about whether or not your bra strap was showing. Rachel’s bra strap was never showing and so I also spent a good deal of Professor Samet’s class wondering whether she was wearing a bra at all.

A deeply flattering photo of Rachel circa college

Rachel: The writing & philosophy class I was required to take freshman year mostly sucked. We had to read long books about the philosophy of the scientific revolution and there were frat guys there. But there was this one girl, Lizz, who seemed cool. She wore comic book tshirts and had beautiful shiny hair. One day after class, I announced to a friend, “Lizz is not straight. I can just tell.” I checked her Facebook profile, which was robust and accurate because this was the early days of Facebook and we all took it very seriously, and lo and behold! I was correct. It was my first semester at college, I had found my first not-straight girl and she seemed cool and funny! Everything was going ACCORDING TO PLAN. It was just what I had been hoping for when I left high school and it was also terrifying.

Lizz and her shiny hair, circa college

Lizz: I don’t remember the first time I saw Rachel, or the first time I thought she might be gay. It’s hazy now, probably because I spent so much of spring semester thinking that girls might be gay. There was something about Rachel that I just couldn’t shake. She spent a lot of time quoting feminist theorists who I’d never heard of and she had what I would later come to call “Congenital Gay Face.”

I knew Rachel liked girls when we walking downstairs together after class one day. I asked if she thought the straight girl in class was flirting with me. “Girls like that always seem like they’re flirting with you, but they never are and they always go back to their long-distance boyfriends.” This would be the first of many times Rachel would tell me that maybe I was getting ahead of myself or maybe something was all in my mind.

Rachel: For the next couple years, we didn’t see much of each other, at least as much as is possible on a campus of 3000 people. I worked two jobs and studied abroad; Lizz studied like a maniac and went home to see her mom a lot and dated somebody who had a sweet housing assignment with a kitchen. It’s bizarre how separate our lives could be even when we probably walked by each other five times a week.

Lizz: At the end of the semester Rachel and I left each other. She went on to study writing and society and pouring coffee at a café. I went on to study math and biology and ultimate frisbee and how to be emotionally distant to keep from getting hurt. The straight girl from philosophy class left school to move home with her boyfriend. But Rachel and I came back together pretty quickly, because we always do.

Senior year Rachel came back from study abroad and I asked her out to get tea at Café on the Common and catch up. I actually wasn’t sure if it was a date so I ran it by our mutual friend Nyssa who said Rachel was also unsure if it was a date. She sat cross legged and it felt really nice.

Rachel: We did end up going on what I tentatively understood to be an actual date. We walked from campus to a shitty cafe while Lizz talked about her exes and family holidays. We didn’t touch even a tiny bit at all and I was wildly nervous and wished I could text someone who would tell me how to do this and it was kind of great.

There was no second date, but Lizz and I got closer as my relationship with my boyfriend got worse. She had just broken up with this girl who had totally steamrolled her heart. We’d spend weekends in the city with the other queer girls, drinking heavily while Lizz told us once again how she was scared to have anal sex because what if she liked it TOO MUCH.

Lizz: College was peppered with these nights where we would go out with a bunch of queer girls and get drunk and maybe make out or maybe I would just want to. One night Taylor and Kip came to town and we took them downtown. Adrienne and I sat in the back of the bus talking about how I was so nervous I was going to like butt sex so I was probably never going to try it. It would be years before I would talk about butt sex in public again. That was my first night in a girl bar. It was packed, and sweaty and disoriented and amazing. I hiked myself up onto a platform and danced with Rachel in circles with my hands in the air.

Waiting outside Machine for Second Saturday, the dyke night

Rachel: We didn’t sleep together until Halloween senior year, when I was dressed as Lindsay Lohan in her grunge phase. (Lizz was obviously a sexy vampire.) We were both so drunk that we didn’t realize Lizz was still wearing her plastic vampire teeth until we had already been making out for ten minutes.

Lizz: At Halloween that year I dressed as a vampire penguin and Rachel went as Ann Coulter. We met at the campus gay group’s annual Halloween party. If I didn’t know better I would swear it was junior year when I went as a ringleader, except that when I woke up in bed with Rachel the next morning I still had my vampire teeth in and she had bite marks down her neck. By afternoon she had left and I was running ass naked through my dorm suit to the bathroom to vomit nude, scandalizing my roommates.

Rachel: In the morning, my neck looked like it had been chewed on by a bear. Welp, I thought, that’s it, that friendship is ruined. But then Lizz texted me a joke about how we were both going to have to wear scarves for a week and we were fine. It was like talking to your best friend about your wacky hookup from the night before, and it didn’t really even matter that Lizz was playing both parts. I should have been stressed out about what it meant for the remains of my deteriorating relationship with the guy I was still sort of with, but I just giggled and texted her back and felt pretty good despite my hangover.

Lizz, before and after

Lizz: We never had sex again after that. We joke that it was Goldilocks and the three bears. We tried to date and that didn’t work. We tried fucking and that didn’t work. Turned out the best relationship for us is an intense codependent friendship.

Rachel: Sleeping together turned out to be kind of a wash and we didn’t pursue it, but we kept our tight orbit around each other. Lizz dressed me up as Sarah Jessica Parker for a Sex and the City party; I tried to talk her out of gunning for this straight girl I kind of hated; it didn’t work. I read flashcards for her while we braced ourselves to stay up all night drinking; she took care of me when I drank way too much and tried to make out with her to distract myself from being sad.

We graduated from college in a blur. Afterwards, it would have made a certain kind of sense to drift apart. Lizz was working in a fancy lab; I was serving coffee and sandwiches, we lived on opposite ends of the city, and didn’t have all that many friends in common. But we didn’t. More than staying alive, our friendship changed; it got super real and intense as our lives post-college got super real and intense.

Lizz: “I’m doing this whole thing where I’m very into queer fashion right now,” I told Rachel. “We used to have a fashion writer, but she left. Maybe you could write a few fashion articles until we hire someone new.” “Alright,” I replied, “I’m not much of a writer, but it sounds like fun. I could do that for a little while.” I did it for a long while.

Our friendship changed substantially after I started working for Autostraddle. Rachel went from my Friend to my Editor–Friend. You want to tell your friend, “Last night I was so depressed I just watched eight episodes of Trading Spaces,” but you can’t if you’re late on an article you owe that friend. Actually it’s the opposite. You can tell a friend that you have to cancel dinner because you’re wicked tired. You have to tell your editor you’re too depressed to get off the couch.

Rachel: It was a terrible, terrible year. I had a spectacularly messy breakup and lived in a miserable shared house while working multiple jobs; Lizz had sixteen million terrible OKCupid dates while her mom got sick again and she prepared for med school.

Lizz: Right after college my high school best friend and I lived in a tiny shitbag apartment midway between Rachel and some of our other queer friends across town. We all spent a lot of time meeting up at my place to party. My brother got married. My mom got cancer again. The apartment got roaches. At some point we got a puppy. Did it all happened the same week? It’s foggy that year. What happened when. We ebbed and flowed through fucked up relationships. There was no space inside of me for romantic relationships, but somehow there was space inside me for our brand of friendship.

Lizz’s apartment, and getting fucked up therein

A friend crashed my car and Rachel came to help me assess the damage. The summer had been so shitty this didn’t even really faze us. My car had been towed to some scummy garage in Somerville and I had to pull out my personal items so the whole thing could be scrapped.

“When did I start living in my car?” I asked her. We picked through the CDs and teeshirts and books and blankets.

“When your mom got sick and you drove home every weekend,” she replied. “Ugh,” I groaned as I pulled another fistful of broken CDs into a trash bag, ” I’m never letting it get like this again.”

“You probably will,” Rachel told me, “But that’s okay.”

Rachel was at the last date I ever went on with a man. On date three I decided that I just wasn’t into Carl and tried to break it off, but he wouldn’t let me. He walked me to a bar and stood outside the bathroom when I told him I had to pee. I texted Rachel from the stall that I needed her to come get me. Right now. I can’t tell you exactly why I texted Rachel and not Joyce or my brother or Jessie but I knew that when I said I needed her right now she would be there right now. I wish I could say that without it sounding like the lyrics to “Lean on Me.” Maybe I didn’t think anyone else would believe me. Rachel texted me she’d arrived minutes later just as Carl was asking me about how sex with girls worked and whether I used lots of dildos; I bolted from the bar and slid into Rachel’s car and breathed for the first time. I told her I didn’t think I could date men for a long time and instead I didn’t date anyone for a long time.

Rachel: We drank desperately, incredible amounts, and I barely remember that year. But I do remember Lizz bringing me South Indian takeout so I could eat it while I sat on the floor packing up my apartment and crying, and I remember driving Lizz to clean out the wreck of her car after a friend totaled it and then taking her to get sandwiches from the place I worked. I remember feeling like I wasn’t sure either of us would make it, and realizing how deeply I wanted Lizz to. I didn’t know the term at the time, but it was the first time I think I understood chosen family: people who help you survive by deeply linking your survival to theirs.

In Amherst MA, 2013

Lizz: The night before Rachel moved I went over to her place and sat in her unpacked bedroom. We watched Hoarders and ate Indian food on the floor. In case you ever feel like throwing away all of your belongings, I strongly recommend watching Hoarders. By the end you’ve decided that even your most treasured possessions are trash. I didn’t understand why she needed to leave Boston. Later I would discover that Rachel had to leave because she was unhappy. I didn’t really understand this until I also left to go to grad school, also because I was unhappy.

When I think about her now I think about her in Milwaukee in front of a laptop screen. I think about her with her friends at her wedding and how happy she seemed. I think about the way she looks with red lipstick on in text message photographs in dressing rooms with questions about button-up choices. I wonder often why we have to be apart in order to be happy. Why we were incapable of being happy while we were together; whether that was the space and time or if it was me.

At Rachel’s wedding in 2014

In the past few years I’ve done things I never thought I could do because of Rachel. Actually, I become an entire new person because of Rachel. She absorbs the ocean in my head and presses it into a faucet. Rachel is able to take me from an insane muppet to somebody you would want to know. In that way she turned me from a talker into a writer and from a writer into a speaker. She edited my medical school application and in that way she also made me a doctor. When I was ready to say I wasn’t damaged anymore she helped me find the words to say it. Heck, she edited this essay.

At A-Camp 2015

Rachel: I want to say something that wraps this up, that concludes, but I can’t because this isn’t concluded, and won’t be. In a while Lizz will move somewhere else to be a doctor and I’ll probably move in a few years too and maybe one of us will have a kid or get really into being paleo and probably everything will change but also some things won’t. I’ll always have someone who’s ready to buy me a bra and mail it if she sees one she thinks I would like, someone who is going to make sure I make it no matter what.

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