On the time I lost my friends at High School

Okay, so I said I'd tell you. This won't be easy. Or pretty. But if you've read The Boy in the Hoodie, you'll see where I got the idea for what went down between Kat and Paige in Chapter 8.

I had issues as a teenager, so let's just get that out of the way first. I had terribly low self-esteem and desperately wanted everyone to like me. Clearly, I also had no idea how to go about this. I was soapy-obsessed (Neighbours, Home and Away, and I read this series of books called Sweet Valley High - if you know the series there's no need to say anything more) and I think this was where I learned how you get and treat your friends. You can see this is headed for disaster, now, can't you.

(Photo: This is me on my first day of High School-Year 7. You can now wake up every morning with a sense of gratitude that, for all that may suck about your life, at least you didn't grow up in an age when it was cool to wear socks with sandals.)

Back then, I loved to write and one way I expressed that love was through having multiple "pen pals". I wrote to other teenagers all over the world; yes, with pen and paper, with stamps that needed to be purchased from the Post Office with a little blue AIRMAIL sticker running up the side. In writing these letters to strangers, I could be whoever I told them I was. I could be engaging and funny. And they liked me. Even people who I met on summer holidays would prefer to write to me, than hang out with me while our families holidayed together. In fact, one of my pen pals called me on the phone one Sunday afternoon and I didn't know how to talk to her. She stopped writing to me after that. On paper, I was good at making and keeping friends.

Which was probably why I was so shocked when one of my pen pals wrote to me saying she was writing to too many people and so was cutting back. I was on the exit list. I suppose it's yesteryear's equivalent of being de-friended on Facebook during a cull.

Well, it just so happened that I told my school friends about it, and Ella, our group's 'leader' came over so we could respond to the letter together. And we did; we wrote the letter together. We were nasty. We were rude. We were accusatory. It was full of terrible swear words and described in very unpleasant terms the type of person we thought she was.

To this day, I have no idea why we even wrote it. It was completely unnecessary. She was a lovely girl. And it was really lovely of her to even write to let me know she wouldn't be able to keep corresponding with me.

I have even less of an idea of what on earth I was thinking in posting it to her.

It was a couple of weeks later that my father confronted me in our family's kitchen, holding a photocopy of my letter and a note from the poor girl's parents saying that if there was any further communication from me that they would be involving their lawyer. My parents were horrified. They had barely heard me swear before, let alone knew I was capable of writing such a horrific letter to another human being.

They banned me from having anything more to do with Ella.

When I told Ella what had happened, she couldn't believe I'd posted the letter. She was smarter than me. Much, much smarter.

It was sometime later that Ella asked me if I wanted to go down the street with her, and without even thinking I told her what my parents had said. And that I wouldn't be allowed to go if she was going.

That was the last time I spoke to Ella, or her to me, for a very long time. Our friendship never recovered. And of course, she took all my other friends with her. I was in Year 7 at the time. I didn't socially begin to recover until about Year 10.

I sincerely hope no one else has such a tragic story to tell about losing their friends. But if you do, let me know in the comments and we can sob over it together ... through our keyboards, of course.

Photo: this is me and one of my besties (my daughter tells me only twelvies say besties, and I'm not allowed to use the word) best friends, Jax. This photo warms my heart. Best friends are awesome.

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