Read Online Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume by Jennifer OConnell - Free Book Online

said.
    And then we tumbled into the usual rhythms of our conversation.
    As if nothing had happened. As if there was never any real space between us.
    I assumed it would always be this way.
    During the early months of this latest silence, I remember thinking that I was too stressed out and busy to deal with it, and if she wanted to reach out, she could. It never really occurred to me that she wouldn’t.
    In those previous silent periods, I’d never taken her off my list of friends altogether. Nor had I done so this time, especially since we hadn’t even gotten in a fight. Quite the contrary—we’d gone on vacation together just a few months before the silence. Until I received the news of her wedding (many months later from a mutual friend), if I’d been asked to make up that list of friends, T. would have been on it.
    In other words, if I’d gotten married in that period of time, it never would have occurred to me to do so without her.
    Which just goes to show how little I knew about our friendship.
    I’ll admit that it hurt my feelings. But not for the reasons it should have. I should have been upset that she let me go, that on the day she’d been thinking about for most of the time I’d known her—and one she’d always planned to share with me—she hadn’t considered me at all. I should have been angry at her for drawing such a significant line in the sand. I should have wondered what I’d done to hurt her so badly that she would undergo such a radical change without bothering to send me so much as an e-mail. I should have wondered why she either (a) didn’t care about me anymore or (b) thought I was such a terrible friend that I didn’t warrant the sort of notification one might send estranged relatives and the local paper. I should have felt all of these things, and perhaps on some level I did. But mostly it hurt my feelings because I was faced with incontrovertible evidence that she viewed our (apparently lost) friendship in a completely different light than I had.
    Which makes me wonder now: How much do any of us know about our friendships?
    What makes for best friends, anyway? In the beginning of Just As Long As We’re Together, Stephanie and Rachel seem bound together mostly by history and geography. Which you shouldn’t underestimate, by any means. There’s a reason people differentiate between “work friends” and “neighborhood friends.” Some people meet a new best friend every time they leave the house. Others maintain a select inner sanctum of close friends, keeping everyone else at a distance. Still others create entirely separate worlds to inhabit—one for work, one for family, one for home—and never allow those worlds to collide (those people always seem to have the most interesting weddings, don’t they?). There are as many different ways of having friends as there are of being friends.
    In my latest book, my heroine, Gus, is forced to confront many of the same issues Rachel and Stephanie must face in Just As Long As We’re Together —many of the same issues T. and I were forced to face in real life. What happens if your friendships aren’t what you thought they were? What do you do if your best friend no longer wants that title? What if you, yourself, aren’t as good of a friend as you always assumed you were? I’m lucky enough to have truly great best friends in my life, but I’ve also lost best friends like T., and these relationships, good and bad, have been the focal point of my life for years. I wanted to try to address these experiences in my book.
    In most of the lives of the women I know, friendship with other women plays an enormous, pivotal role. Sure, most of us have or want a significant other, but it takes a lot of time and energy to find The One. Most women need their girlfriends to travel down the road with them as they either seek out or wait for The One. For