I was fifteen years old when I watched the cult 1986 film Stand By Me for the first time. A love letter to pre-teen friendship, I was mesmerised from the very first frame. The moment it finished, I wound the tape back to the beginning and watched it all over again. For the next two months, I watched Stand By Me every single day, carefully fitting my viewings around homework and family mealtimes.
My love for the film can probably be encapsulated by its now iconic final line: ‘I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?’. Although I’ve forged a number of meaningful relationships as an adult, I’m almost certain nothing will ever compare to the all-consuming intensity of the friendships I made as a teenager.
Two years before my Stand By Me binge, a new girl had joined my form at school. Winnie Tang had a soft Northern accent, super-naturally shiny hair and the neatest handwriting I’d ever seen. It was (platonic) love at first sight. Having spent the last two years hankering for a best friend, her arrival felt like a gift sent from the heavens. As luck would have it, she felt the same way and we spent the next few weeks feverishly getting to know one another. My diary entries from the time are crammed with sweeping declarations and far too many exclamation marks. I’d finally found my soulmate and wanted to document every glorious moment.
It was my teenage relationships that taught me about trust, loyalty, communication and intimacy.
Teenage girls often get a bad rap for indulging in bitchy or toxic behaviour, but this was rarely my experience. Having grown up in a happy but largely inexpressive family, I was rubbish at confrontation and opening up didn’t come naturally to me. It was my teenage relationships that forced me out of my emotionally repressed comfort zone and taught me about trust, loyalty, communication and intimacy. Although I was never in any doubt that my parents loved me very much, the phrase ‘I love you’ was rarely uttered at home. The rush I felt when Winnie oh-so-casually tacked those three little words on the end of a conversation for the first time was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Saying them back felt even better.
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Of course, with the highs, came the lows. When we were sixteen, Winnie didn’t speak to me for over a week. For the record, I was entirely at fault. I’d bailed on her to spend time with some shiny new friends I’d met at the youth theatre group I’d recently joined, and she was quite rightly upset. Revisiting this two and a half decades later, it seems like a fairly minor incident, barely worth writing about, but at the time, her silence felt nothing short of torturous. My friends were my life, everything else merely an annoying interruption, and knowing I’d hurt my best friend so badly she didn’t even want to look at me, shook my tiny universe.
My friendship with Winnie provided a blueprint for my friendships going forward. The high standard we set together has paved the way for a lifetime of healthy and fulfilling relationships, both platonic and romantic. As an author for young adults, teenage friendship inevitably features in all my work, with romance almost always taking a back seat, as per my own experiences. A late developer who didn’t have my first kiss until I’d left school, I never feel hard-changed when I look back on my romance-free teenage years. The love affairs I had with my friends were far, far better.
First Day of My Life by Lisa Williamson is out now, published by David Fickling Books.