She was a foxy badass chick with raven Farrah tresses and black leather pants. 

We were thirteen. She really shouldn't have been my friend, but she was.  She had been for five years.  When she first moved to town she was a poor kid who talked funny, but I thought she was cool right off.  She was an unrepentant tomboy and she liked to hang out with me and  a couple of my friends.

By the time we hit junior high, she hung out with high school guys in fast cars, smoked a little dope and got suspended from school a few times.  She was also already 5'6," (taller for the late 70's than that seems now,) leggy, and a stone cold fox.  Turns out she didn't really talk funny like the kids used to tease her about in grade school.  She had a Southern accent. 

I was a skinny, pimply nerd who wanted desperately to be cool.  She got cool, and I got pushed to the edge of most social circles.  But she never abandoned me.  She always treated me the same as before.  She laughed at my jokes.  She drawled her patented, "Aw shit, fuck ye-ew" when she caught me pulling her leg.  And she smiled her beautiful smile when I passed by.  I was still one of her buds.

She took me with her a few times when she and her high school friends were knocking around.  Some of the baddest dudes in school started to say "hey" to me in the hallways of our combined junior/senior high.  One night we got into a fight with a carload of high school guys from Green Bay.  They had thrown a beer bottle at our car, and broken glass from it had sprayed my friend.  I had never been so livid.  I threw a three-quarters full bottle of beer at a huge opponent and it exploded into a cascade of brown glass, white foam and red blood from his face.  I got the shit kicked out of me by his friends, but she was true as ever and got me out before I was too badly hurt.

We were thirteen, and I knew at that moment that I was not cut out to be part of her world.  She was the cool one, the sexy one, the one other people wanted to be. But I was the one who walked away from her.  After that night, we'd say "hey" in school,  but we never again set foot in each others homes, rode in the same car, fought in the same fight or hid in a culvert for an hour while the cops looked for us.  She understood.  She was cool like that.

For a while I had a picture of us taken together at graduation.  She put her arm around me and leaned her head on my shoulder while her mom took our picture.  She held on for an extra moment, then she kissed me on the cheek and walked away into the crowd.  I got the picture from one of her friends about a week later.  She had already shaken the dust of our little town from her shoes, never to be seen by any of us again. 

I lost that picture somewhere along the way.  But I can see it in my mind's eye.  When I do, I taste Pabst Blue Ribbon, smell her cheap perfume and feel the motion of a fast GTO and the lurch of its sudden stop before we piled out for a fight.  And it seems to me that it all represents the road not taken.  I chose the right course for me.  But for just that little while, I was on the road with my friend, a foxy badass chick with Farrah hair, and I can't pretend that I don't miss it.