Figures of Eight— Hailey Andrasco
This is the truth. When I was thirteen, I had a best friend. Her name was Sophia, but to me she was Clover.
We went biking once, Clover and I. There’s a rail trail a few miles from my house, and we brought our bikes there on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of May. It was the first rainless day in a week—the type of day where your hair clings to your forehead and your skin feels damp, yet all you can do is look up at the sky and feel grateful that the sun still exists.
About thirty minutes in, it started to rain. It didn’t matter that the sun had seemed relentless up until that point; cold droplets began to run down the backs of our necks and pool in our shoes. The water trickled across the lenses of my glasses, and I would shake my head as Clover laughed and laughed. When I remember how the sky turned a greyish hue and the air filled with that fresh, earthy scent, all I can hear is Clover’s raspy laugh.
Both of us started to pedal harder as the rain picked up. We were thirteen, just kids, and life was still a game where outrunning the weather was possible. Clover and I raced through crosswalks and past trail entrances, rain dousing our t-shirts and sending shivers down our bare arms. We sped through newly-formed puddles and rain-filled potholes, grinning as the water sprayed onto our calves. Darkened strands of my best friend’s hair stuck to her cheeks as she flew faster and faster.
Somehow, the front wheel of Clover’s bike began to skid. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, only the way that her handlebars started to quiver. As she fell, there was fear in her face—but beneath it something else. Maybe it was a kind of acceptance, as if she understood how the concrete would burn her elbows and the gravel would scuff her palms. Clover’s bike hit mine as it descended, and I began to fall, too. The wet pavement felt cold against my hands as I tried to catch myself, and my knees stung as they reached the ground. We both landed with our bikes sprawled on top of us and mud-caked tire tracks stamped across our skin.
Initially, I don’t think either of us said anything. We just lay there as the rain continued to pound, tasting the dirt on our faces as it dripped down our cheeks and toward our lips. I rubbed the tips of my fingers across my palms, savoring the gritty texture of sediment embedded in flesh. Clover stared at me with her soft green eyes, and even when her hair was covered in debris and darkened by rain, it seemed to glow—if only slightly.
“Love ya, Bopp,” she said quietly.
“Love you too, Cloe,” I whispered back.
It wasn’t romantic; she had a boyfriend and I was lonely. It was just a mutual understanding of how much we needed each other.
That story is written in a school-issued composition notebook from my seventh grade English class. It reflects just one of the hundreds of journal entries I’ve written since the age of thirteen. They’re scattered across Google Drive documents and college-ruled paper, tucked into leather-bound notebooks and scribbled on the backs of math worksheets. Each one captures a single moment out of thousands—a moment that I didn’t want to forget.
A true journal entry is insignificant. It isn’t created to appease those who see life as a collection of building blocks, each one obvious in size and value. Not once did I describe how, as I entered my front door after that biking trip, my mom stared at my mud-covered shirt and the gashes in my jeans and said, “another pair of pants, Hailey?” Not once did I mention how my palms ached for days after, to the point where holding a pencil was difficult. Not once, even, did I explain how Clover and I got back on our bikes and made it home.
No, a true journal entry describes the way the rain tasted as it dripped down your lips, and how your best friend’s hair clung to her cheeks, and the way her voice said “I love you” in that quiet sort of way.
Sometimes, in a true journal entry, you can run the tips of your fingers across the inked lines and feel the story infused within them. You can sit on your bedroom floor, leaning against the wall, and smell the paper like you smelled the rain when you were thirteen. Then, you can close your eyes and return to the moment each word was written. You can be a child again, riding your bike with your best friend, watching yourself pedal faster and faster as the page seems to buckle beneath the weight of the words.
I remember how beautiful Clover’s hair looked. I wrote about it—how, before the rain started, her hair flowed behind her in these long, ginger-colored strands. As we coasted past telephone lines and maple trees, the sun would catch the strands and dance with them. There was a kind of partnership between my best friend and the sun, and I was the spectator. Every so often, I’d look over at her just to watch the way her hair seemed to glow as the light enveloped it. When she noticed my lingering gaze, the corners of her eyes would crinkle, and her lips would part slightly in a subtle grin.
“Come on Bopp, speed up!” she’d shout before leaning toward her handlebars and pumping her legs faster. I would click the gear up on my bike and will myself to push harder until my thighs burned and my breath quickened. By that point, Clover would be meters ahead, laughing as she flew down the path, her glowing ginger hair fluttering behind her.
Some nights, I find the journal that holds that story. I trace each word with my fingertips, just to see my best friend’s hair again as it danced with the sun.
Not every journal entry ends neatly. In some, the final line sneaks up on you, and you're left wondering where the rest of the words went. Through that frustration, you'll find yourself searching through the margins, hopelessly begging for pen strokes that don’t exist. Only later will you begin to understand that the lack of resolution is resolution itself.
Sometimes, a true journal entry ends with a signature, or an ellipse, or a single word acknowledging that the ending didn’t seem to matter. Other times, the blank space beneath the ink serves as the only honest conclusion. The point is that the ending, whatever form it takes, does not exist to provide closure. It does not cater to the satisfaction of the reader, nor does it fabricate emotion that was never truly felt. Its purpose is only to say, simply and succinctly, “there is nothing more to tell.”
This is a story I come back to sometimes just to stare at the final line, wishing something else was there.
Clover came over to my house one night. It was a Tuesday in mid-July, and we sat on my animal-print bedspread and played UNO. It was a screwed up game of UNO; half the deck was missing, and the remaining cards were creased down the middle with jagged white lines.
As she placed down a red two, Clover looked up at me and whispered, “I have to get rid of my rabbits, Bopp.”
I remember how her words pierced through the silence. They floated among the dust in the air, settling atop the discard pile. I couldn’t catch them as they fell. My mind flashed to her rabbits, with their delicate ears and twitching pink noses.
I put down a red five.
“I can’t take care of them anymore. I can’t even take care of myself anymore, Bopp,” Clover said as she drew a card. It was louder this time, more urgent.
I watched her pupils flick down toward her cards and then up to my face. They twitched like a rabbit’s nose. She wanted me to say something—I could feel it. The feeling buried itself in my gut as I searched for the right sentence. I couldn’t find it, though. I just sat there, on my animal-print bedspread, while my best friend's words hit the discard pile one after another. And all I could do was put another card on top.
I placed down a yellow five.
“I don’t even know what I’m doing. It’s like I’m just drifting with no real direction.”
Desperation crept into her voice. I saw the way her soft green eyes stared at me as she placed down a yellow three. They were the eyes of a rabbit staring at a wolf. I looked down at my hands, expecting to see claws. My stomach twisted. The words didn’t come.
I put down a yellow eight.
“Are you listening to me? I have to get rid of my rabbits, Bopp!”
She was yelling this time, tears dripping down her cheeks. I felt my fingernails bury themselves into my palms. I hated how she looked at me. I hated how I couldn’t fix anything. I hated how the words wouldn’t form. I hated how I just stared at her—at the blue eight she placed into the pile—and stayed silent.
I put down a blue three.
“Bopp?”
She said it quietly, the edges of the word softened by her tears. I watched as she slowly placed down a card. It settled on top of the blue three and the blue eight and the yellow eight and all of her words that I couldn’t save.
I put down my second-to-last card.
I felt a word rise from my stomach.
“UNO.”
That’s how that story ended, and that’s how I wrote it in a journal. There was no heartfelt conversation, no moment where I brushed the tears from my best friend’s cheeks and held her in my arms—just a quiet “UNO” in place of all the words I should have said.
There’s a type of anger that only a true journal entry can provoke. It’s the kind that begins as just a mild irritation, triggered by the memory of who you used to be. It then morphs into a hot, lingering resentment as your eyes travel further and further down the page, noticing the semi-colons you misused and the way you signed your name with messy cursive.
It's the sort of anger that tempts you to just rip out the page and pretend that the words never existed—that the version of you who wrote them never existed. And yet, it’s that same anger that forces you to read every word and cherish each sentence because you were so young, and because your best friend had been replaced by two words, and because those words didn’t include an apostrophe.
It was a text message. Two words: “Im sorry.” No apostrophe.
It was sent by her mom. Maybe she had planned to send something else, some more words that might have softened the two she settled on. Maybe life just got busy, and a couple of days passed, and it started to seem less important. Maybe the apostrophe was a casualty of time.
I went to the gas station a mile from my house when I saw it. Maybe I biked there, or I might’ve walked. Maybe I just ended up there somehow. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that twenty minutes after those two words replaced my best friend, I was standing in front of a combined Dunkin’ Donuts and Mobil Mart.
I never went inside the Dunkin’ Donuts. If I had, I would’ve heard a young employee cursing as he tried to fit a too-small lid onto a too-big cup. I would’ve seen a small cluster of customers, each with glazed-over eyes and hands wrapped around their third cup of coffee that day. I would’ve heard the low buzz of tired conversations and meaningless smalltalk.
I never went inside the Dunkin’ Donuts, though.
Instead, I stood on the concrete walkway, my gaze fixed on their sign.
It had an apostrophe.
I remember how I stared at that character, my vision blurring and anger rising in my throat. It was just an orange line, but it mattered. It mattered because a gas station coffee shop with a crumbling walkway and straw-wrappers stuffed in their gutters got an apostrophe, and my best friend didn’t. And because it was October. And I was standing in a puddle of spilled coffee and cigarette butts. And I didn’t have a coat, or a sweater, or a best friend.
I walked home eventually—or maybe I biked. Maybe I just ended up there somehow, with the taste of salt in my mouth and the Dunkin’ Donuts sign ingrained in my mind. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that it was a text message.
Two words: “Im sorry.”
No apostrophe.
The true gift of a journal entry is how it lets you believe. It doesn’t foster denial so much as it allows you to grieve what should have been. The goal is not to deceive yourself into thinking something happened, but to fully accept that it didn’t.
As you describe in detail your best friend’s soft green eyes, a true journal entry doesn’t interrupt you to say that they were actually brown, that you only thought they were green because you never really looked at her. As you write pages upon pages about your biking trips and UNO games, it doesn’t remind you that you never went biking with her, that your conversations took place behind screens, and that you never once got the chance to hug her. It doesn’t even tell you that your best friend wasn’t replaced by two words, but by none.
A true journal entry doesn’t say any of that. It lets you pretend.
I can pretend that one day, twenty years after I wrote about how Clover and I raced down the rail trail by my house, I went on a trip. I got in my car and drove down backroads and residential streets, past oak trees and telephone lines. When a spring rain began to spray water onto my windshield, I slowed and watched the drops collide as they trickled down the glass.
Eventually, I stopped. I got out of my car and walked up the stoop of a small brick building until my eyes were fixed on the entryway. I pressed my fist onto the wood and knocked. Minutes passed, and then an older woman opened the door. She had grey hair and brown eyes, with wrinkles surrounding her lips.
I held out my hands, filled with college-ruled paper, composition notebooks, math sheets, leather-bound journals, and printed-out Google Documents that I had been carrying for thirty-three years, and I said, with all the bravery I could muster,
“Hi, my name is Bopp. I’m here to give you your daughter.”
Hailey Andrasco is an insect lover and orange enthusiast. She lives in Massachusetts and enjoys creating elaborate chalk drawings, reading books, and spending time with her cat. In the future, Hailey hopes to encounter a Hercules beetle and own 36 bucket hats.