The first bad idea, the one that started it all, wasn't even mine. It belonged to a boy we'll call Praveen—and no, that's not a typo, the universe just has a sick sense of humor. Praveen was my designated eighth-grade bench-mate, a human megaphone whose volume knob was permanently stuck at eleven. His special talent was turning secrets into public service announcements.
The year was 2017. My entire world was a scrawny, 13-year-old-boy's universe of cricket, half-finished homework, and a crush so blindingly generic it's embarrassing to recall. Her name is irrelevant. Let's call her Girl A. She was nice, she had a pleasant smile, and my primary romantic strategy was to stare at the back of her head in math class and hope she'd develop psychic powers.
My second bad idea was confiding in Praveen the Megaphone. During a particularly dull Social Studies lecture, I made the fatal error of whispering, "Dude, I think I like Girl A."
Praveen, bless his cotton socks, processed this information with all the subtlety of a dropped anvil. His eyes widened. A slow grin spread across his face. I had just handed a lit match to a pyromaniac in a fireworks factory.
The betrayal was swift and merciless. He didn't just tell Girl A. He told her friends. He told his friends. I'm fairly certain he scribbled it on the bathroom wall. By lunchtime, my little secret had a wider circulation than the school newsletter. I spent the rest of the day trying to merge with the wallpaper, a feat I nearly accomplished until the final bell rang.
As I was making my escape, a force of nature intercepted me. It was Parveen.
I knew of her, of course. She was in Girl A's orbit, a satellite of chaos with a mischievous grin. While other girls were quiet and reserved, Parveen operated on a different frequency. She was loud. She was direct. She was, to my terrified thirteen-year-old brain, a predator who had just spotted a wounded gazelle.
She bounced over, her schoolbag slung over one shoulder, and got right in my face. There was no preamble, no hesitation. Just a devilish glint in her eyes.
"What's the matter, huh?" she chirped, poking me squarely in the ribs.
My brain blue-screened. The carefully constructed walls of my adolescent dignity crumbled to dust. Here was this girl, a complete stranger, playfully calling me out on my pathetic little crush. I mumbled something incoherent, my face turning a shade of red that probably violated the school's dress code.
She just laughed, a bright, genuine sound that cut through my mortification. Then she turned and skipped off to join her friends, leaving me standing there, my heart hammering in my chest for a reason that had absolutely nothing to do with Girl A.
That was the moment the story really started. The gravitational pull of my universe had just shifted, and I was too dumb to even notice.
For the rest of eighth grade and all of ninth, Parveen and I were just classmates. We existed in the same space, occasionally exchanging a nod or a half-hearted "hi." It was the simple, low-stakes relationship of two people who knew one embarrassing thing about each other.
Then, in tenth grade, the second pivotal character of our story entered the stage: Kapil.
I met Kapil in 2018. He was, and still is, a human golden retriever. Endlessly friendly, effortlessly social, and loyal to a fault. He was the kind of guy who could walk into a room of strangers and walk out with five new best friends. He was the social glue I desperately needed. We clicked instantly, our shared love for terrible jokes and complaining about physics forming a bond of pure, unadulterated bro-hood.
It turned out, Kapil knew Parveen. Of course he did. Kapil knew everyone.
One afternoon, he dragged me over to her group. "Parveen!" he yelled. "This is my boy! You guys should be friends."
The introduction was a masterclass in awkwardness. I think I said "Hey," and she probably replied with a sarcastic "I know who he is." But Kapil's endorsement was a VIP pass. It moved me from "that weird kid from eighth grade" to "Kapil's friend." It was a promotion. We were now officially acquainted.
Our interactions leveled up. We started talking more, mostly in a group setting with Kapil as the buffer. I discovered she was fiercely intelligent and funnier than anyone I'd ever met. Her humor wasn't the pre-packaged kind; it was sharp, observational, and often aimed directly at me.
She found me to be an easy target. I was serious, a little too intense, and she took immense pleasure in poking holes in my self-important rants. I'd be passionately complaining about something, and she'd cut me off with, "Are you done saving the world yet?"
I'd scowl. She'd laugh. And a friendship began to form in the space between my indignation and her amusement.
Eleventh grade was a non-event, a year-long buffering screen courtesy of a global pandemic. We were all reduced to pixelated squares on a teacher's monitor. But the distance, paradoxically, set the stage for what came next.
When we returned for twelfth grade, it was like the world had been switched back to color. And our friendship exploded. With Kapil having switched schools, the dynamic shifted. It was just her and me. The buffer was gone, and we discovered we didn't need one.
She became my person. My confidante. The one I'd call to rant about my family, to dissect a movie, or to complain about the sheer pointlessness of it all. She was the only person, boy or girl, who could handle the unfiltered chaos of my brain. She never told me I was being too dramatic. She just listened, and then she'd hit me with a joke so dark and hilarious it would snap me right out of my funk.
Our love language was insults. We were ruthless. She'd mock my terrible taste in music. I'd make fun of her weird obsession with a particular brand of instant noodles. A casual observer would assume we were seconds away from a fistfight. But we knew the truth. Every insult was a coded message: "I see you. I get you. And I trust you enough to say this."
I learned to see her not through the world's eyes, but through my own. Other people were cruel. They called her "weird" because she wasn't afraid to be herself. They called her "ugly" because they were blind. I never saw it. I saw the way her eyes lit up when she was passionate about something. I saw the fierce loyalty she had for her friends. I saw the girl who could make me laugh so hard my stomach hurt.
They saw a weirdo. I saw the most incredible person I'd ever had the privilege of calling my friend.
And through it all, I remained a complete and utter idiot. My heart was doing everything short of hiring a skywriter to spell out "YOU ARE IN LOVE WITH THIS WOMAN," and my brain was happily ignoring it, convinced this was just what a really, really, really good friendship felt like. I was the world's worst detective, standing over a body with a smoking gun in my hand, and concluding that the cause of death was probably natural.
We graduated high school on a sunny afternoon, our friendship at its absolute zenith. It was perfect. A solid, unshakeable bond that I was sure would last forever. We were heading to different colleges, but that didn't matter. We had survived high school. We had survived a pandemic. We could survive anything.
It was a perfect friendship.
And I, in my infinite wisdom, was about to burn it to the ground.