Day 34 - Tram

Tram and I became "best friends forever" really quickly. She played french horn and we each had English as the last class of the day. She was constantly laughing and spazzing out and was generally really entertaining. She had a lot of catch phrases and nicknames and we had an enormous amount of inside jokes. She was a social butterfly, but always claimed I was the popular one (so not true, by the way).

I used to get on AIM when I was in middle school a couple times a week, but when I moved to Texas I was almost constantly online. I say this because Tram was also almost always online too. We would hang out at each other's house, or the mall, or see a movie or something at least once a week and would be chatting online the rest of the time. We went to San Antonio twice, no three times: once with my parents, once with her parents and once on a band trip.

The trip with her parents was really interesting for me. I haven't mention it yet, but Tram is Vietnamese and her parents are first generation Americans. She spoke Vietnamese before she spoke English which I always thought was cool. Her parents were really strict with her, but not so much with her older brother, and they weren't around a lot. So, a trip to San Antonio with them was exciting to me. I learned an important loyalty lesson that weekend which every other teenager must know inherently: if your friend thinks her parents are lame, then you must treat them accordingly. It was hard, because Tram's dad wanted to go to these haunted railroad tracks. How cool is that?

Apparently, not cool at all. I didn't know. I wasn't good at being rude to other people's parents. Mine? Sure, when it seemed necessary, but my friends' parents? I lacked the gene.

Tram and I did a lot together those four years. We went through braces, crushes and first dates, mean people, becoming staff and officers of the band and getting our letter jackets as sophomores. We grew apart pretty naturally. She did student council (see? popular) and I did computer science and math competitions. We stopped being in the same level of band and the same classes.

Tram also did some things which I never really investigated fully because I didn't consider it worth the trouble, but angered me nevertheless. Tram hung out with guys, but she was a girl's girl. She talked behind people's backs, spread rumors, and occassionaly manipulated people. I don't want to infer that she was a mean girl, or that the majority of girls don't do this. I'm also not claiming complete innocence; that would be a lie. It's possible she was harboring some resentment towards me. I'll admit when I was in a relationship, I neglected my friends. It's totally valid to be mad at me for it.

So much time has passed that I don't want to hash out old, silly problems, I even feel guilty for vaguely mentioning them. But I was honestly shocked each and every time Tram did something to make me feel angry and betrayed. In some ways, my friendship with Tram also taught me how some friends have to be kept at an arm's length for self-sufficiency.