Beck: What were you into when you were in high school?

Haley: I think we've always had a lot of common interests. That was what brought us together, from zebras to music, and—

Anna: Basketball.

Haley: We love basketball. Also, I was a big nerd, so a lot of people didn’t like to listen to me talk about whatever I was obsessed with that week. But Anna really loves to hear people talk about what they’re passionate about, even if she has no interest in the topic. I was obsessed with the civil-rights movement and American history. She would just nod and be like, “I’m glad you’re excited about this.”

Beck: Anna, are you like that too? Do you have really passionate interests?

Anna: Haley makes it sound so one-sided. But when I have interests, I’m an evangelist for them. I’m always encouraging people to listen to what I’m currently listening to. Haley’s always been really supportive of all of my interests, no matter how ridiculous they were, like my high-school crazy One Direction phase. She had their songs in her playlist, too, because she wanted to be able to relate to me in that way. There’s always something new that we’re discovering through each other.

Beck: After high school, you guys drifted apart a bit. What happened?

Anna: Life got in the way. Haley moved to D.C., so we weren’t able, obviously, to see each other every day like we were used to.

Haley: I went to American University.

Anna: And I went to a community college here in Plano. I was trying to get into nursing school. And about a year after we graduated high school, my mom was diagnosed with leukemia, and Haley was far away. We would still talk on the phone, but being 18 years old and not really understanding the true gravity of your emotions at a time that’s incredibly hectic, it was hard. I imagine it was hard for Haley to reach out and gauge how I was feeling. I also didn’t [want to] feel like I was pouring everything onto her, because I know she was dealing with stuff too. And the fact that we were in school was just another thing piled onto it.

Haley: I was incredibly close to Anna’s family my entire life. I was mostly raised by my grandparents and my mom, because my dad wasn’t really part of the picture. Anna’s family was so welcoming. I stuck out like a sore thumb at every family event. We have so many photographs of me at Filipino Catholic events: a white, red-haired girl in the background.

Anna: We have pictures of my entire extended family in one room, and then there’s a little Haley also there.

Haley: It was really tough for me to leave Plano, because I felt like I was losing a big support system with her family. And then her mom passed away in November 2016. That was probably the hardest year, from November 2016 to November 2017.

What’s interesting about friendship once you get older is that you have to figure out how to move from being friends because you see each other every day at school to whatever adult friendship is, which I’m still trying to figure out. In our case, we didn’t know how to navigate all these emotional situations, or how to communicate those emotions to somebody else. We hadn’t ever been super emotionally vulnerable. We had talked about my depression [before], but we had only touched the surface.