Elementary school was officially over. I was moving on to middle school, and they were shutting down Piscataway Elementary for good. Being the last class to graduate felt like the climax of an action movie. We were walking away in slow motion, too cool to look back in our ‘80s sunglasses as the school exploded behind us.

On the last day of classes, I stood in the schoolyard with 100 other kids, all of us wearing matching teal-colored T-shirts with the words “Farewell PES” on the front. We sang “God Bless America” to our parents and teachers and got free ice cream sandwiches. As I poured myself a cup of lukewarm Orange Drank, the official drink of urban ten-year-olds, my best friend Alia walked up to me and said, “We’re moving away.”

I felt betrayed. We were supposed to be together, us against the world, until we graduated high school, went to the same college, and married twin Arabian princes or lived under the sea or whatever the protagonist in the popular Disney movie at the time was doing.

There was one silver lining. We had one last summer to enjoy together, and we were going to make it count. We played together as much as we could, mostly in my backyard. Instead of playing Barbie Princess/Mermaid/Jungle Adventure, which was obviously kiddie stuff now beneath us, we concentrated on playing Barbie Boyfriend/Barbie Wedding/Barbie Gets to Use the Stove Adventure, like the big bad adults we thought we were. We were practicing for the real world—middle school—where we would experience kissing and dances and more kissing. We observed Barbie kiss my male-to-female transgender Ken doll (I wasn’t allowed to have a Ken doll, so I had cut off my other Barbie’s hair and rubbed her boobs against the concrete to make her into a boy). We payed careful attention to the angle of her head and most importantly, what she was wearing. It was unanimously decided that Ken preferred Barbie’s authentic Mattel-Brand dresses to the pile-of-leaves-and-generic-brand-tape dress that I had made myself.

All this preparation was because we believed that when the school bell rang at our separate schools that fall, we were going to transform into beautiful women who looked like Barbie. Especially the part where our bones would shrink and our legs would grow to six times the length of our abdomens. To hurry along this process, Alia secretly took off her headscarf and put Sun-In Spray-In Hair Lightener Super Blonde with Lemon: Extra Tears Formula™ on her jet-black hair. It did nothing. I tried too, and it turned my whole head orange. Rather than resembling Barbie, I bore a remarkable resemblance to Ronald McDonald. My Transylvanian grandma, Nagymama, scrubbed my head violently with a bar of soap to “get the red whore out” and threatened to shave my head in my sleep if I ever tried that again.

Alia’s father insisted that we needed to have more regularly scheduled activities so we’d stop ruining each other’s hair out of sheer boredom. He and my mother, Anyu, took us to the playground, where I watched from a distance as Alia conquered the Big Slide. Our families went to the shore together. I wasn’t allowed in the ocean, but I could see it from a distance. We went to Six Flags Great Adventure. I wasn’t allowed to go on any rides, but I could see from a distance that they looked like fun. Anyu let me go outside and I even got to eat a red snow cone, even though I was normally forbidden to eat food that contained any sort of colors that could stain my clothing. It was progress.

I don’t have the dramatic memory that is in most movies of a moving van pulling away, with the protagonist running behind it as the best friend puts her hand on the window, desperate to catch one last glance of her friend before driving into the sunset. Alia’s father scheduled a moving company and she and her family moved. She called me with her new phone number. I was sad but not hysterical. Even though we weren’t in the same zip code anymore, we were still best friends. We played videogames over the phone and discovered the joy of prank calling random numbers by using three-way calling.

Hearts full of childhood love, we hoped nothing would change.

This is an excerpt from American Goulash, a coming of age story about adolescence, art, and awkwardness. Pick up a copy at Barnes & Noble, Kindle Store, Amazon Books, Nook Store, and iBooks.

Photo by Sarah Williams