“On the Precipice” a Nonfiction Story by Juli Harter
When you’re a kid, life can feel like your friends and yourself against the world, against your parents, against the impending doom of adulthood. Being a kid is like being in a world of your own, and that doom feels lifetimes away.
When I was in eighth grade, I had an obsession with the movie Stand By Me. I’d seen it over twenty times that year—including one week in which I watched it every single day just because I wanted to. I was Wil Wheaton’s character for Halloween. What fourteen-year-old girl dresses up as a twelve-year-old boy from an eighties movie for Halloween?
“We knew exactly who we were and where we were going. It was grand.”
Four boys search for the body of a local missing kid their age in 1959. What should be morbid becomes a heroic adventure. Their friendship feels everlasting.
I recently revisited the story over Labor Day weekend—when it takes place. It hasn’t aged completely well, but the gauzy warm feeling will never leave me. It felt prophetic, like that was the exact moment for me to relive it, because suddenly, I saw my fourteen-year-old self again. An embrace just too tight.
“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”
Stand By Me is based on a novella called The Body by Stephen King. It’s part of a collection called Different Seasons, in a section called “Fall From Innocence.” The turning from
summer to fall, reaching maturity. As a kid, it’s difficult to appreciate what that means when you’re in the process of living it.
At the time, I was in my own friend group of four girls, and I thought we’d last forever. We were so obsessed with each other, how could we not be? Probably the nerdiest girls in our grade, we had every class together every year. I was the Weird One in the group, known for being loud and jumpy, constantly spitting facts about a TV show I was watching or music I liked. A bit annoying, some would say. But that was okay—I was the quirky friend.
In eighth grade, I knew things were about to change, that high school marked an inevitable turning point.
“Junior High. You know what that means. Next year we’ll all be split up.”
By the end of our freshman year, my best friend and I split off from the Other Two, just as Gordie and Chris split from Vern and Teddy. While the boys’ split was the inevitability of circumstance, our split had been premeditated by my best friend, tired of the Other Two for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint. They caused drama, but hadn’t she done the same by always complaining about them in some sort of conspiracy? All I remember is that she made me believe that I had wanted it, too.
During our sophomore year, she and I stopped talking, getting in a fight over my mental health that left me feeling like a bit of a burden. At the worst time of my life, she left me, and I had no one, really. She was able to convince our new friend group that I had committed the offense, even though the only thing I was guilty of was not having enough energy to hang out with them. I would wonder, if our original group had stayed friends, would the Other Two do this to me? I learned to become a quiet person that year—unassuming.
Eventually, I apologized—for what, I’m not sure—realizing she would never do it herself, and I had grown tired of being forced to work with her in class, our words short like we didn’t know each other.
“Should we pin the spider or the butterfly in the center of the board?”
“The spider.”
Most of all, there were good memories; she had been a good friend.
“It’s like God gave you something, man, all those stories you can make up. And He said, ‘This is what we got for ya, kid. Try not to lose it.’ Kids lose everything unless there’s someone there to look out for them. And if your parents are too fucked up to do it, then maybe I should.”
In my senior year of high school, I started talking to the Other Two on a regular basis again, sharing classes together without my best friend. I realized that I had missed them, and the petty grievances from the years before seemed childish. At our carlot COVID graduation, we laughed over letters we had written in eighth grade to our senior selves. I remember mine talking about never wanting to lose our friendship.
Perhaps wishing to recapture what once was, the four of us met up after graduation, swapping stories in a local park like we used to do at late-night sleepovers. I thought it went well, but afterward, my best friend said, “I don’t want to meet up again. They were being annoying.”
The more that I hung out with her after high school, the more that I realized that I had grown out of the necessity of her friendship. I knew, as I was about to leave for college, that change was imminent. I had grown tired of the way she judged everyone, of the ways in which she would try to change my opinion to match her own. I remember the exact moment that I decided it. Somehow, our fight sophomore year came up, and she said, “I don’t even remember what that was about.”
She wasn’t happy when I finally declared to her, “I don’t want to continue this friendship,” over text. I’m not sure I could’ve done it in person—too susceptible to being agreeable. I remember her typing back, “I just hope that when you look back on all of our memories, you think of them fondly, not tainted.”
Last year, she got married to her high school boyfriend, and naturally, I was not invited. We sat by each other in every class since we were ten. At recess, we would pretend to be our favorite characters from the books we read. When a teacher said, “find a partner,” our eyes locked automatically. When we were kids—playing out our futures in our heads—we would declare, without question, that we’d be each other’s maid of honor. When I think back on our memories, I feel that embrace, the one that’s too tight.
The truth is that I try not to think of her because I do think back fondly, and it is tainted. Thrust into adulthood, Gordie and Chris fade from each other’s lives, although less dramatically. When I was fourteen, the quote, “Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant,” didn’t have too much meaning for me. I wasn’t old enough to see what happens when the distance grows. I wasn’t old enough to accept that time goes on, and that the things and people that feel so immediate fade.
“Am I weird?” Gordie asks. “Yeah, but so what? Everybody’s weird,” Chris responds.
The last year of college. Anticipating the drudge of adulthood, the sheer terror of not knowing what will happen when you’re thrown into the world after spending your whole life in school. It’s like asking a fish to leap out of the water they’ve always known, to grow legs and live on land. That feeling that life is going to change, that you’re going to be reaching another stage, but you’re not quite there yet, you’re just on the precipice. The turning from summer to fall, when you start school, but there’s still a few weeks of summer left, like you can still sense its freedom in the sticky air.
For most of college, I’ve felt like a completely different person than who I was at fourteen. I keep to myself, live with a little chip on my shoulder, and stress about starting conversations with people. Less concerned with what others think, more accepting of change. Away from the small town where my class size was about one hundred people, where you couldn’t escape the expectations of everyone that knew you since kindergarten, I’ve finally been free to flourish into my own person. Through people I’ve met that embrace my quirks instead of challenge them.
The friends you have at twelve are very special, indeed; they capture that freedom of childhood, but I do think you can find it again. Playing a board game on the floor of a friend’s house and drinking wine, I feel like a kid in my friend’s basement again, giggly and warm inside. Friends come into your life when you need them, each with an offering of something new.
“Although I hadn’t seen him in more than ten years, I know I’ll miss him forever.”
Looking back at that fourteen-year-old, I find that I miss her. I shake my head at her immaturity, the embarrassment of her running mouth and frenetic energy that made her friends call her the Weird One. I bristle at her over-confidence, but looking at her now, I want to cry and hug her. I wish I could warn her, to let her know that she shouldn’t lose her spirit. I want to tell her that I’m sorry I ran in the opposite direction of almost everything she was, and it feels like just now, I’m starting to put back the pieces of her I lost—an amalgamation of who I was and who I am now. Of all the people I’ve known, of every experience I’ve had, of every piece of clothing I’ve tried on. Maybe that puzzle never ends, with new pieces constantly being made, but that only means that the picture is getting bigger, not being thrown away and replaced.
I am the only person that has known the entirety of myself, and that can seem quite lonely. But I like the idea that someone who knew me in eighth grade, someone who knew me in high school, even after years of being absent from my life, would still be able to recognize those past pieces of myself in myself now. Or that someone I’ve only known in college would be able to turn back time and look into the window of my past and say, “I know her.”
I find that at the core, at the center, we’re not that different. I’ve always lived my life through art, through my imagination. I’ve always been the type of person that believed the world, that people’s lives, should be documented through stories. I’ve always been the type of person to find comfort in rewatching my favorite movies over and over. It’s as though I’ve always known what my place in the world was, and on the precipice of that abyss of not knowing where I’ll be, of not knowing if I’ll see these people I’ve met here in college after it’s done, of not knowing who I might become, it’s nice to know that some things remain the same.
Chris: “I’m never gonna get out of this town am I, Gordie?”
Gordie: “You can do anything you want, man.”
Chris: “Yeah, sure. Give me some skin.”
Gordie: “I’ll see ya.”
Chris: “Not if I see you first.”