About two years ago on a quiet Saturday evening, my friends and I were plagued with boredom. Krishonna suggested we go skating, but that was out of the question. She doesn’t even know how to stand in skates. I recommended we go to the park down the street from my house, but the heat felt unbearable. Plus, it was five o’clock and the darkness already started to creep over the neighborhood. Finally, Angelica proposed that we go to the movies. We were all happy, but our celebrations were soon halted when we remembered that we had no money.

“Dag-nabbit! I left my wallet on the dresser at my house! I only have a dollar fifty with me,” Krishonna whined. I ran into the living room with the lights still off. I fumbled for my purse in the darkness, accidentally tripping over the creme ottoman at least twice. I finally found the black leather purse, that blended in with the darkness so well, and reached into it, feeling around for the small, sock-shaped coin purse. I pulled it out and opened it and to my surprise I found money. I rushed to the girls and boasted my discovery, but when I unfolded the bills that I had grabbed, I found out that I only had four dollars. Four. Freaking. Dollars. Angelica checked her purse and only recovered a dollar and some change. We bundled our money and collectively had six dollars and seventy cents.
Angelica started to whine and I almost had to smack her to get her back to her senses. We sat around my room with various looks of disappointment hanging from our faces. Asking my mom for money wasn’t fit to even be a suggestion because she had given me twenty dollars the day before and we blew it on candy and chips and other sugary delights. “Well we can still do something around the house, right?” Angelica so desperately asked. I told them that everything in the house was ours to play with, we had no limits on the unthinkable treasures that lay beneath beds and buried deep inside closets. The only problem was that we had no idea about what we should do with it all. Our minds had been tapped out from hours of playfully bullying each other and playing a long lasting game of hide-and-seek.
“Would your mom mind if we build a fort?” Angelica asked. I had never done anything like that before. Something so simple and childlike intrigued me. “I mean, she wouldn’t care. As long as we put everything back when we were done,” I replied. With this, we assigned each other tasks that would make our fort awesome. Krishonna set out to make the snacks, Angelica to collect couch cushions and sheets. I set out to the dining room to arrange chairs and begin to construct the fort with the supplies Angelica had scavenged.
After all was done, we sat inside of our new castle, fortified with pillows and couch cushions, and ate snacks and talked and talked. In the midst of all the gossiping, giggling, the seriousness, and the sometimes catty conversations, I began to think. If we would’ve gone to the movies, we would’ve never had a chance to just hang out, to form deeper, stronger bonds. I would’ve never learned of their deepest secrets that I promised to take to the grave, never of the phobias they held concealed behind happy faces. I would’ve never heard them speak so freely of their lives at home and how they handled their daily struggles, and I definitely would not have revealed any of my skeletons. Our friendship grew stronger and, because of this, I am grateful.
Scene 2
Last year, for my sixteenth birthday, my dad promised me that he would take my friends and I shopping wherever we wanted to go. He had been saving up all of his spare money for months, my friends did too, and he finally had $1,600 that was for me to spend freely. I was so excited for this birthday gift that I would get all giddy just thinking about it. My friends and I would call each other on the phone and exchange our thoughts on where we would go shopping, what we would buy, what we would keep for ourselves, and what we would share with each other. We did this everyday for two weeks until the unthinkable happened.
My stepmother called me with the bad news. My father’s truck had broken down on the train tracks near his house. “He heard the train coming but couldn’t get the door opened in time,” she said in a low, but strangely happy tone. I had asked if he was alright, and he was, and if he would be able to come home tonight, and he was. He had fractured his left arm and had glass from the window leave cuts on the side of his face and hand. When I finally got to see him, which was two days later, he greeted me with a hug, a smile, and then a look of disappointment.
“What’s wrong pops?”
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”
“What happened? What’s wrong?”
“I can’t take you shopping for your birthday.” He said other things but I tuned him out. I tuned everyone out, everything. I was so disappointed. The only thing I was getting for my sixteenth birthday, the most important of birthdays, in my opinion, was being taken away from me. After he finished talking, I hugged him and told him that I was glad that he was okay. I was glad and all, the sadness was just stronger than my relief of my father’s health at the time. I went to bed thinking about how I was going to cancel on my friends.
The next morning was better.  I had seen how selfish I was by only thinking about my birthday while my dad was still in pain. On the other hand, I felt like out of all the things there was to be upset about, that this was justified, but I got over it quickly and helped my dad out around the house. I called my friends and told them. They had suggested that we still go to the mall and at least eat at the food court for my birthday. I agreed even though I knew that when I got there I would be flooded with sadness over the thought of what could have been. We set a time and arranged for Krishonna’s mom to bring us to the mall the day of my birthday.
The day had finally come and I could already feel waters of sadness slowly rising, threatening to wipe out all of my remaining happiness. I kept telling myself that it was okay and in two weeks, tops, I would be laughing and having fun and forgetting about the whole incident, but I still couldn’t get my mind off of it. The whole ride to the mall was filled with fake smiles and halfhearted jokes. I could tell that my friends felt awkward because I was so enthusiastic, so I tried a little harder at my facade. When we got to the food court, we sat down and engaged in mindless talk about this and that.
“Well, we feel bad about you not having the birthday you wanted. I know how excited you were about it and how devastated you were when it was taken away from you….” Angelica had said. It had taken me aback a bit by how blunt she was. I thought there was an unspoken understanding we had, that no one would speak of the situation until it was so far behind us that it no longer had the ability to hurt. “ We just wanted to tell you that even though we would love to spend this money on ourselves, we would rather spend it on you. It is your sixteenth birthday, after all,” she had continued while she and Krishonna had taken almost identical wads of cash out of their purses. I was so shocked that I sat there, speechless and teary-eyed.
“Don’t cry, you big baby. Lets go get you some stuff,” Krishonna had said playfully.We wound up splitting the money three ways because I didn’t feel right taking it all. They had saved up three hundred and sixty-nine dollars (and some change) over the course of about seven and a half months. This was one of the most generous things they had ever done, and I appreciated every bit of it. As we shopped, I started to think about how they so easily gave up their hard earned savings to make me feel better about my hard comings. I realized that a person didn’t need riches to paint smiles on their faces. The only thing needed to summon up a smile was a warm conversation between friends, a familiar face smiling back at you, and all the riches in the world would then be worthless. Friends would become the new currency and I would then be wealthy.