The Girl with the Rainbow Beads

I’m not a stalker. I promise you I’m not. It’s just… I catch sight of her out shopping, and now I’m following behind her like the world’s least convincing undercover agent. I may as well hang a pair of binoculars around my neck, stick on a fake moustache, and commit to the bit. At this point, I’m only missing a trench coat and a security guard shouting, “Excuse me, madam… are you stealing those candles?” She’s got some serious speed. She doesn’t walk. She struts. Not the awkward shuffle I remember. No… This is confidence wearing high heels. She moves as though the tiled floor unrolls beneath her feet, every step announcing that she finally belongs in her own skin. It’s strange watching someone become the person they were always meant to be. Because she wasn’t always like this. When I knew her, she couldn’t even look in a mirror. Well… Technically she could. She’d hold it at bizarre angles while putting on her make-up, studying one eyebrow… half a cheek… perhaps an eyelash, if she was feeling especially brave. Never the whole picture. “Why do you hold the mirror like that?” I’d laughed once. She’d looked at me with heartbreaking sincerity. “Because I can’t bear to see my whole face.” I never understood. I still don’t think I fully do. In my eyes, she was beautiful. Past tense. Not because she isn’t beautiful now. God, no. If anything, she looks as though she’s stepped straight off the pages of a glamour magazine. Salon-fresh hair threaded with golden highlights catches the shop lights. Long eyelashes frame bright, confident eyes. Her skin is so flawless it almost illuminates the world around her. She looks incredible. The past tense has nothing to do with beauty. It’s because we haven’t spoken for three and a half years. Not one passing “hello.” Not one message. Nothing. Just a silence stretched so impossibly long that parts of it feel permanent. Long enough that I’m beginning to forget the sound of her voice. Funny, isn’t it? You can remember songs you made up together when you were nine… yet somehow you forget the voice that sang them. Of course… I’m talking about Kylie. My first ever friend. We met when we were four. I was painfully shy back then. The sort of child who wouldn’t say boo to a sodding goose unless the goose introduced itself first. Kylie was that goose. She marched straight over to me without the slightest hesitation. The first thing I noticed wasn’t her smile. It was the rainbow beads threaded onto her shoelaces. Tiny plastic beads in every colour imaginable, glittering like treasure to a four-year-old who thought rainbows could fix the world. Only then did I look up and see Kylie. “Wanna be friends?” she’d asked casually. I nodded so enthusiastically I nearly gave myself whiplash. Of course I wanted to be friends. Who wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who had rainbow beads on their shoelaces? That was it. No grand beginning. Just one little girl asking another little girl a simple question. And somehow, without either of us knowing it… That tiny moment became the beginning of a friendship that would stretch across three decades. We were as thick as thieves. Us against the world. Forever stumbling into fresh acts of absolute stupidity. We were weird kids. Wonderfully, unapologetically weird. The kind of weird that only works because someone else’s oddness slots perfectly into your own. Over the years she became less like a friend and more like a sister. She practically lived at our house. Whenever she came over she’d arrive with a holdall so enormous it looked as though she’d packed for a six-month expedition across the Andes rather than a Tuesday night sleepover. My mum barely questioned it anymore. She’d simply sigh… “…I’ll make up the bed.” And that was that. Kylie had somehow gone from “my daughter’s friend” to part of the family without anyone formally agreeing to it. The pranks drove Mum absolutely round the bend. Our personal favourite? Weeing in places no sane person would ever consider weeing. A sentence I never expected to write about my childhood… yet somehow, here we are. For reasons known only to our underdeveloped brains, Trevor and Pat’s birdbath became public enemy number one. We’d take it in turns, relieving ourselves into it, convinced we’d invented comedy. Poor Trevor and Pat. To be fair, they took it remarkably well. Either they never noticed… or they decided two feral children armed with full bladders weren’t worth the confrontation. Eventually we escalated. As all idiots inevitably do. One afternoon we christened Mum’s sun lounger. Minutes later, another neighbour wandered over, lowered herself into the still-warm seat… Paused… then sprang back to her feet. “What the hell have I just sat in?” Kylie and I collapsed behind the bedroom curtains, passing the binoculars between us, while laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe. Yes. We really were that strange. Summers were spent in the paddling pool pretending to be otters. Actual otters. Not children pretending to be otters. In our minds, we genuinely were otters. “Ora Ora…” I’d sing. “That’s how otter goes…” “Ora Ora…” Kylie would sing back. “He doesn’t have no toes!” We’d clap our hands together like flippers, floating on our backs as though the fate of the entire otter population rested squarely upon our shoulders. There wasn’t a hint of irony. No embarrassment. No “this is a bit silly, isn’t it?” We were professional. The otter population depended on us, and we were not about to let them down. Mum would occasionally wander into the garden… Take one look… Quietly turn around… …and retreat indoors without asking a single question. Probably because she had learned by then that whatever we were doing was best left unexplained. Because that was the thing about us. We didn’t just play. We escaped. We could turn absolutely anything into another world. That was our speciality. Give us a random object and five minutes, and we’d somehow transform it into a full production. A scarf became a fortune teller’s headpiece. Chunky jewellery became mystical accessories. The Madame Rosa crystal ball came out and suddenly Amanda disappeared. I was Madame Rosa. A highly respectable psychic. I’d sit dramatically, looking utterly ridiculous with my clip-on hooped earrings, waiting for Kylie to enter my mysterious realm. Then, with all the seriousness of someone who genuinely believed they possessed supernatural powers, I’d deliver a very serious reading about her future. “I’m getting a strong vision,” I’d say, channeling my inner Mystic Meg. “Something terrible has happened…” “Simon Hiscott has run off with another girl.” Her first “proper” kiss. She was absolutely distraught. Then Kylie would transform into Helga. The most terrifying nail technician the world had ever seen. Complete with questionable accent, an overbearing personality, and absolutely no regard for customers’ requests. “Sit down,” she’d demand. “You need colour.” And colour I got. Never a nice Barbie pink. Always something that looked like it had been scraped from the bottom of a pond with a teaspoon. I guess I deserved that. After all, I had just spent ten minutes predicting her romantic downfall. Looking back, I think that was the magic of us. We didn’t need much. A second-hand crystal ball. Cheap costume jewellery. A paddling pool. That was enough. And somehow, we’d turn it into an entire universe. Although there was always one small condition attached to these imaginary adventures… Kylie was always the main character. Bossy little sod. She claimed the best Polly Pockets. Leaving me with the sad little plastic shells that served no purpose whatsoever, other than sitting there looking smug, reminding me I had clearly lost. My Little Mermaid roller skates? Also hers. I’d trail behind on my tragic troll roller skates, secretly hoping she’d hit a pebble and disappear gracefully into the nearest bush. She never did. Infuriatingly. Winter never slowed us down. If anything… The colder months seemed to make us even more creative. We wrote plays. Deeply dark plays. Somebody was almost always brutally murdered whilst innocently taking their wheelie bin out. Because apparently, we looked at a routine household chore and thought, “Yes. This needs more suspense, betrayal, and possibly a body.” We genuinely believed we were creating theatre. Dad became our unwilling audience. The poor bloke had usually just staggered home from the pub, all he wanted was a cup of tea, a sofa, and twenty minutes of blissful uninterrupted unconsciousness. Instead, he’d find himself squeezed onto the edge of my bed, watching a murder mystery illuminated entirely by a Fisher-Price torch while a cassette player provided a soundtrack that probably deserved its own criminal investigation. He always watched until the end. Mainly through closed eyelids. But he stayed. Bless him. Mum was too busy disinfecting furniture. Then there were the letters. God… The letters. We’d type them on the world’s most temperamental laptop, print them off, then post them through random letterboxes. Usually our own parents’. Our favourite was creating our own obscure church. We took it incredibly seriously. “Come and join our church. We worship the sacred wee jug. Donations accepted. Please bring your own toilet paper.” Complete nonsense. The spelling mistakes gave us away every single time. Not that we cared. Half the fun was imagining Mum and Dad opening the front door to discover they’d been summoned to a new faith involving a jug of wee. We genuinely thought we were comic geniuses. And maybe… in our own strange little world, we were. Because that was the magic of those years. We weren’t trying to be cool. We weren’t trying to impress anyone. We were just two kids creating ridiculous little universes and laughing until our bladders did a Trevor and Pat. But then, slowly, things started to change. The costumes were packed away. The crystal ball gathered dust. Helga closed the nail salon for good. The otters disappeared beneath the surface. And the strange little worlds we had built together slowly became memories instead of places we visited. They were replaced by something far more confusing. Adolescence. Boys. The desperate search to fit in. Somewhere between childhood and growing up, we stopped pretending to be other people… and started worrying whether we were enough as ourselves. Secondary school arrived like an unwelcome plot twist. Something shifted. We weren’t quite… us anymore. Kylie found new friends. We used to share the seat on the bus. Then one morning, I watched her slip into the seat beside Zara Tunney instead. Such a tiny moment. One empty seat. Yet somehow it felt enormous. I sat down on my own, staring out of the window, wondering when I’d stopped being the person she automatically chose. We still saw one another outside school. A secret little world that still belonged to us, but only when nobody else was watching. Perhaps I wasn’t cool enough. Perhaps I was simply… too weird. I found myself hovering around the edges of her friendship groups, never quite fitting the mould everyone else seemed to slip so effortlessly into. But whenever it was just us… Nothing had changed. We’d laugh exactly as we always had. It was as though school disappeared the moment we were alone again. After school we stayed close. Then life happened. The messy, complicated kind that nobody warns you about. I met the worst person I’ve ever known. I fell pregnant with Phoebe. That relationship slowly hollowed me out until I barely recognised the woman staring back at me. Bit by bit, I disappeared. Bruises hidden beneath sleeves. Smiles rehearsed. “Everything’s fine.” The words I said so often I almost convinced myself they were true. It wasn’t. Not even close. Kylie saw through every lie. She was the only one who did. She never believed the smiles. Never believed the excuses. One afternoon she arrived outside in her friend’s battered Ford Fiesta. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t hesitate. She simply begged me to leave. Not tomorrow. Not when I was ready. Now. So I did. I genuinely believe she saved my life that day. The years afterwards became golden. Nights out. Road trips. Random afternoons doing absolutely nothing except existing together. We argued, of course. Real friendships always do. Once we stopped speaking for eight months. Neither of us could remember why. It may have had something to do with being spectacularly drunk after a night out. The streets were buried beneath thick snow. She practically carried me home while swearing at me every twenty seconds. Every few steps I’d collapse face-first into a snowdrift like a tranquillised reindeer. She’d haul me upright. I’d immediately fall over again. By the time we reached home she looked ready to leave me there to thaw out in the spring. God… She was furious. Absolutely furious. But she still got me home. Because that was Kylie. She could be unbelievably annoyed with you and still be the person standing beside you when you needed her the most. Those eight silent months afterwards felt endless. So I made her something. A scrapbook. Every memory. Every photograph. Every stupid joke. Every piece of us. Tiny fragments of friendship I couldn’t bear to lose. I poured love into every page. …and an alarming amount of glitter. When I finally handed it to her, she smiled through tears. “This is incredible.” Just like that… We were us again. Because she was my world. And for a while, I truly believed that whatever happened, we would always find our way back. Losing her had hurt. I couldn’t imagine letting it happen again. Yet, here I am. Three and a half years later. Hiding behind a display of reading glasses, peeking around it like an anxious meerkat conducting surveillance. She still hasn’t seen me. I don’t think. It’s a strange thing, really. How someone can know every version of you… the child, the teenager, the broken young mum… and then, somehow, become someone you wouldn’t even know how to say hello to. She feels like a stranger now. Someone else’s best friend. Someone else’s history. And that’s the bit that hurts the most. Not that she’s changed. She was always supposed to. It’s that I wasn’t there to watch it happen. Part of me wants to step out and shout— “Kiddo!” The nickname rises instinctively. But it never makes it past my throat. Because what if she looks at me blankly? What if she remembers my face… but not the person behind it? So instead… I simply follow. Curious. Not about where she’s going… …but about all the years I never got to witness. The birthdays. The heartbreaks. The celebrations. The rainy afternoons. The tiny moments that quietly built the woman walking twenty feet ahead of me. All the chapters that carried on after I’d stopped reading the story. We spend our lives believing we’ll always get another conversation. Another coffee. Another chance to say, I’ve missed you. Until one day… The gap between “soon” and “someday” quietly becomes three and half years. Without warning, Kylie stops. She turns. For one terrifying second our eyes meet. I freeze. Do I wave? Smile? Pretend I haven’t been trailing behind her through the homeware department like a woman trying to solve a forty-year-old mystery? Every possible opening line evaporates. She smiles politely. The sort of smile you give a stranger whose face seems vaguely familiar. Kind. Distant. Fleeting. Then she turns… …and carries on walking. I don’t call after her. I don’t wave. I simply watch her disappear into the crowds. And that’s when I notice something I’d somehow missed all afternoon. The rainbow beads are gone. Of course they are. Nobody wears rainbow beads on their shoelaces at forty. But for one ridiculous second, part of me expected them to still be there. As though they’d somehow been carrying our childhood all this time. And I realise, with a strange ache somewhere behind my ribs… I wasn’t following Kylie through the shops at all. I was following the little girl with rainbow beads on her shoelaces. The one who walked over to a painfully shy child and asked one tiny question. “Wanna be friends?” I wish I’d known that some friendships don’t end with a goodbye. Sometimes they simply fade quietly into the distance, leaving you standing there, still waiting for someone who has already walked away.