"an early night" part 4

Gen was my best friend. She'd been my best friend since the middle of high school, when we bonded over a love of chai tea and cheap chardonnay. We'd had other friends over the years, which came and went, but Gen was the one constant thing that I could be sure of. We loved all the same music, all the same food, all the same books and - very important - we had the same shoe size so we could wear each others two and a half inch heeled brogues. We'd always predicted that when we lived together our flat would be full of shoes. We were right. Most of them were impulse buys but we loved them all dearly. Such as my black court shoes, with the patent toe. I'd worn them twice but if somebody threatened to take them away I'd be upset.
I'm a nice five foot four, and Gen is just a fraction taller, so we treasure high heels as a defense against short comments. People found them funny. We didn't. All through high school people had made fun of me for my height. Or for pretty much anything, like Tommy Piercy who liked to make fun of my teeth (I didn't get braces until I was seventeen). Tommy was interested in one thing and one thing alone: social status. In high school we'd hung out a bit, we both went to different schools - mine was a state funded public school, his was an expensive and exclusive private school - but he hung out in the city centre often and we had mutual friends. Gen and I were never cool, not cool enough for Tommy anyway, but at one point he'd deemed us socially accepted and we used to sort of be friends.



photo credit - magicwandcd