When girls are very young and the world hasn’t yet taught us not to be ourselves, we can be wilder than our brothers. For the first ten years of my life, I was wild. My hair was always knotted. My face and hands and knees were always smeared with dirt and nothing was beyond my power.

The first challenge I ever encountered which I could not surmount was my father’s word when he forbade me ever to see my best friend again. The mature thing to do in telling this story would be to acknowledge that he was only doing what he thought was best for me. In growing older, all children discover that their parents are just as blind as the rest of us to the consequences of their actions. I’ve had to accept that I’m not mature enough to forgive him yet.

My first term at intermediate school had been difficult. My new school was filled with strangers, and my teacher had become someone to fear. So on the first day of the holidays, I went to my best friend’s house, and I did everything in my power not to go home until school went back.

We found a grapefruit tree, heavy with fruit, down the embankment in her back yard, and we would climb through the trees every morning to pick them so we could feast on the flesh, covered in sugar, for breakfast. Her bedroom was a renovated garage, separate from the house where her mother and brother lived, so we could stay up late and listen to Green Day on her CD player and talk about how we felt different from everyone else. She said she wasn’t really human. It wasn’t hard to believe. Her limbs hung awkwardly, as if she wasn’t built for standing upright. She never wore shoes. She had long, matted hair. She said that after a long time of not washing it, the oiliness faded. I hadn’t washed my hair for two weeks that summer, but my father had made me do it before the oiliness went away.

Eventually the holidays ended and I had no choice but to go home. On my first morning back, my father called me into the living room. His ruling: my best friend was a bad influence, and if I couldn’t understand this for myself, it was his responsibility to do something about it himself.

It wasn’t just that she was weird, he said, though that was certainly part of it. She was also, he said, quite hateful. ‘She’s always saying “I hate him, I hate her,”’ my father said. ‘I don’t want you exposed to that.’ I hadn’t noticed that about her. I saw only her fearlessness. Where she was unyielding, I was too often soft. She didn’t care what anybody thought, and she did whatever she believed was right, and no one could stop her. I looked up to her more than anyone else in my world. But I was just a kid, and he said I couldn’t see her anymore, so that was that.

At the time, I was only about eleven, and I didn’t yet know what a sensitive person I would turn out to be. Without her, the weight of being different was hard to bear. I kept the memory of her enshrined in my mind, striving to remain someone she would be proud of, but I couldn’t keep from changing. In my mind’s eye she grew distant, scornful. Meanwhile my softness grew like rot.

Soon I was convinced that she would despise the person I was becoming. She had always been quick to turn on those who cared what the popular girls thought, who wore dresses or acted feminine. What would she think of me now, wearing the girls’ uniform without complaint just to fit in? I had betrayed her trust. I had never felt such profound guilt in my life. I would sit and stare out of windows for hours at a time, cursing myself for failing her. I wasn’t good company. I didn’t make new friends. Whenever I saw my old friends, all I wanted to talk about was her. What they said was not good. She’d been hospitalised for an overdose. She’d stopped going to school. She was in the mental health ward of the local hospital on suicide watch. All of this was proof that I had failed her. All of it was my fault. It wasn’t long before my old friends stopped coming to see me.

It took years to accept that she was beyond my reach. I moved far away, met new people, and learned not to talk about her. By the time of Facebook, I had really started to move on. I didn’t go looking for my old friend, not least because I didn’t expect to find anything.

She came looking for me.

She seemed to live a life of drama. Every year or so I’d get another friend request from a new version of her. She didn’t seem to have changed much, judging from what little information she put online. Her profile picture was rarely a photo of her, and she preferred to go by names more mystical-sounding than her own. Each time she reappeared we’d chat for a while about nothing in particular, letting all our angst go unspoken. It felt too late to say anything about it all, just as it had felt too late when she’d overdosed or when she’d been locked up. We’d missed each other too long to mend it now. So I kept it to small talk. I never asked how she was feeling. Who she was friends with these days. I didn’t really want to know.

She never asked me either. I don’t know if she felt the same, or whether there was some other reason, but she never did ask about my girlfriend, or the protests I was going to, or even what I was studying. I had never told her about the diagnosis when we had been children, and I decided not to bring it up. I knew she wouldn’t understand.

I remember where I was when I heard about the twin towers, and about my favourite band breaking up, and my cousin getting into that accident. It hit me at least as hard, but I don’t remember where I was when I got the last friend request from her.

The profile picture wasn’t familiar, but it was definitely her. For once she’d used her real name. She’d sent me a message: “gotcha!”.

And I didn’t know her anymore.