A good friendship

Laura and I have been friends for fourteen years now. I met her in Between Friends Club where she was leading a program for adults to socialize. The club aims to provide recreation and social activities to people with and without disabilities.  Her program was every Friday night but she missed the first event and I missed the next two.  We finally connected on the fourth event, a movie night showing "Simon Birch".  She made me laugh all through the movie with her comments and funny facial expressions.

One autumn, Between Friends Club made a trip to William Watson Lodge because a lot of us never had the opportunity to go camping. The weather was a little cool and we stayed there for one night. After setting everything up, we all walked down to the lake. Laura and I were already good friends and she was one of three leaders.  I had dared Laura to dunk me in the lake to see for myself what she would do when we were around other campers.  I wanted to test her to see how good a friend she was. She said, "No, it's too cold."

This started us on a long exchange of teasing that we kept up all the way back to the lodge.  As a leader, she had the keys to open and close the lodge doors. She arranged it so I would be the last person in but then she closed the door before I could enter and locked me outside!   My boyfriend at the time was also locked outside with me.  We tried to convince his roommate to unlock the door but the roommate was always on Laura's side, so our attempt was unsuccessful.  We tried to race around to the back door but Laura reached it ahead of us and locked that door too!

I asked my boyfriend to go back to the other side and have someone unlock the door.  Laura heard us conspiring against her and asked,  "Are you lying to me because you need to get back in?"  "No!" he yelled back. He made it back around the other side and someone opened the door for him.  I had to ask one of the other leaders to unlock the door for me.  As a final revenge, Laura filled a bucket with water while I was in the bathroom.  I opened the door and was immediately soaked through!  I tried to top that prank but I quickly realized I couldn’t ever beat it.

Later that evening, we were trying to find somewhere quiet to talk. There were two rooms joined by a door; every time we switched into the quieter room, everyone followed us into that room and made it noisy.  We switched back and forth a few times before giving up and dealing with the noise.  I never had a really close friend before her and now I can call her my best friend. The closest I ever had to a best friend was my best friend from Denmark in elementary school.