Read and annotate the article titled "Early Dismissal" (you can find this tile under the "Assignments Folder"). Be sure to mark any confusing passages and write a 1-2 paragraph summary of the text.

Early Dismissal
1 When you’re a rational, clear-eyed, culturally conversant, healthy, mature, and stable grown-up, there are certain fundamental facts you know about the world. One of which is that twelve-year-old girls come in only two varieties: the ones on the cusp of dumping their best friends and the ones who will be dumped. The corollary to this is that it would be rather inappropriate for any rational, clear-eyed, culturally conversant, healthy, mature, and stable | grown-up to care. Muchless still hold a grudge.

2 I was born to be a dumpee, the epitome of quiet and bookish, with oversized glasses stuck to my face since nursery school and an oversized helping of glee at any opportunity to be the teacher’s pet. I was easily bored, easily charmed, and easily led, a ready-made sidekick to the school’s resident (if relatively mild) wild child.

3 I was also, having been reared on a steady diet of Anne of Green Gables, well versed in the pursuit and cultivation of “kindred spirits,” and desperate to get one of my own. Once I finally did, it was as if ! morphed into a fifties cheerleader who'd just scored a varsity beau, obsessed with the trappings of my new status. Instead of letter jackets, fraternity pins, and promise rings, I coveted friendship bracelets, science project partnerships, manic sleepovers, and above all, the best friend necklace, which could be broken in two and worn by each of us as a badge of our unbreakable bond. But the reasoning behind it all was the same. These were talismans: proof to the world that I was no longer an I, but a we.

4 Don’t get me wrong. I liked my best friend well enough—just not as much as I liked having a best friend, any best friend. I was a frightened child, not to mention an only child, and my best friend was my security blanket, the universe’s guarantee that I wouldn't face the future alone. She was also my mirror—a far more flattering mirror than the one hanging on the back of my bedroom door. Her very existence was evidence that I couldn't possibly be that ugly, that awkward, that unlovable, because she was perfect, and she not only loved me, but loved me best.

5 So you can imagine my surprise that sixth-grade day in the playground when, lurking in corners as I was, I overheard her casually tell some new group of admirers that, no, I wasn’t her best friend, why would anyone ever think that?

6 That was it. No dramatic breakup scene. No slammed books, no rumor mongering, no cafeteria shunning, no mean girl antics whatsoever. Which was almost worse, because if I had become her worst enemy, it would at least have been an acknowledgment that was once her best friend.

7 Instead, from that moment on, I was nothing.

8 It was the first time in mylife it had occurred to me that kindred spirits might not last—that life, no matter how many talismans of attachment you accumulated, would be a constant struggle against being alone. There would eventually, at least after I’d crossed the social desert of junior high, be other best friends. Better ones. But much as I may have believed in those friendships, I have never again taken it for granted that they would last. In the real world, the Grown-Up world, people leave, people die—people sometimes just get bored and move onto another part of the playground. Anything can happen.

9 There are certain fundamental facts that twelve-year-old girls know, while grown-ups, even the wisest of us, have forgotten: the names of Magellan’s ships, the difference between mitosis and meiosis, the formula to calculate the volume of a cube—and the fact that BFF is not meant to be ironic.

10 Knowing that no one’s guaranteed to stick around has probably made me a better friend, and I’m certainly a better accessorizer now that I’ve left the ratty friendship bracelets and plastic necklaces behind. But I'll admit: I liked believing in forever.