Article December 10, 1979 Issue

What is a friend?

Barbara Cook

I had felt a little uneasy accepting my best friend Sandy's invitation to meet some "great boys" on a street corner before going to a movie. And when I got there and saw the boys carrying brown paper bags, I didn't feel any better. Sandy was already there with the other two girls that made up our close little foursome. After I'd been introduced to the boys, the group of us spent the next hour leaning against walls and shifting from one foot to the other, trying to make up our minds what to do. I said at last, "I told my mother we would be going to a movie."

"So tell her you went to a movie. She'll never know the difference," one of the boys said casually.

There it was—deception. Confirmation of my feeling that something was wrong. I didn't like the feeling, but I didn't know what to do about it just then. I was a pupil in the Christian Science Sunday School, and if I'd had to state exactly what I'd learned between the ages of three—when my mother enrolled me—and thirteen, I couldn't have done it. But what I could do was feel instinctively when situations didn't line up with what I had learned about the nature of God and my real self.