Joy! Or, Why the Resale Value of My First Car Was Slightly Lower Than it Could Have Been

I'm getting together with Joy tonight. I can't tell you how happy this makes me. Joy is one of my oldest friends. We met our freshman year of highschool and became almost inseparable. We went through all of our bad teenage phases together (her: "My eyeshadow always matches my shirt! Red, green, purple..." Me: "Mine too! Because it's always black."). I've seen her go from thick glasses and poodle-like bangs to being the most desired girl at the Cowboy Boogie to being an awesome wife and woman-of-all-trades. She currently lives on 3.5 acres of land in Lucerne and owns (at last count) 3 horses, a goat, a pig, two dogs, and 8 chickens. And a lot of Joshua trees. Which she drives copper nails into in the dead of night. But you didn't read that here.

Joy is responsible for many of my best memories and my worst habits, like the whole eating the fortune cookie before reading the fortune thing, and also (as noted by Barbara in the previous comments) the tying the straw paper in a knot and pulling to see if the knot will hold or come out when the straw paper breaks thing. If it comes out, the person you're thinking of is thinking of you, if it doesn't they're not. This tradition also includes blowing on the knot as you pull, but I've ditched that part of it. It's way too obvious in restaurants and makes my OCD about straw papers really noticable. Joy also taught me to pick up my feet off the floor and make a wish when I drive over railroad tracks. Thanks a lot, Joy. You've turned me into a complete freak and a reckless driver.

We went to our first Renaissance Faire together and to many in the following years, usually dressing up as peasant girls. We were water girls for the football team and stat girls for the basketball team. We heckled the cheerleaders and made fun of the homecoming courts. We embarrassed each other with boys (the sentence "Hey, my friend likes your necklace!" still makes me cringe). We roamed around London together and were mutually responsible for forcing our friend Amber to sleep on the doorstep of our hotel for several freezing hours (we accidentally locked her out). Joy was a bridesmaid in my wedding (she wore a periwinkle blue spaghetti strap gown) and I was a bridesmaid in hers (I wore blue jeans and a white button up shirt and boots, the only bridesmaid outfit I will actually wear again). We're really really different, but we get along great. We managed to share a house for six whole months and not kill each other, and we spent a whole evening painting blue flowers on the walls of the kitchen in our house.

And then there was the business of the roof of my first car. Joy said, "Whenever you run a yellow or red light you have to kiss your finger tip and touch the ceiling so that the cops won't give you a ticket." Joy said it, and it was so. We all began the tradition immediately. The ceiling of my car was white. We were highschoolers. I was prone to running yellows and occasionally reds so badly that we didn't kiss just one finger, but all ten. And in this way, the ceiling of my car became covered with red (Joy's), pink (Caron's), berry (Elisa's), and burgundy (mine) fingerprints, like little constellations. We thought it was cute. It wasn't so cute when I went to sell the car and they wouldn't come off.