I used to have a bit of an infatuation with kettle chips. It was partially because they tasted so fabulously salty, but mostly because my friend Ivy and I used to have a certain fascination with "Oh! Christmas Tree" by The Whomping Willows. Back in our fangirl days of 2008, we used to rap this song in public like it was our national anthem.
"Dumbledore just got here and he brought some appetizers
He's got kettle chips, some onion dip, and a plate of cocktail wieners"
Ivy and I would peruse the aisles of Giant Eagle on a safari hunt, sniffing out just these ingredients. Well, besides the plate of cocktail wieners because I'm a vegan and Ivy was vegetarian. We're too cool for that, obviously. There's even a picture of this exciting event somewhere on my Myspace... ah, and yes, I have found it.
To be honest, I forgot how much something as simple as kettle chips meant to me. I think they were more of a symbol of my friendship with Ivy than anything. Yeah, they're super tasty, but a girl with braces that got tightened once a month and sore three times as often isn't too prone to snacking on kettle chips when she's bored. So what's so great about them besides our partiality to that wizard rap?
Out of the blue one day in 2007, Ivy and I started talking about Harry Potter on Myspace. The first conversation we held in each other's Comments section was about how unrighteous Hot Topic was for not stocking Remus Lupin T-shirts. A year later I drove 7 hours and 42 minutes to her house in Middle of Nowhere, Virginia, where "Food Shitty"s are abundant, Ma and Pa's serves the best ice cream, and it's not a "pool", it's a "poe-ell."
Sometimes we'd mention the miracle of how I drove to southwest Virginia for the first time to meet a girl I'd befriended off Myspace. But what we'd truly focus on was how I jumped out of the white rental Nissan before my mom pulled it to a complete stop, how I jumped into Ivy's arms that smelled rich and floral, and how we peed in the Walmart bathroom with the creepy cold drains below our feet.
"Silly strawberry or mint?" my mom asked, pointing to the shelves of organic toothpaste without peeling her attention from Ivy's mom Debra. Who knows what they were talking about: what time their daughters usually go to bed? Where the nearest store with vegan options was?
"Strawberry," I shrugged, deciding to be spontaneous. I always chose mint. Maybe my time in Virginia would be punctuated with happy and delicious memories of Silly Strawberry toothpaste.
I think Ivy was the one who taught me that the little things like this matter. These memories do make an impact on my life. And they definitely, definitely prove that I changed while I was so close to her... even if the Silly Strawberry ended up disgusting.
"Is that Golden Girls?" Ivy's brother Isaac, who was my age, would interrogate from the computer room.
"Yep," I'd reply, a grin twisting my thin mouth. I was waiting for Ivy to get out of the shower, what else would I occupy my time with than old bickering women on a new flat screen?
Ivy and I fell out of touch for a little while, maybe six months or so. But she's one of those people that I've been confident since day one of our friendship. She'll always be hidden behind the cupboard door, maybe even under the stairs with the Dursley's spiders crawling around her Harry Potter DVDs. Wait, who am I kidding? She would never let those get anything with more than four legs near them.
Just looking at the words "kettle chips", a whole scrapbook seems to have knocked into my head like a meteor. Along with kettle chips comes this whole anthology of a rusty friendship. And now I'm hungry.
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