The Other Girl in the Room: On the Intimacy That Devours

An essay on female friendship

You stole her shirt and wore it to sleep until the collar yellowed. Not because it looked good—God, it was hideous, with rhinestones on the chest and a little skull—but because it smelled like her. Because it held the warmth of her back. You would’ve worn her skin if she’d let you. Peeled it off at the shoulder like a silk camisole. Slipped it over your own.

They don’t warn you about girls like her. Not in health class, not in church, not even in the feminist literature they pass around like gospel in school libraries—empowerment, solidarity, feminine rage. No one tells you that sometimes the person who first teaches you tenderness is also the one you want to swallow whole.

You met in seventh grade. She had blood under her fingernails and lip gloss that tasted like cherries. She called you “baby” before boys did. She wrote your name on the sole of her shoe in red pen, like a spell. That’s how it began. Not with a kiss, not with a vow, but with a mutual sharpening. You made each other brighter. Hungrier. More unreal.

Female friendship, when it’s young and undiagnosed, is a kind of fever. It burns so hot it melts language. You say friend, but you mean witness. Double. Daemon. You mean: the only person who’s ever seen the inside of your mouth and liked what she found there. You mean: the girl who watched you starve for three days and called it devotion.

Culture doesn’t know what to do with that. It keeps trying to flatten the friendship into sweetness—bracelet kits, shared secrets, innocent slumber parties. But the truth is closer to Heavenly Creatures than Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. It’s about two girls breathing each other in until they forget which lungs are theirs.

It’s Elena and Lila. It's Baby and her dead-eyed reflection in the mirror before she lies to her mother. It’s the blood pact, the stolen diary, the silence that starts to taste like power.

Friendship is the name they give it so you don’t have to say desire.

There’s something sick about the way girls love each other. I don’t mean perverse. I mean devotional, like monks starving for God. There was a night she kissed your shoulder and you felt it for a year. There was a summer where you wrote her name in lipstick on your ribs. Not for her to see—for you. Because you belonged to her, like a dog, or a haunted house.

You started dressing like her, talking like her. At one point you caught your own reflection and whispered her name without thinking. When she cut her hair, your scalp ached. You made excuses to be near her, to touch her—helping her zip her hoodie, brushing lint off her cheek, pulling gum from her fingers like a mother bird.

When she cried, you imagined feeding her your own blood. Not metaphorically. You had read somewhere that spit and tears shared some molecular composition with plasma. You thought maybe if she drank your sorrow, hers would end.

You were thirteen. Maybe fourteen. Which is to say, you were dangerous and stupid and ready to ruin yourself for the first person who said “forever.”

The trouble with girls is that they grow up. They change shape in front of you, shedding their skin for something sleeker. She got prettier. Meaner. Her hips sharpened, her voice dropped, and suddenly boys were following her like heat-seeking missiles. You weren’t enough anymore. You were still chewing your hair and picking at your hangnails and staying up all night scrolling through things you didn’t understand. She wanted music you’d never heard of. She wanted weed and glitter and the sound of other people’s approval.

You watched her go, slow as a funeral. She didn’t say goodbye. She just started forgetting you in increments. She didn’t text back. She didn’t invite you to her birthday. Then she blocked you on Tumblr, which in that era was the same as a death certificate.

Your mother said it was natural. Girls drift. Friends grow apart. But that didn’t explain why you stopped eating for three days. Or why you scratched her name into your arm with a paperclip during English class. Or why the next time someone tried to hold your hand, it felt like betrayal.

You kept one of her bracelets hidden in a box behind your dresser. Sometimes you held it up to your nose like a crime scene investigator. You imagined her wrist inside it. The tiny bones. The pulse.

Years later, you learn the words for what you felt. Attachment trauma. Erotic fixation. Dissociation. Queer yearning. All of them are true, but none of them are as true as this: she was the first person you ever wanted to be and be consumed by, in the same breath.

This is the part no one talks about. Not in pop culture, not even in therapy. That for some girls, the friendships are the great loves. The ones that carve something permanent in the chest. That leave you altered. Marked. Scarred in the shape of someone else’s handwriting.

You still dream about her sometimes. Not about her face, but her breath. The way she held your head underwater in the pool just long enough for you to panic, then laugh. The way you thought: I’d die if she asked me to. I’d say thank you.

There’s no conclusion here. No neat moral. She didn’t come back. You didn’t forget. You carry her like a ghost on your back, like a fever under the skin. Some days, you write her into every story. Some days, you pretend you invented her. That’s the thing about girlhood love—it never ends, it just changes costumes.

In this version of the story, you’re both still thirteen. She still kisses your shoulder. You still steal her shirt. The scent never fades.

You wear her forever.