Dragon Fruit Worlds

memoir, pensive, wholesome, friendship, storytelling

When I was in elementary school, making friends was one of my biggest struggles, as it was for many people. Now that I’ve grown up and made some really great friends, memories of my past seem so horribly lonely and anger-fueled to me. I don’t like the person I used to be. Though I don’t often cry, this story is one of the few stories I’ve ever cried over while writing.

Once upon a time, there were four friend thieves. Twice upon a time, there was a little girl who found someone she thought would always be her best friend. But once upon a time, she found a little dragon fruit notebook to save her friendships.

Once upon a time, there was a six-year-old girl called Alice whose aunt gave her a dragon fruit notebook. But the little girl did not like dragon fruit and the pink spikes of the fruit looked strange and scary, so she left the notebook on her shelf and forgot all about it for three years.

Once upon a time, the little girl thought she’d found her best friend forever and always. The best friend was called Nia. Nia was a liar. She lied often, but not very well. Sometimes, it seemed, she simply lied for the sake of lying. But she was all Alice had, so Alice brushed off lie after lie after lie—they all blended together after a while. Despite the lies, Alice believed they were friends. Nia believed that without a friend, she would be a target for bullies. And so, they were friends, and they stayed friends for three years. 

Once upon a time, first grade started, and for the first time in three years, Nia and Alice were no longer in the same class. So Alice was lonely throughout class, but when recess came, she impatiently raced to the playground, where she and Nia had always played together. But she was not greeted by Nia’s freckled smile. Rather, she slowed to a halt, searching the faces of unfamiliar students running up the slides. Alice looked and looked and looked, and saw her once, but Nia disappeared around a corner and Alice lost sight of her. Alice couldn’t find her friend for days.

When she finally did, she also found Kaia, a new girl with whom Nia had become friends. Nia had found someone else and left Alice behind. But with a brittle smile, Alice asked Nia where she’d been. 

As if Alice didn’t know. She’d been thrown aside—just like that. Nia had a new friend. She didn’t need Alice anymore. “Oh, I looked for you too, but I couldn’t find you,” said Nia. Alice always knew when she was lying, but never had a lie hurt so much. Still, Alice desperately needed and wanted a friend. Like always, she brushed off the lie, and became the third wheel, always trailing behind the new pair, the friend who’d left her for that intruding friend-thief. Kaia taught Nia how to do a cartwheel. Alice tried—and fell. Alice suggested they play at the playground. Kaia preferred the grass. They played on the grass.

Eventually, after the two girls repeatedly ditched her, Alice gave up trying to follow them around. Now alone, bullies quickly descended. She trailed after the teachers and scary fifth graders in hopes they might be some form of protection, but the bullies found her. Often. 

Alice watched Nia and Kaia from afar. They were more than happy without her, doing… Alice didn’t even know what they did anymore. She taught herself how to do a cartwheel, and proudly showed Nia and Kaia, but they were doing back handsprings. 

Later that year, Alice’s parents told her they were going to move. Alice loved the idea. She could tell Nia and Kaia, and out of sympathy, they’d surely let her tag along until the end of first grade.

Once upon a time, a little girl was full of jealousy but also tentative hope as she marched up to her used-to-be friends, her chin high for the first time in months. “This is my last year here,” said Alice. It was the first sentence of the sob story she’d been constructing all class. 

“Oh… good,” said Nia. They laughed and turned away. Alice’s chin dropped once again.

Once upon a time, the girl named Alice started second grade. She was cautious about friends now. She needed to find someone who wouldn’t leave her behind. In this new school, there were no bullies she needed protection from, but she didn’t want to be lonely again. She needed one friend. Just one. But it was a small school, and even after months, she still couldn’t find the right person. She began to imagine friends from other worlds, in the form of dragons and fairies and little people no taller than her thumb. 

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Leila. Alice and Leila bonded suddenly and quickly over their love of playing Pretend. The teachers would get them mixed up often—those two small, dark-haired girls who would sit hip to hip and finish each other’s sentences, both with their heads in the clouds because they’d finished the worksheets five minutes before everyone else. Together, they dreamed up hundreds of worlds, each one unique, but always with one similarity that Alice loved—there was always Leila and her, and they were always best friends.

“Let’s pretend… we have silver wings,” said Leila.

“And only a few people have them,” said Alice, “so we’re special.”

“Which is why there are people trying to steal our wings!” finished Leila. They skipped across the asphalt and flapped their arms.

Then third grade came and Alice and Leila were placed in separate classes. Alice was afraid Leila wouldn’t want to be friends anymore. But… she wouldn’t, thought Alice. Leila isn’t like Nia. She’s your real best friend and she’d never leave you.

The first day of school, Alice couldn’t find her friend all recess. She wanted to cry, but no friend liked a crybaby, so she kept it in. At lunch, she finally saw Leila. Leila was laughing. Having a good time. Without her.

But just like she’d done with Nia, Alice walked up with a smile. “Hey, Leila, who are these people?”

“This is Lizzy and Kestrel,” said Leila. “Kestrel’s new.”

“Hi,” said Kestrel. Alice instantly hated her—from the way she dressed to the way she spoke and to the way she stood beside Leila.

Leila was excited. “They like playing Pretend too. Wanna play?”

Horror crashed over Alice. Another best friend. Another new girl. Or rather, another friend-thief. “Sure,” said Alice. She hoped she could move again next year. 

“I don’t like this game,” announced Alice as soon as Leila explained Kestrel’s game. “Let’s pretend something else. What about the one about silver wings?”

“Silver wings? That’s boring,” said Kestrel. 

“I like this one more,” agreed Leila and Lizzy.

But Alice was sick and tired of playing second fiddle. So she left. Friendless again. She became insecure and envious. She developed a stutter, wouldn’t speak in class, and stopped finishing her worksheets early—what was the point, if Leila wasn’t there so they could mime Pretend from across the classroom? Maybe she wasn’t meant to have friends. Maybe she was like those villains she read about, and that’s why people couldn’t be friends with her. The bad ones always died alone. Would that be her too? 

No. Alice needed to show that she was the good one. The problem was that Leila thought Kestrel was better at Pretend. So Alice simply needed to come up with a better plot, better characters, better magic. She needed to pretend to be the good guy, even if she wasn’t. For this, she needed to plan. Which meant she needed a notebook.

Once upon a time, the girl found a little pink notebook tucked away on her shelf. The cover had a picture of a dragon fruit. It was perfect—such an outlandish, odd-looking fruit. It looked like it came from another world. She would create hundreds of worlds in this notebook. And each one would be better than Kestrel’s. 

Alice plotted. And she created. And the little girl formed an idea of a new world. She created characters, assigned Leila, Lizzy, Kestrel, and herself to them. She didn’t want to include Kestrel or Lizzy, but Leila might pull away if she didn’t. If Leila liked Lizzy and Kestrel’s personalities more, fine, but Alice would lure her in for the games and stories. 

Once upon a time a crafty little girl walked up to three friends and presented her idea. Kestrel tried to call Leila and Lizzy away. “The trolls are coming! Help!” shouted Kestrel, dangling from the yellow bars of the play structure.

“Look here,” insisted Alice, flipping her notebook open to her charts and maps and doodles, “I’ve got an idea for Pretend. I drew a map of the world and wrote about our characters on the next page.”

Leila and Lizzy loved it. Kestrel grudgingly played along. Then, Kestrel presented a new idea, and Alice had to play along because Leila and Lizzy liked it more. Alice and Kestrel created story after story, each competing to get the audience. With each story, she pulled Leila and Lizzy further and further away from Kestrel. With each story, Alice’s confidence regrew. Her stutters started fading and she didn’t duck her head and hide in the corners anymore. 

It wasn’t all good. Alice hated Kestrel and Kestrel hated Alice. They fought as much as they could, both trying to get Leila and Lizzy to side with them on this or that. At some point, Alice tried to convince them Kestrel was a witch from another world who had an invisible staff that could hypnotize people. At another, Kestrel claimed Alice had thrown food at her and stained her brand new pants. Alice retaliated by mentioning that Kestrel had been wearing those pants for months and she hadn’t thrown food at her, but would certainly like to. 

Neither realized how much they hurt the other. Neither realized that maybe—just maybe—they weren’t so different. They had both moved homes a couple of times and they were both insecure because they could never keep their friends. Eventually, Alice would realize that as much as she thought of Kestrel as a friend-thief, Kestrel thought of her as a friend-thief—after all, Kestrel had been friends with Leila and Lizzy before Alice stole them with her games of Pretend. Yet Kestrel and Alice would never be friends. 

And Lizzy—Alice didn’t care much about Lizzy. All Alice wanted from Lizzy was a vote to her and not to Kestrel. What she didn’t know, until Lizzy told her years later, was that she had considered Alice to be a friend-thief too. Lizzy had her own story. In first grade, while Alice was dealing with Nia and Kaia, Lizzy was best friends with Leila. Then once upon a time, Alice, the new girl, came and stole Leila from her. It was a convoluted mess and tangle of unnoticed emotions and abandoned friends crying just around the corner. In the past, Alice might’ve thought this was proof that she was the villain. But Alice wasn’t a jealous little girl anymore. And if she had once been a villain, she was glad she no longer was. 

By fourth grade, Kestrel had found a new friend, and she and Alice had settled into a comfortable routine of ‘ignore the other and they’ll ignore you.’ The battle of worlds fell silent. The animosity, though always present, rarely boiled over. Alice continued to use her dragon fruit notebook, no longer as a weapon, but now to record stories. She’d mostly grown out of playing Pretend but liked to write stories and poems, which Leila and Lizzy also loved. 

Once upon a time, Alice went to her swim team practice and, to her surprise, saw Nia there—her first friend, not forever and always as she once thought, but a friend for a time. It had been so many years. Out of curiosity, she asked if Nia and Kaia—the first friend-thief, but it had been too long to still hold grudges—were still friends. How might things have changed for them? 

“Oh, we’re not friends anymore,” said Nia. “No, we haven’t even spoken in like, a whole year.”

Alice had no reason to believe Nia was still a liar and that this was a lie, so she said goodbye and moved on. But less than an hour later, she sat outside on the bench, waiting for her mom to pick her up, and she saw a black car pull up. Nia walked out of the swim center and climbed into the backseat of the car, greeting the driver and the other passenger cheerfully. She hadn’t noticed Alice. As the car pulled away, Alice scoffed as she wondered how it was possible that Nia and Kaia weren’t friends, and hadn’t spoken in a year, when Nia had just driven away in a car with Kaia’s family.

Once upon a time, Alice became friends with someone who used to be a bully. Alice remembered this girl from first grade and was angry—at first. This was the girl who had given her a fear of the dark. This was the girl she had seen in countless nightmares. But it was sixth grade by now, and in the five years that passed, the girl had turned her life around. They became friends—not very close, but friends nonetheless. And one day, as they both laughed at memories of first grade, Alice decided people could change for the better. Hadn’t she, too?

Once upon a time a girl named Alice laid in bed, thinking. The former bully had changed. She herself had changed. So had Leila and Lizzy. Nia hadn’t changed. It took her a while to form a conclusion. Some people change, some people haven’t. Maybe they won’t. At least you gave Nia a chance. She closed her eyes and let herself move on.

Once upon a time, a girl named Kestrel moved away. The three girls who were supposed to be her friends let out sighs of relief. “Thank god,” they said. “She was such a toxic friend.” With Kestrel gone, the three felt freed to criticize every bad thing Kestrel had ever done to them. Alice joined in, but afterwards a voice in her mind seemed to nag at her. Why did you say all that? You weren’t any nicer to Kestrel. I thought you moved past all this. Alice decided to revise her words the next time she saw Leila and Lizzy. She should tell them they all had done each other wrong. They should’ve given Kestrel a chance too. But she forgot about it by the next day.

Once upon a time, three friends sat together on the concrete steps of their high school and looked out over the busy campus. “Kestrel’s coming back,” Leila said. “Can you believe it?”

Both Lizzy and Alice had mixed responses. Apprehensive, of course. Alice remembered the crying, the drama, the fights. She remembered how she had grown, and recognized how she was still growing. She’d never been more confident, nor as comfortable around her friends as she did now. She’d never been as proud of her stories nor as peaceful as now. Kestrel coming back… what if she ruined everything? Suddenly she remembered the day she heard Kestrel was moving. She hadn’t spoken up then. 

“Maybe Kestrel will change,” suggested Alice. “We have. We should give her a chance. Toxic friend or not, she was a friend. We can’t forget we were horrible to her as well. We can all work on being better friends.”

There was a silence in which each girl seemed to acknowledge this about themselves. 

“Last I heard of Kestrel, she wasn’t all that bad,” Leila admitted. “She might’ve changed already.”

Lizzy nodded. “At the very least, we can welcome her. We don’t need to be friends, but we can be there. We have to give her a chance.” The three friends nodded, staring at the ground between them.

“I’m scared,” said Lizzy. 

“Me too.”

“Same.” Alice was the last to agree. “I don’t want it to be like elementary school again.” Her statement was met by a pensive chorus of yeah’s. 

They knew they had to give Kestrel a chance. They wanted to give Kestrel a chance. But none of them knew what exactly to do. “She’s coming in the summer,” said Leila. “We have until then to figure something out.” The conversation slowly turned away from Kestrel.

In the end, Alice stood before the shelves in her bedroom and searched for the notebook of her childhood. It had been a while since she’d last seen it, but she had a new story to write. It had all the characters her old games of Pretend had—but not as trolls or silver-winged girls. This time they would be friends or friend-thieves, many of them both. And one girl called Alice had a dragon fruit notebook with hundreds of worlds, once containing battles and weapons, but now just hazy memories.