This is about a friendship.  Milly became my best friend when I was five years and two weeks old and she was five years and five weeks old.   We started school on the same day and Mrs Marshall sat us together and said we were the new girls.  All the old girls stared at us and I felt like crying but I didnt cry. I just stared back instead and something made me want to poke out my tongue.   Milly looked at her shoes and then she began to twist the top of her white socks.  They were white socks with a frill around the top and I had often asked my mum if I could have socks like that but she always said `no'.  

Milly and me became best friends that day.   We were best friends all of that year and by the middle of the next year we always played together any time we could.   Sometimes other girls came by and wanted to join in and we usually said `no'.   

Milly and me were best friends for the whole of the next year as well and we had our birthday party together that year and our mums organised a clown to come.  It was the best party I had ever been to in my life. I was just so happy that Milly and me were best friends.

Just after the time when we had the joint birthday party Milly's dad had to go to England for six months and he took the family with him.  Milly and her little brother went too and she went to school for one term in Oxford.  I missed her very much and hated being at school without her.  It seemed such a long time before she came back and I wrote to her but she did not always write back.   At last she came back to New Zealand and I was bursting to see her again.

Milly came back to school on a Wednesday morning after Labour weekend, wearing black socks with yellow flowers on them.    I rushed towards her saying `Hi Milly'.  She smiled at me a bit but she dident sit beside me. Instead she went at sat next to Veronica who was a new girl but she lived in the same road as Milly.

All day I felt miserable.  It was never the same after that.  Milly and me simply were not best friends any more and my mum said maybe we had `got over each other'.  Maybe we had.