I got to know my new friends better than I did my class schedule over my first few months: I learned willowy, creative Natalie’s coffee order (cappucino with soy milk, please) and feisty, opinionated Eliza’s prerequisites for weekend hookups (quiet, non-misogynistic, and preferably on a sports team, which, BTW, is a hard combination to find on a college campus). A group of about seven of us started eating together in the dining hall regularly and choking down shots of Smirnoff and orange juice in our dorms on weekend nights, and lo and behold, I suddenly had the kind of friends I’d secretly dreamed about as a lonely tween, people to text between classes and sit with at lunch and gossip with in the corner at boring frat parties. There was just one problem; where did this leave me and Jazmine?
I don’t like to think of my friendship with Jazmine as a marriage of convenience—after all, 15 years later, I would still rather talk to her than just about anyone else—but it can’t be denied that we needed each other badly in high school, and that need wasn’t always beneficial to our bond. The thing about a two-person friendship is that you’re just one sick day away from being completely and utterly alone, and though I should have been thanking the universe for sending me a pal as like-minded as Jazmine, I’m ashamed to admit I often took her for granted. When I met her at Penn Station on my way home for the wildly fake liberal-arts-college convention of “October break” (to quote my dad: why do you deserve a break in October?), I avoided talking too much about my new friends, for fear of messing with the dynamic we’d long ago established: We are the only two cool people in the world, and everyone else sucks.
A few years later, I was watching a rerun of The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling’s sitcom about a free-spirited doctor living, laughing, and loving her way through New York, when I came across a phrase that changed how I felt about my friend circle. When gruff fellow doctor Danny (Chris Messina) expresses disbelief at how Mindy can have more than one best friend, she responds confidently: “’Best friend’ isn’t a person, Danny. It’s a tier.” The phrase embedded itself somewhere deep in my subconscious as I grew up and finished college, moving to L.A. with Eliza before admitting after three years that I hated sunshine and finding myself back in New York. There, I added two new people to my “tier”—Kate and Maya, fellow journalists with whom I began trading hourly (if not minute-by-minute) observations about New York media, dating, and Succession—but for the first time, I began to see the expansion of my friend circle as a potential boon to my earlier friendships, rather than a threat.
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