Sometimes you can’t even judge a book by its table of contents

Earlier this morning I received a message on Facebook from my childhood best friend. She’d had some life changes and, despite our not being all that close for the past 20 years, she wanted to share the news with me.

She goes on to tell me that she’s polyamorous, dating one of our mutual high school acquaintances, and has a couple of girlfriends, to boot!

[insert shocked face emoji here]

We’ve been facebook friends since the advent of facebook, so I’ve kept up with her life and its successes. The husband, the kids, the dream job and all the stuff you’d expect from our class valedictorian; but….

THIS?

It makes you want to say things like “Small world!” or “OH EM GEE.”

I mean, of all the people in the world who I might have thought would “get” my situation, she’d not have been one of them. For many reasons that I won’t go into, but suffice it to say I thought she’d gone the way of the straight and narrow after high school and that was that.

In this case, I had enough knowledge of her to go past the cover. She was, at one point, my best friend. I could say something like OMG, you’re dating LL (not his name, not his initials)? and she’ll know exactly what I mean and she’d be the only one on the planet to know what I mean and if she’s reading this right now, she’s laughing.

Inside joke.

LIKE THE KIND THAT HAPPENS WAY PAST THE COVER OF THE BOOK.

This is friend I called during my walk home from losing my virginity at 14 and said “guess what happened!” and she answered “you lost your virginity!”

By the way, a few years later the same conversation happened in reverse.

And STILL when she said to me this time, “there’s something I want to share with you,” my initial thoughts were “you’re pregnant again, you’re getting a divorce and moving back to California, you’ve just won the Nobel prize for science, or you have six months to live.”

Like, the last thing I imagined I’d read next was “I’m polyamorous, and…”

I guess you really just never know about people until you really know about people.

I love it when the plot thickens.