This post was originally posted on OCTOBER 18, 2018. It’s part of my reclamation of old posts onto this blog again.

My senior year was a chain of milestones that I was insufferably proud of: being school president, getting the fat envelope from my dream college, winning two state championships, and graduating at the top of my class. Ten years later, I’m still proud —but today I have the decency to be embarrassed about how proud I was then.

These successes aren’t what I remember about that year, however. The list above is an answer to the question What did you accomplish your senior year?, a question nobody asks because it doesn’t matter the moment you step onto a college campus. 

Another question matters more, and still matters today: what did my senior year feel like?

It felt like October 18, 2008. It’s my golden birthday, and I’m driving around the curve of an Oregon forest road with my three best friends. We’re wearing Burger King paper crowns. Annalise flies a shark kite from the moon roof of my Volvo station wagon, while Cheyenne nestles into the mountain of our bags, snacks, and pillows beside her in the back seat. Wesley sits next to me in the passenger seat, sporting our senior class sweatshirt and leggings. We share the laughter borne out of easy classes, established cliques, starring roles in high school plays, soccer team captains, and inside jokes that were years in the making — it’s the laughter of being a high school senior. We’re on top of our school and on top of our lives.

The best Hollywood coming of age films give you more than teen drama. The truly great coming of age movies liquor you up with nostalgia, get you drunk on the romance and angst, and then kick you with a yearning hangover for that edge of puberty. I’m an unapologetic addict to coming of age.

Films like Stand By Me, Dead Poets Society, My Girl, or 2017’s Ladybird are great films, but they’re even better snapshots of being 12, or 13, or 18. As the protagonists struggle from childhood into puberty or from puberty onto the cusp of adulthood, every frame whispers: Your life will never be like this again. You can’t even know yet how much your life will change around the corner. Hold this moment in your palms while you can and protect it. 

The Goonies is one of the best coming of age films ever made. The film is corny and full of bloopers, but it bottles that sense of impending change that I still chase like my next score. 

Here’s a recap for the uninitiated: four kids and three teenagers, called the Goonies because they live in a neighborhood called the “Goondocks,” set out to find pirate treasure in order to save their homes from development. They race mobsters who seek the same treasure and along the way the gang deals with booby traps, hormones, and their own friendship in the face of change.

When I was 16, I loved the movie enough to mark it on my bucket list:

#47. Visit Astoria to where “Goonies” occurred

Nearly a year later, as my 18th birthday loomed, I realized I could combine that bucket list item with two others:

#9. Do a roadtrip with my girlfriends

#48. Have the perfect birthday party

My three best friends didn’t have a choice once I calculated how efficiently I could knock out bucket list line items. Annalise, Wesley and Cheyenne agreed to road trip to Astoria, OR to visit all the filming locations of The Goonies that I could research. I don’t remember if they’d all even seen the movie, but they bought in to my enthusiasm, and they got in the Volvo.

***

I’ve known Annalise since we were four, and to this day I know the cadence of her voice and the shifts of her expressions as well as my own. I met Cheyenne in third grade when she moved to Seattle from Elko, NV.The beginning of our friendship was one of the most intense infatuations I’ve ever been a part of. We spent every moment together that year and for the rest of elementary school. 

Our foursome came together in middle school when we met Wesley. I spent a few months resenting Wesley for the fast friendship she formed with Cheyenne and the next 17 years respecting and loving her as penance.

We wore each other’s clothing regularly. We knew phone numbers and birthdays and favorite songs by heart. We held grudges on another’s behalf((I still haven’t forgiven one of their exes who cheated)), and we shared every gory detail of our fumbling encounters into love and lust. We were woven into each other’s lives by the time our senior years began.

We were barreling down the road towards adulthood at full tilt. We were taking corners fast and trusting the centrifugal force of friendship to hold us together. We couldn’t know about the fights to come, the words that would rip our group apart. We didn’t know that college would add miles of stretch marks to our friendships and test the elasticity of our bonds for the next decade. We couldn’t see over the edge we were teetering on.

On that Friday, October 17th, 2008, we were just friends piling into my gray ’98 Volvo XC station wagon. We had caches of junk food, bags of our most colorful clothing, and a vague plan to head south. We blasted music, took silly and unflattering photos, and laughed down SR 101. We hit every box on a road trip checklist: we stopped on a whim at curio shops, earned and evaded a speeding ticket, and peed on the side of a highway.

My beloved Volvo was leaking so much coolant that I had to top it off every time the car stopped. I watched the neon, viscous fluid drain from the car even as I poured more in.

Together we traced Goonies moments big and small across the small coastal crust of Astoria. We posed in the doorway of the old jail featured in the opening credits, which today is the Oregon Film Museum, dedicated to The Goonies. We explored the circumference of the Flavel House Museum, where Mikey’s dad worked. 

We reached my own holy grail when we parked in front of The Goonies house, in all its glory. Pictures were taken, the truffle shuffle done in homage. My stomach flooded with butterflies gazing at the yard where the Goonies built their M.C. Escher doorbell. I could see the spot on the wraparound porch where Mikey and his brother have a touching moment. I could turn and see Data’s house. Standing in my bright yellow rain boots((Not unlike Mikey’s yellow rain coat in the movie, a detail I still notice today)), woolen brown tights and a neon orange dress, I was in movie geek heaven.

In our Astoria hotel((Why yes, the same hotel the Goonies’ film crew stayed in, thank you for asking.)), we lounged in our bras on the hotel deck, drinking and talking and basking in what felt like adulthood. We made balloon animals from condoms and gave them silly names.

We wandered into town with no plans. We were four girls old enough to look for trouble and too young to know where to find it. We followed townsfolk to the Astoria High School homecoming football game, under the small town Friday night lights. I was ecstatic because the football field was also featured in the film’s opening credits. My friends were more ecstatic about the new crop of boys to consider. As America’s Friday night tradition played out before us, we flirted furiously with a pair of Oregon lumberjacks beside us on the fence. We were all city girls—the idea of meeting real lumberjacks was intoxicating. 

At halftime the six of us crept behind the bleachers to share an illicit joint. We knew we were mortal; but we also knew we could pretend otherwise for the night. The boys returned to the game, and we returned to the hotel to collapse in giggles and stoned, deep sleep.

The next day we sought out the final Goonies location that I’d researched: that special bend in a road, from which Mikey compares his dubloon to the rocky Oregon coast. Bedecked in color and crowns, we poured coolant in the Volvo and set off into the woods. Laughter was the only music I remember. The day was young and we were young. We had a plan but no agenda. We were on a mission, but it wasn’t about the mission. It’s never about the mission.

The spot was found, photos were taken, and then we piled back into the car to trace the same curve in the road once more. It’s bittersweet to reflect on now: me and my best friends, on an edge of our own, celebrating the fictional friendships of a young group of kids, the Goonies. 

Only recently did I connect my own moment to the same shot in the film: the kids, biking down that forest road, on an adventure for the sake of adventure. To save their town perhaps, but really to save their friendships.

It didn’t happen all at once, but over the course of our senior year, our group fell apart. Or to say it more honestly, we all grew apart from Cheyenne.

Our group was broken by two equally powerful forces: bad boys and macroeconomics. Cheyenne began dating a loser, who I’ll call Rusty. Rusty was every high school trope rolled into one unwashed package: heavy drinking, theft, truancy, and the scary kind of drugs. We hated Rusty, but Rusty stuck around, attached to Cheyenne at every party or event. With Rusty came his loser friends, and our group hangouts became a lot sketchier and illicit. 

The Great Recession was just beginning, and its impact hit Cheyenne’s family earlier and harder than our families. Cheyenne had to grow up faster than we did to keep her family afloat, while Wesley, Annalise and I were still living in our upper middle class bubble. We didn’t know how to help, and we really didn’t know how to talk open about money and class. I did know even then that for the first time, friendship for friendship’s sake wasn’t enough.

It’s easy to armchair analyze now all the ways we fell apart ten years ago, like it’s a cold case I could solve if I just identify, organize, label all the events correctly. But living it in 2008 wasn’t easy. The four of us fought a lot. We grumbled, cried, argued, cried more, and threw punches (just once). Cheyenne’s deep stubborn streak kept Rusty around and kept money issues at the fore of our lives. Eventually, amid all the other changes in senior year, the fights were too much. 

Cheyenne had been my friend the longest, and I’m not proud today to say that I was the first to really let her go. I didn’t know how to support her that year, and I don’t think I tried. Wesley, her newest friend, hurt the most that year. I think she still hurts the most. Annalise and Cheyenne fought their fair share that year, but their friendship didn’t fade like mine did or break like Wesley’s had.

The most recognizable line from The Goonies is their mantra, “Goonies never say die!” It’s a mantra filled with optimism and the same youthful immortality that we all lean into a little when we’re high school seniors. You’ll always be on the top. Nothing can touch you because illness, distance, car accidents and old age happen to other people. Friendships last forever. 

It’s been ten years since that trip and my own senior year, and while I’m still so young, I know that mantra isn’t true. We aren’t untouchable, and not every friendship lasts on its own momentum. Friendships take work, and the work makes them worth it. I know how to be a better friend now than when I was 18.

While Goonies never say die! is on all the merchandise, my favorite moment in The Goonies happens in the same scene, moments later. The kids are all in an underground cavern, and everyone is ready to quit. Except Mikey:

“Don’t you realize? The next time you see sky, it’ll be over another town. The next time you take a test, it’ll be in some other school. Our parents, they want the best of stuff for us. But right now, they got to do what’s right for them. Because it’s their time. Their time! Up there! Down here, it’s our time. It’s our time down here…”

Our time. It won’t last forever, and it’s still worth it. We should still find that pirate treasure or take that road trip or jump out of that plane. The future will come hurtling at you before you know it. 

The four of us celebrated New Year’s together at Cheyenne’s, and we took a photo together at graduation — the last photo of us, together. It’s our gang, but I think even then the photo was taken as a courtesy, a checked box to bookend our high school years.

Our time was earlier. We were driving a bend in the road, laughing on my birthday, Saturday October 18th, 2008.