By Celia Gibbs
In Gingko Leaf Girls, Celia describes the "coolest girl" she knows, her childhood best friend Caroline. Caroline has tattoos and thrifts her clothes and, for a time, lived in a converted van. This story recalls the friendship between these girls: how they came together, their time apart, and all that they learned along the way. A quirky tale, it's sure to make you chuckle. 

Photo by Celia Gibbs

Caroline is the kind of person that you could picture living in a van. Often wearing a pair of corduroy pants and a thrifted sweater or turtleneck, her style is a mixture of granola and grandma. She’s probably wearing the same Vans she’s had since middle school or the pair of hand-me-down Doc Marten boots that her mom gave her from her old boarding school uniform. She’s got a septum piercing and a matching tattoo from Frog and Toad with her mom.

To put it simply, she’s the coolest girl I know. 

    We were girls together, she and I. She helped me, a timid girl from a Baptist home, discover pieces of myself. She helped me rebel. Helped me become an individual, separate from ideals and expectations. From shearing our t-shirts into crop tops in the school bathroom and going to concerts together, to sleepovers and her showing me Hamilton for the first time through a grainy YouTube bootleg. 

Once, we even skipped school to go to a Bernie Sanders rally in Asheville, back when he was running for President. We got to shake his hand and we ‘felt the Bern,’ figuratively and in our sun poison. But when my burnt face ran in the newspaper the next day, the church ladies back home were not amused. One ‘concerned mother’ even zoomed in on my face and sent it accusingly to my own, who, to her credit, said that they were allowing me to test my boundaries in a healthy way. She’d never admit to having a liberal for a daughter though. 

Caroline’s parents helped me with that, expressing myself and challenging notions that had been regurgitated to me again and again. They listened and allowed me time and space to figure out what I thought about things before adding their input. They listened to my stories, never interrupting. They were there for me when I felt that my own parents weren’t, but always encouraged me to communicate with them, to understand them. Even now, when I go home on breaks, I visit them alone and call Caroline after. 

    We often talk about our near parallel lives, Caroline and I, and the miracle our friendship is, brought on by a middle school conversation about the Percy Jackson books that were our obsession. We realized, together, that ours was an early 2000s childhood bordered by Appalachian culture and an off-brand mindset from our parents. That we were bookish girls who daydreamed ourselves into the stories we read: the misadventures of the Mother Daughter Book Club crew, stories from Little House on the Prairie, and the wholesome family dynamics of The Penderwicks. We’d leave the Blue Ridge Mountains that we called home. We’d become protagonists, adventurers, main characters.
 
Sometimes we made our own stories, imagine where we’d go if we could leave our slippery trap of a town. Caroline used to tell me that she was going to pack a backpack and volunteer on an organic farm somewhere far away. Or that she was going to go on a zero-gravity plane with her cousin. Or that she was going to move to Hawaii for some time. But more than anything else, she talked about living in a van. I never thought she was crazy for dreaming big, although my parents were skeptical of her reach-for-the-stars outlook. “Keep your feet on the ground,” they’d tell me, knowing that we didn’t have the kind of money to spend on frivolous things like adventure and travel. 

Caroline is brave, though. She’s independent. When she says she’s going to do something, she will. I mean, the zero-gravity plane is a bit out of her budget right now, but she did build out a van with her dad, Greg. He knew her heart was set on this, so he was going to send her out into the world the best he could.

They bought an old white van from a defunct heating company, its logo crudely scratched off the side. They left it like that, thinking that people aren’t going to want to mess with a big, scary white van. They also added a Beware of Dog sticker on the back for a sense of security. Even though Caroline only has her cat, August, who wasn’t leash-trained in time for this particular trip. 

It was with waitressing tips, fudge from a little store up the road, and a tiny space heater that Caroline set off on her grand adventure up north that Autumn. As one can imagine, a lot of things went wrong. She’d set up camp in parking lots, mostly at various Walmart stores, and stay up wondering if the cops were going to show up and tell her to leave. There were a few nights that her mother, Eleanor, was so worried about Caroline freezing that she got her a motel room. The space heater let off too much exhaust for Caroline to leave it on at night, so she would bundle up under quilts and blankets and stuffed animals, in her coat and layers and hat that she doesn’t remember coming off her head. But still, she’d shiver. A sweet tea lover, she found it a bit distressing to have to go to a McDonald’s to get that fix. 

But worst of all, she told me, was her sense of aloneness, the idea that she could go anywhere, do anything, and no one would know or care for who knows how long. It was a kind of loneliness that she had never experienced before, she told me later, one that she wasn’t keen on experiencing again. One night while she was setting up camp, she got to talking to a few homeless guys nearby. When she was telling me this story after the trip, my heart seized thinking through all the worst things, all the what-ifs. But Caroline isn’t like that, and she said that that conversation was one of the highlights of her trip, even if she went to bed that night with her pocketknife under her pillow.

She got to go to places that we’d dreamed about seeing our whole childhood. She was able to tour Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott lived. She put a sticker on the van from Walden Pond, collected leaves, and made crafts. When I talked with her about her trip for this story, she told me that she regretted not exploring the hiking trails and nature all around, but it was quite cold and she was a teenage girl, alone, with questionable cell service. It’s more than understandable that she didn’t explore all that more, and I told her as much.

She wanted to be back at home for Thanksgiving, and Chapel Hill was on the way, so it was decided that she’d pick me up and take me home. She got to see what I’d been doing in that time apart, the first time our lives had diverged in six years of friendship. I was one of three people from our high school that was accepted to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of only a handful going to university at all. I lived in a dorm. I had three meals available just a short walk away from the dining hall. I spent my days going to classes about mythology and literature and films. She got to see where I’d made myself a home; meet friends that didn’t know more about me than I wanted them to. She loved it, and I knew she would. On the way home we talked about our misplaced childhood dreams of being orphaned and shipped off to a boarding school where we’d discover secret passages and get to wear a uniform. In the van, she gave me the treasures she’d collected that had reminded her of me: a keychain shaped like a copy of Little Women for my backpack, some pebbles from a northern beach, and a bookmark made from packing tape with maple and gingko leaves pressed between.

I keep them all with me even now. 

That wasn’t my only experience with Caroline and her van, though. We had our own adventure that May for her nineteenth birthday. We decided that we were going to camp out at Holden Beach. I packed up a couple of bags and my mom dropped me off at her house and then we were off. Caroline drove exclusively. She’d tried to teach me how to navigate the clunky steering and width of the van, but with shaking hands and a quick beating heart, we decided that it was probably safest for everyone if I played navigator.

At the sandy, ghost town of a campground, we got a few weird looks and second glances from the staff and some year-rounders. It was understandable I suppose; we were two teenage girls pulling up in a big white van all alone. While we were there, we swam in the ocean in our clothes, I tried flan for the first time, and we lived almost exclusively off a couple bags of Tate’s cookies. We didn’t shower for days and went nose-blind to ourselves, probably a hidden miracle having to share a bed and such a small space. We collected shells and she taught me to how to make linoleum cuts on the beach; she was always teaching me things like that. We watched movies and lazed around. It was one of the best times of my life. 

The drive home was a different kind of hell, though. Caroline had gotten a severe sunburn on her ankles and the tops of her feet. It was an angry red and the skin was all swollen and puffed up. But she was the only one of us who could drive the van, realistically. The van also doesn’t have a working air conditioner, and for a long time, it was stuck with the heat on. We were tired and dehydrated and hot. But we made it home, and looking back we agree, even now, that we wouldn’t do anything differently. Except bring sunscreen, I add.

But now, a year later, the big white van is parked back at Greg and Eleanor’s house, and Caroline and I are separated once again. She’s all the way across the country this time attending university at Western Washington. When it was time to move in, she did so in the most Caroline way ever: traveling by Amtrak with Eleanor and all she could carry. This was all during a railroad strike, but still, she got there. It’s Caroline, she’s going to find a way. 

She is living with some friends in a house not far from campus. It’s near the beach, and I get Snapchats of her sea glass and rock collections daily. Her room has a bay window and I’m insanely jealous of it. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. Of course, it isn’t. She told me how at one point she was considering selling her eggs for rent money, but thankfully, Greg stepped in that first month. The house is also near some cute shops where she buys yarn and naan, a refill shop where she gets her facewash and organic jellybeans. 

I’ve been making more of an effort to call and FaceTime; I know she likes it when I do. We write long letters every few weeks, sometimes months, a collection of sorts in each envelope. When I was preparing to leave for my freshman year, Caroline made me a little quilt. I use it to lay on the quad when it’s sunny and I think of her. So, in turn – and with her help – I learned to quilt and made her one. It was packed away among her things on the train as she crossed the country, and now it’s in her room as she enters this next chapter of her life.

It's a role reversal of sorts.

I’m deep in my sophomore year of college, she’s nearly done with her first. I’m experiencing all these things first: the highs and lows of dining hall food, digging my niche in the Creative Writing department, trying other… extracurricular activities that we swore we’d never do when we were little, giggling while we thought of growing up. 

It’s a funny feeling. 

Now we’re planning her twentieth birthday, thinking about what we can fit in between work and flights and school. Gingko leaf tattoos were decided, and now I’ve just got to work up the gumption and the funds. Caroline has a few tattoos now. I don’t have any. The thought makes my heart race, thinking about the needle, its permanence, and what my parents – the church – might think about it. But I know that Caroline will be right there with me, holding my hand. She’s always been right there with me. I don’t know what’s next for us, but I do know that for sure. Caroline is constant. 

Photo by Celia Gibbs

Photo by Celia Gibbs

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