Did you just say “midnight blue?”

These are the words that popped into my head as I stood in the evening gown department of Nordstrom with my high school friend. She was describing her homecoming dress from the twelfth grade, which I really couldn’t have forgotten if I tried (That’s because I have a photographic memory. Seriously, I can tell you the color of my shirt the day the first Harry Potter movie came out – pink.). I nodded and listened, but I still couldn’t help but think.

Do you really call colors by their shades?

I was pretty sure there was one word for every color unless you work for Crayola. I mean, it doesn’t say “Cerulean” on my birth certificate for a reason. And why was I even at the fancy dress rack, anyway? It was the last place on earth I wanted to be and still, the first. Because that’s where Kayla wanted to be, and I want to be where she is.

Kayla’s role in my life is one you could never really understand because I don’t really understand it. When I was a teenager, I was resistant to call her my friend. I would think that she really wasn’t; she was just the only person who wanted to do stuff with me and hung around past the end of every party to talk with me.

Looking back, I realize that I was sixteen and ignorant, and of course Kayla was always my friend. My only friend. But I fell into that trap I think a lot of girls fall into. We want friends who are our carbon copies.

I thought I had that when I was about fourteen, and it lasted up until I was almost twenty. There was this girl in the grade below me whose interests seemed to match up perfectly with mine. It wasn’t very often one had to persuade the other into forging common ground because it was already there. And that was awesome, considering when I would drive around with Kayla, I didn’t know a lot of the music she liked. When I was a teenager, I thought that was a bad thing.

And you know how the story goes. I was wrong and all that.

Here’s what your friend does. She stays up until one in the morning to watch a movie with you and mock the characters, even if she didn’t even really care about that movie. Even if she doesn’t feel the same way about film as you do.

Here’s what your friend doesn’t do. She doesn’t call you at one in the morning and complain that she’s mad because you’re happy.

Your friend turns up “Oh What a Night” by The Four Seasons when it’s raining really hard so you can hear it, and she’s well aware that this isn’t the original group because you’ve told her a million times. She also doesn’t care that you were born in the mid-1990s and know this much about Frankie Valli.

Your friend doesn’t ask you to take a picture of her with her other friends because you are not part of their group, even though you’ve spent the entire day with them.

It doesn’t matter if you can have a conversation with your best friend using nothing but Arrested Development quotes. I’ve had that before, and it’s really cool! Don’t get me wrong, and if you and your best friend can do it, more power to you. For me, though, the people who know how funny “The Final Countdown” is turned out not to be the truest friends. It was all I wanted for the longest time, but for me, that kind of friendship just hasn’t happened yet.

Maybe Kayla doesn’t know which season of The Office Jim and Pam get married in, I think. She cannot name every Big Bad on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in order, probably. But none of that matters. It’s just trivia in a board game box.

I used to think these were friendship dealbreakers. They’re not. A friendship dealbreaker is refusing to make someone feel welcome in your home or telling that her that you hate her because she left your fries in the car (and meaning it).

I don’t care that my friend Kayla and I can’t have a lively debate over whether or not the movies screwed up Ron Weasley (They did.). She probably doesn’t care that I never to watch One Tree Hill, except I probably will, those sly teen soaps.

What I do care about is that Kayla was the only person who checked in on me after my car accident and that she listens to me when I’m at my most embarrassing.

I can say whatever I need to when I talk to her, and she can do the same. We feel comfortable interrupting each other’s sentences because we know we’ll just get back to it. It makes me happy knowing she’ll stay the longest at every party because we’ll get to talk without all the noise mixed in. I don’t think I could aimlessly drive for hours a day with anyone else. It’s never a dull moment with my friend Kayla. I’m always learning something new, like how sometimes, people refer to colors in specific shades.

Yeah, she really did call that dress midnight blue. And I’d never been happier to be somebody’s friend.

(Kayla's on the left. That's me on the right. I'm 5'4," but I have the attitude of a 6'1" man.)