Emily Spicer

Even before I met Anne, I knew of her. It was impossible not to.

She was the goddess of the quad. She lived in a neighboring dorm, but we shared the same cafeteria and the same smoking porch. I didn't smoke then, but I would watch her puff sexily as I was hanging out with other freshmen. Everyone watched her. But she was oblivious to my presence. She was statuesque and cold. Haughty and beautiful. I was so scared she would notice me, but so desperate for her to. I was in love with her the moment I saw her.

The first semi-encounter was when my boyfriend at the time tried to get a hold of me at the dorm. After a fight on the phone, I'd taken my phone off the hook. He came to dorm after-hours, worried and wanting someone to let him in. He asked Anne.

"Maybe she doesn't want to see you," she said to him, giggling in her mischievous way. He didn't get in. When he told me the story, I was done for. She had to be my friend.

And then one day, it happened. It was a lunar eclipse – of course, when else would a goddess make herself known? We were out in the quad courtyard and Ramee was with me. The moon was in complete shadow, and all I could see were the tips of lit cigarettes, glowing a momentary red with each inhalation, briefly illuminating the faces of the smokers. For a second I saw her talking to Ramee, and then she was lost in the blackness.

I heard Ramee ask Anne, "Do you know Emily?"

And her sweet, feminine voice said in a singsong I would come to know so well, "I know who you are. Do you know who I am?"

I almost shit in my pants.

And from there, we were fast friends. Guys: we would laugh at them. Songs: we would dance to them. Wine: we would drink it, especially if it had any kind of date on the label – the height of classiness.

She was so gorgeous and intimidating with her blonde mane of hair, her platform shoes, her wee cut-off shorts – and that was just her going-to-class outfit. When she would put on the charm, well, no one could resist her. No one could approach her. All my years of ice-princess training, and I had nothing on that Amazon queen.

A group of us went tubing once on the Guadalupe River in New Braunfels. She'd never been tubing and didn't know about the standard uniform of shorts and a T-shirt worn over a swimsuit. She showed up in a teeny macramé bikini – no coverup. She had already started buzzing her hair short and she walked through the crowd of more clothed tubers – no, she paraded through that crowd – head-up as if she were wearing royal vestments. And of course, she was.

She was fearless like that. And then later that day, on the car ride home, she dug into that KFC bucket like a shameless, starving peasant, extolling the virtues of potatoes and fried chicken like a Southern pro. She was like that too. Full of complications, of contradictions.

When she, Sarah, Bryan and I went to New Orleans for Spring Break my sophomore year, we had a another KFC picnic, only this was outdoors in gale-force winds. There was no silverware included in our take-out bag, and, starving, we were reduced to eating the side orders of mashed potatoes, fried potatoes, and cole slaw using Trivial Pursuit cards to scoop out what our hands couldn't manage, all while fighting off the gusts of wind. But to give Anne her royal due, she made sure there was a gallon of Gallo wine to accompany the meal and her best cut-crystal goblets to drink it from. That was Anne.

She was the first to start dancing at our parties, and there were many - every weekend, in fact. "I Will Survive" from the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert soundtrack. "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister. Gallons of wine, kegs of beer. But she made the party.

And then she'd empty the party when she brought out that damned snake, Naldo. Naldo, who as a baby peed on Sergio and cleared the room with his stench. Naldo, who stoically wore the party hat I made him for Anne's birthday. Naldo who is responsible for one of my favorite party anecdotes:

My roommate in college had a snake that one day went crazy and attacked her. The girl who was subletting my room that summer tried to come to her rescue and pull off the snake, who had bitten into her wrist and wrapped himself like a tourniquet around her arm. It wasn't working, so Anne said to the girl, "Go get a knife. We're going to have to cut his head off."

Poor Naldo was never heard from again.

Only in the re-telling of the story, I talk about it as if I had been there. Simplifying and embellishing at the same time. She'd understand. We shared a flair for the dramatic.

We would go late at night to Amy's Ice Cream to get a pint of our favorite. It was Mexican vanilla with Oreo crush-ins and it was called Mexican-Oreo. We made it a point to tell our server how that was our ice cream anthem, because I was the Mexican and she was the Oreo.

The servers never laughed, but we loved that joke, and I took it as a sign that our friendship was meant to be.

Those were the good days, the days I will treasure.

The bad days started after she was diagnosed with narcolepsy. We were living together and she got hooked on the amphetamines she was taking to combat her sleep attacks and withdrew completely from our group. At first, she and I tried to make it normal. She would have a cataplexy attack from laughing too hard at something – a TV show, a joke, my life – and that would send us into another fit of laughter. More cataplexy, more laughter, more cataplexy.

We would joke about the title of her future autobiography: Mulatto Like Me or Sleepy Like Me.

But then there was no way to play it off. She slept all day in the living room, talked to the TV, and turned down every invitation we made to her.

My Anne was gone.

Later, after graduation, after moves and marriages and the disconnect that comes from entering the adult world, she called to say she was on a new drug that made her feel like herself again. And then much later, she called to say she had brain cancer. But it was OK. She was in love and she was happy and he was wonderful.

Then she was engaged. Then married.

And then the tumor came back. Again. The last time I saw her, there was pain and morphine and the hope for a miracle.

But she was always the miracle. The imposing queen, the best friend, the pain in the ass.

I'm glad that I got to see her, to spend time with her in person and by phone and got to know my Anne again. The day she died, I toasted her at my birthday party, and I swear I felt her there. I could hear her tinkling, mischievous laugh, and I could smell her Quelques Fleurs perfume.

And here I am writing my Anne-ecdotes (she loved puns, too). But it pisses me off that they're all in past tense.