Danya was effortlessly cool. She had funky sweaters, Docs, and knew of bands I’d never heard of. Her parents were South African, and from what I can recall, her house always smelled like biltong. She was a voracious reader and wrote poetry that I thought was genius. I still remember a bit:
’Twas the young wind I did spy,
It sailed north across a burning lake...
Something, something...
’Twas the young wind I did spy,
but never got to see it.
She would later go on to score a perfect score on the verbal section of the SAT.
But in Marietta, Georgia, in the ’90s, grown-ups called her “quirky” and “precocious.” Some kids called her weird.
I was so insanely jealous of my friend. She had a built-in thing—the smart girl. The smartest girl.
But we did a lot of dumb stuff.
The dumbest thing we ever did was on a Saturday evening after a session at the Media Play newsstand. We’d bought copies of SPIN and Rolling Stone—because the internet didn’t exist yet, and that’s how we got our pop culture news.
In her basement, I flipped through the glossy, thin pages looking at pictures of Courtney Love. Danya actually read the articles—about war, famine, and other terrible things that didn’t seem to happen in America in the ’90s.
I reached the back pages of SPIN and found the ads. They were crammed with 1-900 numbers—sex lines. Sex was written multiple times on the page. My pubescent brain lit up. We should call these numbers and see what happens.
Danya violently agreed. We dialed the first number and heard moaning. We giggled and hung up when they asked for a credit card number. This repeated several times—until my genius friend said, “We should just make up a credit card number.”
So we did. She was the genius, after all.
I don’t remember the specifics of those calls, but I’m certain “shaft,” “tits,” and “cum” were all said by some poorly paid adult on the other end of the landline.
About a month later, I was watching Oprah after school—on one of the six channels we got—when my mother told me Danya’s dad was on the phone for me.
He let me know that Danya and I would be paying back the $276 we spent on 1-900 sex lines. I was still allowed back at their house, but SPIN and Rolling Stone were off-limits for the foreseeable future.
Danya and I grew apart in the following years and now live in different cities. But hearing a South African accent or smelling biltong at some craft Brooklyn meatery still makes me think of her.
Names were not changed, but some details may have been.