I have a long history of talking on the phone for inappropriate amounts of time. It's not that I would ever pick up the phone and make the call myself, because interaction over the phone just doesn't appeal to me, but when a girl gets me talking on the phone, she's unlikely ever to get me to shut up. This became an issue for my parents when I entered high school, because the battery in their phone was often dead due to my extended conversations. And this is the story of when that conversation went on just long enough to force my parents to get me my own phone line.
When Liz and I were growing to be really good friends, there was a period of a few months where she would phone my house almost every night, and it got to the point that my parents could rarely use their own phone because either I was using it, or I had used it to the point that the battery was now dead.
There were also a few times that some of my other friends would comment that they never got to talk to me (which was ridiculous, because we almost always skipped classes together in high school) due to my constant chatter with Liz. So that's when I made a deal with myself that I wouldn't talk on the phone longer than the conversation was enjoyable. So, my parents should really blame Liz for being an incredible conversationalist, because that girl was a delight...well, at first, anyway.
One night, when Liz phoned me, the first words out of her mouth were that she couldn't talk to me. That seemed like a strange way to start a conversation that she herself had instigated, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt and asked her why. She then explained, at length, that I had managed to occupy so much of her spare time that she didn't have a chance to connect with her other friends. I wondered why she was blaming me for this, because I'm not sure that I was ever the one to phone her, but I didn't want to risk saying as much -- as fun as she could be to talk to, she could also turn violently insane when angry.
When she had finished explaining to me that she couldn't speak to me, she then put me on hold and a few seconds later I heard ringing, as though I were phoning someone else. A moment later Anika picked up, and Liz told her that we were three-way calling, and that's when I realized that, what Liz meant to tell me was, she couldn't speak to me exclusively.
While Anika and I knew each other, and had had a few conversations with one another, we weren't, at that time, friends, and I'm not sure that we had ever been alone together, or had ever chosen to seek one another out for companionship. What I'm trying to say is that the conversation was about 90% Liz, because both Anika and I were very awkwardly silent, unsure of what would and wouldn't be appropriate conversation.
As the night wore on, and our conversation hit the three-hour mark, Liz's phone started to die, and she excused herself from the conversation. It's at this point that my memory's a little bit hazy about how three-way calling works, so I'm not sure how Anika and I were still connected without Liz, but I doubt it's important to the story at-hand. The point is that Anika and I had an awkward moment when Liz had hung up, wondering whether we were going to be polite and continue the conversation in Liz's absence, or be the socially-frightful people we were and just hang up on one another.
We chose to be polite, and reached for any topic we could, and we ended up talking about our families, how we had met our friends, movies we had loved as kids and wanted to watch again, et cetera.
Anika and I soon found that we got along quite well, and it turned out that nothing was really off-topic between us because we both had either a morbid curiosity about everything or a hilariously inappropriate opinion about it all. After a few more hours, the tell-tale beeping of my phone told me that it was about to die. When I informed Anika, she was thrown into incredible despair, apparently having enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Fortunately, my parents had had a secondary phone, just in case I killed the first one, and I switched over to that one, prolonging the conversation still.
We spoke more about what we planned to do once we graduated, gossipped about our mutual friends, told stories about when we were young(er), and regaled each other with hilarious jokes until her phone, too, began to die out. Her family, like mine, had a second extension in case the teenager of the house couldn't shut up, and so our conversation continued on.
Neither of us were really sure how long we had been speaking, because we had chatted with Liz from just after having dinner, but when we each started hearing stirring from our parent's bedrooms, we wondered if maybe it was time for us to go to bed. That's when we looked out the window and realized that the sun was coming up, which granted us the unique opportunity to watch the sun rise with someone over the phone.
We both then hid in our bedrooms and whispered into the phone while we listened to our father's getting up in the morning for work, worried that they would both be angry that we had had what must have been at least an eleven-hour phone conversation.
When I started to hear my father's footsteps approaching my door, I realized that he was coming to wake me up for school, so I gave a rushed goodbye to Anika, turned off the phone, and threw myself under the covers just as the door opened. Being the fantastic actor that I was, I faked sick, and my parents allowed me to stay home during the day. I had no contact with any of my friends until about seven that night, when I Liz was phoning once more.
"Where were you today?" she asked, "both you and Anika were missing, what's going on?" I explained to her that I faked sick, and suspected Anika had as well, because neither of us had slept after watching the sun rise together.
There was a brief pause on the other end of the phone before "WHAT THE HELL?! I thought you two would just hang up, I didn't expect you to talk to one another!" I guess she should have told us that, while she wanted her friends to get along with one another, she didn't actually want them to be friends with one another. Unfortunately, all Liz managed to do was introduce me to my best friend, so...at least something positive came out of my relationship with Liz.
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