Lifelong Friendship and “Best Friends Forever”

Lifelong Friendship and “Best Friends Forever” is the enduring bond between Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey, forged in adolescence and given meaning through acts of care, remembered rituals, and an explicit promise to remain friends. Its force lies not in an uninterrupted closeness: the two women become estranged, and Kate’s terminal illness makes their remaining time painfully finite. Instead, the friendship persists through rupture and loss, sustained by Tully’s return to Kate, their shared past, and the memories that remain after Kate’s death.

How the Friendship Begins

The bond becomes real when Kate responds to Tully’s distress with a hug. Tully has started crying despite insisting she is fine; at first, being held feels foreign enough that she flinches and tries to pull away. Then she cannot move away. She clings to Kate, frightened that without this unexpected comfort she will drift away and be lost. The scene makes friendship a physical act of shelter before it becomes a promise: Kate stays beside her, and Tully discovers how badly she needs someone to stay.

That shelter deepens into trust when Tully tells Kate that Pat Richmond raped her. She draws a steadying breath and confesses, ashamed and afraid of Kate’s judgment; Kate’s first response is a quiet question about whether she is okay. Her presence does not erase what happened, but it gives Tully a witness who does not blame or abandon her. The friendship is defined early by this distinction: Kate cannot undo Tully’s hurt, but she can meet it with care.

The pattern recurs after Tully returns to Kate and tells her that Gran has died while Kate was away. Tully is angry at Cloud, Gran, and God, yet beneath the anger she has been waiting for someone to love her and be truly sorry for her loss. Kate holds her through gulping sobs without trying to fill the silence. Across these moments, their closeness is expressed less through solutions than through staying, listening, and allowing grief to be borne in company.

A Shared Story and Its Rituals

The friendship acquires a language of its own in letters and repeated memories. When Tully first leaves Snohomish, the girls write to one another in profusion and sign their letters “Forever friends” or “Best friends forever.” The alternatives matter less than the act of making the promise: separation is already part of their lives, and the written words give their connection a form that can travel across distance.

Years later, Tully can summon their history in precise, comic episodes. She recalls Kate reading Love Story and being unable to work out what “sonovabitch” meant because it was not in the dictionary, and Kate swearing that she would never French-kiss because it was “gross-o-rama.” Tully remembers them riding their bikes down Summer Hill and running from the police on the night they were arrested. These details do more than decorate a recollection. They show friendship as a shared archive: each remembers the younger person the other was, including the small embarrassments and private jokes that a public account of a life might leave out.

One memory condenses that archive into a refrain. The girls go to Pete’s Dragon expecting an action movie, discover that it is a cartoon, and leave the theater singing “You and Me Against the World.” They say it will always be that way. Tully returns to the song and its promise when speaking to Kate in the hospital, placing an ordinary childhood misadventure alongside their long history. The friendship’s durability is built from such particular episodes, not from an abstract claim that nothing ever changes.

Estrangement and the Return to Kate

The promise is tested most sharply by estrangement. Tully replays a message from Kate until the remembered accusation becomes all she can hear. The voice on the machine seems unlike the girl who had once promised lifelong friendship: Tully cannot reconcile that hurtful call with the Kate she remembers, and she erases the message. The action gives the conflict a material end point, but not a resolution. Deleting the recording cannot delete the bond or settle what has happened between them.

When Tully returns, Johnny warns her that cancer in Kate’s brain has affected her faculties and that she may not recognize her. Kate is physically diminished by treatment, with no hair or eyebrows, but when she opens her eyes Tully recognizes the woman she has known, and the girl to whom she swore to be best friends forever. The danger that Kate might not remember turns the visit into more than an apology: Tully has to speak before she knows whether the shared past can still be met by recognition.

Tully apologizes for what she did and says she should have spoken sooner. Then she rebuilds their story aloud, naming both its painful and ridiculous details and remembering Kate as more than the friend who once comforted her. Her account reaches back to their first meeting, their letters after Tully left Snohomish, their bike rides, their arrest, and the movie they mistook for an action film. Recollection becomes an act of reconnection: Tully offers Kate the life they had made together, hoping that even a mind altered by illness can find its way back to it.

Care in the Face of Death

As Kate’s condition worsens, friendship takes the form of practical presence. On Kate’s last night in hospital, Tully persuades Johnny to take the children home and takes his place beside Kate. She pushes the other bed across the linoleum until it nearly meets Kate’s, then brings a tape of her final show. The two watch it from their beds like schoolgirls at a sleepover. The broadcast belongs to Tully’s public life, but sharing it here makes their old intimacy more immediate than its audience or applause.

Earlier, Tully’s farewell on television has already made that choice plain. She says that the show is only a show, while real life is with friends and family, and that an old friend has reminded her she has a family who needs her. She removes her microphone and leaves the stage. The decision places companionship and care above the performance that has occupied her professional life; it is not a rejection of the work, but a recognition that Kate’s need cannot be answered from a studio.

Tully also turns their childhood freedom into a final shared experience. She pushes Kate’s wheelchair over uneven grass toward the hill above the beach, describing them as girls sneaking out with their bicycles and riding down Summer Hill without hands. Kate feels the breeze against her bare head, smells evergreen trees and dark earth, and laughs. For a heartbeat, she is again a child on Firefly Lane with her best friend beside her, believing she can fly. When the ride ends, Kate looks at Tully and remembers everything about them. The imagined bike ride does not reverse the illness; it lets a remembered freedom briefly become present between them.

Memory Beyond Death

After Kate dies, Tully is swept back in time by “Dancing Queen.” Standing in the street, she is unsure whether she is laughing or crying, but knows she is not alone. Their more than three decades of good and bad times cannot be taken from them; the music and memories keep them together. Tully begins to dance by herself, making visible a continuity that now has to be carried without Kate’s physical presence.

“Best friends forever” thus survives in a changed form. It once appeared in letters signed across a separation; later it was spoken through songs, childhood stories, comfort, apologies, and bedside care. At the end, it does not promise escape from illness or grief. It names what remains: a shared history that can still be recalled, and a friendship whose past continues to accompany Tully after Kate is gone.