“Friends, forever and ever.” Pam and Jaqui swore.

“I’ll miss you,” Pam said with tears in her eyes.

“No. No missing. ‘Cause we will always be together.”

“Because of the unicorn.”

“ ‘Cause of the unicorn.”

Looking back, Pam couldn’t remember why they had chosen a unicorn. She remembered everything else about that summer – the tearful goodbyes, the long phone calls back and forth, the elaborate plans to stop the move – but, she couldn’t remember the reason why they had chosen a unicorn.

Pam and Jaqui had been friends their entire lives. They lived down the street from each other, and it was rare they spent more than a day apart. Their neighbors used to tease them about being twins, always skipping and playing together. They didn’t care, in their minds, they were twins.

That all changed the summer when they were ten. Jaqui had to move (Pam had long since forgotten why). The week before the move, Pam and Jaqui went to store and chose a necklace that would forever bond them – the unicorn.

On the day of the move, they tearfully put the necklace on. Pam hadn’t taken it off for years. Even when her mother insisted she stop wearing it, she would place it in her shoe, or hide it somewhere else, always close by.

Somehow, it came to bond them in more ways than the originally thought. Every time Pam would get nervous and scared, she would instinctively feel for the charm, rubbing it between her fingers, as if she could speak to her friend that way. It seemed that every time Pam was really worried, she would get a phone call from Jaqui, asking what was wrong. Now that she is older, Pam knows it was likely just coincidences, but when she was younger, Pam was amazed. The necklace seemed to represent an unbreakable bond between the two girls.

During high school, the two girls drifted apart, talking less and arguing more. One night, after a particularly bad argument, Pam had discovered her necklace on the ground, the chain broken. Pam cried for days on end, not wanting to even fix it. She reasoned that it was really their friendship that was broken, not just the chain. She placed the broken necklace in her jewelry box, and decided to move on.

It was nearly a month before Pam spoke to Jaqui again. Pam didn’t bring up the broken necklace; she didn’t even talk at all. But Jaqui knew. She questioned what was wrong. They talked for hours on end. The next day, their friendship was back, different, but back. They both realized they weren’t the same little girls who bought the unicorns, but they were still friends. That afternoon, Pam took the necklace to the jewelers, and got the chain fixed.

It hadn’t left her neck since.