R.L. Stine’s 1992 novel, The Best Friend, deals with everyone’s worst nightmare, the acquaintance who claims that you’re one of their best friends even though you don’t really know or remember much about them.
Becka seems to have the perfect life for a Shadyside teen. She lives in a nice house on Fear Street. She’s got wealthy parents. She has lots of friends. She’s a popular student at Shadyside High. She just dumped boring old Eric for the hottest guy around, Bill.
But then Honey shows up.
Honey Perkins was in the same 4th Grade class as Becka and she has now returned to Shadyside. Honey swears that she and Becka were best friends in the 4th Grade and that they were always getting into trouble together! Becka barely remembers Honey and she certainly doesn’t remember ever being friends with her. In fact, Becka remembers Honey as being one of those students who rarely spoke and didn’t have any friends. Honey, however, insists that she and Becka were besties and now, it’s time for them to be besties again! And that means getting rid of all of Becka’s other friends!
It’s always kind of fun to make jokes about how dated most of R.L. Stine’s books are today. He was writing for young readers in the 90s and, as such, he filled his books to references to what he thought teenagers were into in the 90s. Some of those references were probably correct while a good deal of them were obviously selected by a middle-aged man trying to think like a much younger woman. Unavoidably, Stine’s book also seem dated because of all the advances in technology over the past few years. Stine was writing at a time when personal computers were exotic (and boxy) and everyone was dependent on a landline phone. Most of Stine’s book offer a look into what the world was like in the days before the Internet and social media.
However, The Best Friend does not feel quite as dated because I think, thanks to Facebook and Twitter (or X or whatever it’s called now), everyone has had the experience of being followed by or getting a friend request from someone you vaguely recognize from the past. Usually, you can’t remember anything about these people but they’re just so excited when you follow back or when you click on accept. It’s always a bit weird. It leaves me wondering if they’ve spent years thinking about me and it also leaves me feeling a little guilty when I realize that I haven’t done the same for them.
As for Becka and Honey, their relationship soon turns into a Single White Female thing, with Honey getting her hair cut so she can look more like Becka and then showing up at Becka’s house when she’s not home so that she can go through Becka’s clothes. (Seriously, I would push her out my bedroom window if she tried that with me.) It’s all effectively creepy if a bit predictable. The books ends with one the darkest conclusions that a one will ever find in an R.L. Stine book. I mean — YIKES!
Read The Best Friend and then think twice before accepting that friend request.
Through the Shattered Lens 