Mara Wilson remembers Michelle Trachtenberg as friendly and sincere, but says the late actress struggled with being perceived as the opposite.

Trachtenberg died on Feb. 26 at the age of 39. Wilson says the two had lost touch by then, but became fast friends when they met in the ’90s as child stars (Wilson played the title character in Matilda and Trachtenberg the same in Harriet the Spy, both released in 1996). “Not only was she nice, I realized, but she was remarkably intelligent,” Wilson recalled in a recent essay for Vulture. “Yet she managed not to be condescending and didn’t try to impress with big words, the way other kids (including me) might have. She was smart, but she was also self-possessed, and didn’t need to show off.”

Despite her winning qualities, when Wilson and Trachtenberg later attended the same middle school in Los Angeles, she said the Buffy the Vampire Slayer star pulled her aside one day and asked, “‘Are the kids here mean to you?'” In tears, Trachtenberg continued, “‘Because they are to me… They call me Harriet the Slut, Harriet the B—-, Harriet the B—-y Spy… and so much worse. They never stop.”

Though Wilson remembers that “everybody fell in love with Michelle Trachtenberg,” it was precisely her fame and friendliness that caused her to be misunderstood in school. “Every time I even heard someone say ‘Michelle Trachtenberg,’ a kid would jump in to say that they’d heard she was mean, full of herself, a total b—-.”

Wilson would defend her — “‘She’s not… she’s really nice!'” — saying she “couldn’t reconcile” the names being thrown at Trachtenberg “with the Michelle I’d known, the one who was never anything but warm and kind.” Wilson had “never seen Michelle cry before” the day she confided in her at school, which led her to the realization: “So much of being a child actor is about making everyone happy. It felt cruelly ironic to be so hated when our raison d’être was getting people to like us.”

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As an adult, Trachtenberg was open about her experience of childhood bullying, and about the challenges that fame poses to interpersonal relationships even as you age. The actress shared a vulnerable Instagram post around Valentine’s Day 2020, recalling in the caption of a picture of herself during the Harriet the Spy days, “Back in my day all the kids had to write a bulls— Valentine’s Day card to everyone in the class. I never got one on purpose, everyone got a valentine card. No one ever gave me one and they thought I didn’t need the attention. The kids and staff all laughed and thought everyone else should get one, being an actress since I was 3, apparently I didn’t need one.”

“The kids were cruel… I still have scars from being thrown down stairs and slammed into lockers head first,” Trachtenberg said. But summoning the courageous optimism that defined some of her best characters, resolved, “There is no need to harp on the past… I write this to every child, teen, person, out there who is bullied. You are something.”

Stars from Trachtenberg’s Buffy and Gossip Girl families publicly mourned her following her passing, with Sarah Michelle Gellar remembering her on-screen sister with an emotional quote from a scene they shared, and Blake Lively describing her TV frenemy as “fiercely loyal to her friends and brave for those she loved.”

Wilson regretted the distance that had sprouted up between them, writing, “I always thought I would get the chance to see her again, to tell her how much I’d always looked up to her. To tell her the times we spent together as children were some of the best of my life.”