Best Friends Forever (12 page)

I jumped up and down, trying to get my blood pumping so I’d warm up. “Maybe he was Raptured. Although if that happened, his clothes would be here, too. And his clothes are stil in your car, right?”

She rol ed her eyes. “So you don’t know whether it’s his blood or not, but you know exactly what happens to clothing during the Rapture.” I shrugged. Val stuck her thumbnail in her mouth and nibbled at it.

“You know what we should do? We should go get the rest of them.”

“Val,” I said, struggling not to laugh.

“You’re a weathergirl. I paint greeting cards. This isn’t the Wild West. We’re not Thelma and Louise.”

“Thelma and Louise had jobs, too,” she said. “And as for me being a weathergirl, there is a long and honorable tradition of weatherpeople taking part in radical action. Perhaps you’re

familiar

with

the

Weathermen?”

“Val.” Giggles rose like champagne bubbles in my throat. “Those guys weren’t actual meteorologists. You know that, right?”

She ignored me. “We should try to find him. Make sure he doesn’t talk. Then we can go get the rest of them. Kevin, and Mark, and…”

“We?” I repeated. “Oh, no. You’re on your own, sister. This isn’t my problem.”

She looked incredulous. Then, hurt…hurt and very young, in her high heels and red dress. “You’re not going to help me?”

I shoved my hands deep into my pockets and spoke to her slowly, pronouncing each word careful y so there’d be no mistaking my meaning, remembering that day in the cafeteria, Val at one end of the room surrounded by her friends and me, alone, at the other. “Perhaps you don’t remember,” I began, “but the last time I tried to help you, it didn’t turn out very wel for me.”

She bit her lip, looking abashed. “I said I was sorry.”

“Yeah, wel , you know what? It’s a little too late for you to be…” I raised my hands in the frigid night air and hooked my fingers into quotation marks. “ Sorry.’ Do you have any idea what my senior year was like?” I asked, remembering the whispers that fol owed me everywhere I went: Fat bitch. Fat whore. Fat

narc. Always fat something, as if fat was real y the worst thing they could say about me, about any girl.

“Do you have any idea what my life was like?” Valerie shot back.

“Actual y, I do,” I said. “I was there, remember? I’m sure it was absolute hel , having to decide which guy to go to prom with.”

“You have no idea.”

“No, I don’t. I’m sure I couldn’t possibly imagine what it’s like to be tal , and blond, and gorgeous, and to throw your best friend under the bus…”

“I hated you,” Valerie said. Her voice was flat and toneless.

I stared at her. “Excuse me?”

“I

hated

you

because

you

had

everything.” She turned away, aiming her keys at the Jaguar. There was a click as the locks popped open. “Come on. Get in. I’l take you home.”

“Wait. I had everything? What are you talking about?”

She turned to face me, heels dug into the gravel, hands on her hips. “You had a mom.

You had a dad. You had a brother. You had fucking food in your refrigerator, which, in case you never noticed, was something I did not have, because my mother never ate anything but Tab and fucking Wheat Thins. You had clean clothes. You had someone to sign your field-trip permission slips and give you five bucks so you could buy lunch. You you five bucks so you could buy lunch. You had someone to show up at parent-teacher conferences. You never had to wake your mother up after she’d passed out on the couch with a lit cigarette. You had two parents who loved you…” Her voice caught.

“You had everything.” She turned away and jerked open the passenger-side door. “Get in.”

“Valerie.” I felt breathless, like I’d been hit in the stomach. What was she talking about?

Her mother had been beautiful and fun, lively and ful of adventure. Sure, she was a little scattered, but loving and goodhearted. At least that’s what I’d always thought. Had I been that wrong?

“I wanted to belong somewhere,” Val continued.

I stared at her, astonished. “How did sel ing me out help you belong?”

She lifted her narrow shoulders in a shrug, then dropped her face again. I stood in the parking lot, the night air frigid against my cheeks, not knowing what to say. Of al the times I’d imagined this scene, al the ways I’d thought about it playing out, feeling sorry for Valerie had never been a possibility. I was the victim, she was the vil ain; I was the ugly duckling, she was the swan. She’d escaped Pleasant Ridge, and I was stuck here, tethered to my brother, tied down by fear. In al my years of fuming and resentful imagining, al the years I’d carried my grudge like a pocketbook I was afraid to set down even for an instant, I’d never considered that there might be a different way of looking at the situation, another truth. I took the chil of the night air into my lungs and breathed out slowly. “If Dan’s not here, where do you think he went?”

Val shrugged.

“We should try to find him.” I could do that at least, I told myself. I owed her that much for al the years she’d been my friend.

“Why?”

“Because…” I had the sense of somehow having slipped out of my regular life where logic and the normal rules applied and into some other world, a place where you could hit people with your car and escape with impunity, where you could hurt the people who’d hurt you without suffering any consequences…where

they’d

just

disappear, maybe back to the real world, where the rules did apply. Everything was up-side-down and backward. “Because he could be hurt.”

She turned slowly, looking, now, entirely grown-up, like a version of her mother, who could slide out of any tight spot with a pretty smile and a little judicious flirting. “Not our problem.”

“But if you’re the one who hit him…”

She rocked back and forth on her heels.

“What if,” said Val, “tonight is kind of a…kind of a get-out-of-jail-free card?”

I looked at her, wondering if she had any idea how close what she’d said was to what I’d been thinking.

“What if you could do anything you wanted?” she asked. “Get back at those boys? Get revenge?”

No, I thought. It doesn’t work that way.

There’s no such thing as something for

nothing; the bil always comes due. But then I thought about my life. I’d lost my mother and my father and my brother. I’d lost my best friend and my boyfriend. Worse than al that, I had lost my dreams of the life I’d imagined for myself…and now, if that stiffness in my bel y meant what I thought it did, I was going to lose my life, too, probably quickly, and there’d be nothing left to show for the thirty-three years I’d spent on this earth except for a handful of greeting cards that sold in drugstores for a dol ar ninetynine, plus three mugs and a spoon rest, and a brother who didn’t always remember that we were related and that I wasn’t thirteen. I had nothing but Val…my best friend, who’d come back to me after al this time. A rust-spotted sedan drove past the entrance of the parking lot. Without speaking, Val and I climbed into the Jaguar, Val behind the wheel, me beside her. The car started up with a purr and spat chunks of gravel in its wake as Val steered for the road.

“Where?” she asked as she accelerated, heading toward the highway, which could lead us back home or…wel , anywhere, real y. “Which one should we fuck up first?”

For some reason, the name that popped into my mind didn’t belong to one of my classmates. Instead, I remembered the guidance counselor, one of the grown-ups, one of the people who should have been keeping me safe. Her name was Carol Demmick, and she’d kept a cruet of vinegar on her desk to sprinkle over the cut-up carrots she snacked on. The kids cal ed her Summer’s Eve, or Douche for short (I assumed she didn’t know this). She’d cal ed me into her office once in the spring of senior year, invited me to have a seat, asked me about my plans after graduation, and then asked me, gently, how my senior year had been going. It had been so long since someone at that school had looked at me with kindness, had spoken to me with anything besides indifference or contempt, that I told her.

“Terrible,” I choked. The details came spil ing out of my mouth: the kids who tripped me and shoved me, and knocked over my lunch, the graffiti on the wal s of every bathroom, how even the teachers seemed to hate me, to treat me like I had some horrible disease that might be catching. The guidance counselor had looked at me for a long minute, her big, buggy gray eyes magnified behind the green plastic frames of glasses someone had probably told her were “hip” and “cool.”

“Addie,” she said in her too-sweet voice, her double chins quivering gently as she studied me. “I don’t mean to be unkind, but maybe, over the summer, you might think about a diet.”

I’d stared at her, stone-faced. Did she think I’d never considered a diet before? That the possibility had never occurred to me? That I was not, in fact, on a diet right now, the same one I’d been on for the past six months and stuck to rigorously until nine o’clock every night?

And who was she to talk to me about my weight? She was a fattie, too! “You know what they say,” she continued, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression! And inside of every fat person there’s a thin person dying to get out!”

I bent down and snatched my backpack off the floor. What kind of first impression did she think she was making, with her calendar of kittens thumbtacked to the wal ( Hang in there! read the legend beneath the little white kitty clinging to a branch) and her dyed-blond Mamie Eisenhower bob that had remained unchanged in al the years she’d been at Pleasant Ridge High? “I’ve got math,” I said.

Ms. Demmick’s plump face softened.

“Addie. I can see I’ve hurt your feelings. That wasn’t my intention. I only…”

… wanted to help, I fil ed in as I walked into the crowded hal and let her door slam shut behind me. Sure. They al just wanted to help: the doctor, my mother, those boys who fol owed me down the hal s, oinking—just trying to help! The girls I’d overheard in the bathroom— I mean, she’s got to weigh, like,

two hundred pounds! That’s almost two of

me! giggle, giggle—just offering their assistance! The world was just bursting with Good Samaritans, al of them dying to help out poor fat Addie Downs.

“Addie?” Val said from the driver’s seat. I pul ed myself back to the present, to the heated seats of the Jaguar, to my old best friend sitting beside me. “Who’d Dan come with?” I asked.

“Chip Mason,” she answered.

“First we’l check around the country club. Maybe he’s on the side of the road. Then we’l go to Chip’s.”

“Can we stop for doughnuts first?” She looked at me, wide-eyed and hopeful. I bit back another gust of laughter. Vehicular manslaughter, then baked goods. Sure thing! Why not? It sounded like fun, and I hadn’t had any of that in a very long time.

TWELVE

“This can’t be right,” I said, peering through the window at the numbers on the houses as Valerie slowed the car to a crawl. She squinted down at the class directory, open on her lap, then out at the dark street in the town of Aurora, a suburb forty-five minutes west of Pleasant Ridge. “Threeninety-six Larchmont. This is it.”

“But it’s…” Val’s headlights washed over the white sign stuck in the lawn in front of the two-story clapboard building. FIRST

PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH: THANKS AND

GIVING, SERVICES SUNDAY MORNING, IO

A.M., CHILD CARE AVAILABLE. “It’s a church.”

She cut the motor and unbuckled her seat belt. “Maybe it’s been converted into condos.”

I got out of the car and looked at the building, then studied the sign’s smal print, which ad-vertised AA meetings Wednesday mornings at ten and read, at the very bottom, CHARLES

MASON, PASTOR. “Val,” I said. “When you were talking to Chip Mason at the reunion, did you happen to notice a black shirt and a white col ar? Priestly garments? Rosary beads? A big wooden cross?” My father was Jewish but not observant, my mother had grown up Lutheran, and Jon and I had been raised as nothing in particular—we’d light a menorah in December and bring in a tree that we’d decorate, and there would be dyed eggs and chocolate rabbits in the springtime, without much in the way of explanation about what any of it meant—so I was a little bit vague on how you could recognize a churchgoing (or church-running) man. Val made a face. “Oh, I’m sorry. Was I supposed to go to my high school reunion and listen to other people talk about themselves?”

“I guess not.”

“Bunch of breeders passing around pictures of their kids,” she grumbled, helping herself to a crul er from the wax-paper bag ful of doughnuts we’d bought. “Like anybody cares.” She took a big bite. “Like al babies don’t look just like Ed Asner.”

“Not the black ones,” I pointed out.

“Funny,” said Val, who knew as wel as I did that of our class of 280 or so, fewer than a dozen had been black, bused in from Chicago as part of a program to give them more academic opportunities, then bused back home before they had a chance to join any teams or make any friends. The chance that one of them had felt connected enough to the class to actual y show up at a reunion was slim.

I pried the Class of ’92 guide out of Valerie’s hands and found his name in the directory.

“Reverend Charles Mason,” I read.

“Reverend. As in, God.”

Val frowned. “Huh. Now that you mention it, he was talking about working on his service. I figured he just meant tennis or something.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. Together, we walked up the flagstone path that led from the street to the church and climbed the halfdozen steps to the front door. Val cupped her hands around the pane of glass and peered through the window. “Pews,” she reported. “Big cross up front.”

She took a step sideways to the next windowpane. “Um. Sign says Christmas organ concert on the seventeenth, but I don’t see anybody there…”

“Excuse me!”

Val turned around. “Duck!” she hissed. I hopped off the stairs and crouched in the shadow beside, invisible as I’d wished to be back in high school, as a man in striped pajamas and a bathrobe—the elusive and now holier-than-us Chip Mason, I presumed

—came from behind the church. His hair was thinning, his bel y strained the waistband of his pajama bottoms, and he looked weary…although, in his defense, it was very late. “What are you doing here?”

he demanded, then looked more closely.

“Valerie?”

Val raised her hand and managed a weak wave. “Hi, Chip.” She lifted the wax-paper bag.

“Want a doughnut?”

“Is everything al right?” he asked, now sounding more puzzled than angry.

“I…came…for…”

Oh, shit, I thought, and leaned forward, ready to spring out of the shadows and defend us…or run.

“Salvation!” Val continued. “Just lately I’ve been…you know…thinking about God and stuff.”

God and stuff. Kil me now. But Chip Mason actual y seemed to be buying it as Val came tripping down the steps and onto the frost-crinkly lawn. “There are things in my life…things I’ve done that I’m not proud of.” She stood close to him as she looked down, head bowed, then up, tossing her hair and angling her body even closer to Chip’s paunch. “And it’s been years and years since my last confession.”

Chip frowned. “You know this isn’t a Catholic church.”

“Oh, of course.” She gave a shril little giggle. “Of course not. But I just thought, you know, with someone who knew me…

and knew God…it’d be, like, a setup! Blind dates are always better when there’s someone who knows both people.”

“Maybe we could talk about this on Sunday,” he said. “Come to services. I’d be happy to speak with you after.”

“Okay, but…wel , it’s just that there’s something that’s real y been on my mind. I had…I guess you’d cal it an epiphany last night.” She led Chip to the car, and when they were directly beneath the streetlamp, she turned her head and mouthed the words Find Dan.

Great. I waited until she’d unlocked the car and somehow sweet-talked Chip Mason into the

passenger’s

seat,

where,

presumably, they could arrange her night out with the Almighty. Then I bent over and hustled along the side of the building. The church was two stories, and behind it was a one-story brick addition that looked like living quarters—I could see a light through one of the windows, a stove with a kettle on it, a vase of red carnations on a cluttered kitchen table. I peeked through the window. No sign of Dan. Breathing deeply, I walked to the door of the rectory, or the parsonage, or whatever believers cal ed the place where the priest lived. The door was closed but unlocked.