The Anything Friend

by Michela DiMarco

CHAPTER 23

  “From the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web... we must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.” Pablo Picasso

 

  Elizabeth heard her cell phone vibrating on the nightstand next to her. It had been vibrating off and on for almost an hour. Her head was safely buried in her mold with the comforter over it in a poor attempt to drown out the constant buzzing. She was ignoring her phone because if she picked it up she would be tempted to see who was calling or texting her or an unfortunate combination of both, and the last person she wanted to talk to was Bob. She heard the faint knock at her bedroom door.

  “I’m up, I’m up,” she shouted, her head buried into the pillow top mattress below.

  “Elizabeth,” her father called opening the door, “you have a friend downstairs.”

  “Tell him I’m sleeping.”

  “No, he’s a she,” he answered.

  Elizabeth looked up. “Who is it?” she asked confused. Random people never stopped by her house.

  “I’ve never seen her before. Ah, skinny, blond hair…”

 

  “Oh, no,” she moaned thinking back to the previous night’s fight between Jack and Jamie. “Tell her I’m sleeping. Please dad, I can’t talk to her.”

  “Okay,” he said agreeably at first, “but your mom already told her you were sleeping and I had to wake you so if I come back down and you’re still sleeping, she’ll wake you up and we’ll both suffer the consequences. I would just recommend waking up, going downstairs, and getting rid of her.”

  As soon as Elizabeth tossed the comforter off the bed, the cold air hit her like an arctic blast. “Why is it so cold out?” she mumbled.

  “Why is your window open?” questioned the electricity police. “Do you know how much it costs to heat the house in January?”

  “Take it out of my allowance,” dared Elizabeth walking past her dad in her purple fleece pants and matching long-sleeved waffle shirt.

  “You don’t get an allowance,” he said confused following close behind her.

  “That’s the whole point,” she said. “If I did have an allowance it would be your money anyway, so please stop complaining.” Elizabeth bounded down the stairs only to find Jamie nowhere in sight. She heard a giggle coming from the kitchen. “Come on,” she said out loud encouraging her to find her enemy. Her bare feet hit the cedar floor hard as she walked towards the kitchen, annoyed and ready to send Jamie home. She walked in to see Jamie and her mother laughing at the kitchen table, drinking tea. Jamie was drinking out of her favorite coffee mug, a red hibiscus mug that she had gotten in Hawaii, years ago. “Ahem,” she cleared her throat, rudely, approaching the table.

 

  “Morning Elizabeth,” Jamie said, her once gorgeous blue eyes looking tired and swollen. “Can we talk privately?”

  Elizabeth wondered how many hours Jamie had spent crying on New Year’s Eve to look that bad. Maybe Elizabeth had not wanted to talk to Bob, but that didn’t mean she had to take the opportunity away from Jamie to talk to Jack. Suddenly, feeling guilty, Elizabeth took a deep breath and willed herself to invite Jamie up to her bedroom by nodding.

  “Thank you for the tea Mrs. Benson,” she said as Elizabeth watched Jamie Johnson hug her mother. “You have a very lovely home.”

  “Come on,” said Elizabeth disgusted that in ten minutes her mother could love a stranger more than she loved her own daughter. Jamie followed Elizabeth upstairs and walked around the room looking at everything while Elizabeth sat down on her bed, propped up against the headboard. She glanced at the clock. It was later than she originally thought. She needed to shower, get dressed, and eat before she went over to Jack’s to watch college bowl games. Her cell phone vibrated on the nightstand again suddenly causing her to be irritated again. “Look, I have plans, so could you maybe tell me what this is about, quickly?”

  “When did you get so confident?” Jamie asked setting one of the golf trophies that she was holding back on the shelf.

  “Since you showed up at my house and became friends with my mother,” she answered.

  “And, your boldness last night? Or was that just a fluke?”

  “I don’t know what is going on between you and Jack, okay?” huffed Elizabeth. “All I know is that you were grinding up against my boyfriend, I mean ex-boyfriend, like he was the only one you were into and then you were all mad at Jack when he never did anything.”

  Jamie laughed smugly. “You really think Jack is so innocent. That’s so cute. Seriously, Elizabeth, you have to stop living a dream. Jack is really a jerk. So is your boyfriend. My friends do things a certain way that your kind just won’t ever understand. Jack only talks to you because he feels bad for you.”

  “That’s not true,” Elizabeth defended. Jamie had nerve!

  “Your naïve-ness is pathetic. He doesn’t even care about you, at all. You’re a charity case to him, just something to make him feel better. Why do you think he’s ignored you all these years? You were nothing to him, ever.”

  “Neither were you,” she said standing up. She could feel every red blood cell rushing to her face as though she were hanging upside down. She glanced to the right, looking out the window to Jack’s room.

  “When you were nothing to him, I was the one sleeping in his bed,” taunted Jamie. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you Ms. Prude?”

  Elizabeth raised her voice and pointed to the door. “Leave!”

  “Fine,” said Jamie. She looked at the window. “Is that where you guys talk?”

  “What?”

  Jamie slowly took a few steps until she was at the window. She put her hand on the screen and sniffled. “That’s his room, isn’t it?”

  “Yep,” answered Elizabeth annoyed. “Are you done yet?”

  “You’re so lucky.”

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes. Jamie was talking all over the place. She started off insulting Elizabeth, making up lies, and now she was suddenly feeling sorry for herself? “Is that because I’m living a dream or because I’m pathetic and naïve?”

  “You get to like talk to him whenever you want. He opens up to you. You have like real conversations. Nobody else really gets that with him. He used to tell me all the time that my business was none of his concern and his business was none of my concern. I tried so hard but he kept me at a distance all of the time, never really letting me in. With my beauty, my body, my popularity combined with whatever he sees in you that makes him trust you, we would make the perfect girl that Jack Bennett would love. I guess we’ll both have to settle for second place.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “We can’t swap parts like Barbie dolls and…and I don’t need first place or even second place. I’m his friend. Friendship doesn’t need a place or a title and it can’t be fully defined in the dictionary. It’s unique to the people in the friendship.”

  Jamie looked out the window again and pulled her curly blond hair off the back of her grey Yale sweatshirt before piling it on the top of her head. Elizabeth admired how perfect her hair looked, even when Jamie wasn’t trying to impress anyone. “I’m sorry about what you saw or heard happen with me and Bob. You should know that we just danced, nothing else happened. I shouldn’t have done it but we were both drunk and we were crazy mad and I guess crazy jealous. You have no idea how hard people have tried to get Jack to open up to them and suddenly after all this time, he just starts talking to you. No offense, you’re cute and all, but you’re not really popular. You go against everything we stand for. Then you start dating Bob, Nick starts dating your friend, and Liam is suddenly interested in your other friend. If this is the way it is, then popular kids can date losers and suddenly I’ll be at the bottom of the chain.”

  “Is the bottom so bad?”

  “Yes…you know it is,
just like you don’t want to be popular. I didn’t work this hard to scrape the bottom of the barrel. I can’t let that happen.” Jamie faced Elizabeth. “I’m not gonna let that happen. I’m going to get Jack back. You’re not gonna take him from me.”

  “You can have him,” said Elizabeth shrugging her shoulders. “I’m not into him. He’s not into me. We’re just friends. Quit stressing over it.”

  “Sure you are,” declared Jamie making her way to the closed door. She walked into the hall and stuck her head back in the room. “When you decide to admit the truth, you’ll learn you’re not good enough for him. He won’t ever like you as more than his neighbor, some plain, green eyed girl that he grew up next to and never talked to until a year before college. In a year or two, you’ll stop talking completely. In five years, he won’t even know where you live. In ten years, he will have forgotten your name. But me…I’ll always be in his life. That’s how the universe set it up. You’re just a lost star that will have to go back to her solar system eventually.”

  “Bitch!” shouted Elizabeth after her, sinking to the floor. Tears began flowing freely. She felt like a complete outsider in her own life. Her phone vibrated again. “Enough!” she screamed. She

  got up to see who was trying to get a hold of here. To her dislike, there were eighteen text messages and thirteen missed calls from Bob. Elizabeth tossed her cell phone onto the frigid asphalt driveway below. The purple BlackBerry landed on the clear rubber cover and bounced onto the grass. “Crap!” she shouted.

  “Stop making all the noise.” Jack suddenly appeared at his window holding his head. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to destroy my cell phone.”

  “Bob?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied somber. “I don’t have anything to say to him.”

  “Next time you want to shout and throw things out the window when I’m asleep, close your window or wait until I’m up.” Elizabeth sighed. Jack could turn anything serious into something funny when he wanted to. “Are you coming over soon?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be over in an hour,” she hesitated. What if Jamie was right?

  “Good. We’re starting the new year off well, with good friends.”