Best Friends Forever

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Why’d you tell her not to come to your meet?”

  Jon kicked his bare legs out in front of him, then lifted them straight into the air—some kind of runners’ stretch, I thought. “I just said she doesn’t need to come. She can come if she wants to. I never said she couldn’t.”

  “Can’t you just be nice to her?”

  Jon set down the book, picked up his Magic 8-Ball and revolved it in his hands.

  “I know she’s… you know… kind of big.”

  “Kind of big,” he repeated, with his lips tight and nostrils flaring in a way that let me know he was furious. “Sure. And the sun’s kind of hot. And the ocean’s kind of deep. Do you know what the rest of the guys say about her?”

  I shook my head. “What do you care?”

  “You don’t know,” he said. “You’re not on a team. You don’t have to deal with it.”

  “Why don’t you just tell them to shut up?”

  “Addie.” He spoke with exaggerated patience. “Those guys are seniors.”

  “So what? You’re faster than they are. Tell them to shut up. I bet they’d listen.”

  He shook his head and didn’t answer.

  “What about Dad?”

  He looked at me blandly. “What about him?”

  “Maybe if he came to the meets with her…” But Jon was shaking his head before I’d finished my thought.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “That’d be great. Just have him show up at three in the afternoon in the middle of the week, so that everyone would know he doesn’t have a real job.”

  I swallowed. A father without a real job would not cancel out a fat mother. It would only make it worse.

  “No offense, but you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jon said. “And I’ve got to finish this.” He turned away from me, opening his book. After a minute, I threaded my way through the rubble and out into the hall.

  • • •

  That night I lay awake long after I’d heard my mother’s slow tread up the stairs, long after the line of light underneath Jon’s bedroom door went dark. Other families weren’t like this. What was wrong with the four of us? Why were we so different?

  Why do you care? I heard Val asking in my head. What does it matter? Her family wasn’t normal, and she didn’t care at all… but her mother was beautiful, and somehow, I thought that having a father who was divorced was easier than having one who was home but didn’t behave like the rest of the dads. It mattered to me that we didn’t look right, that we weren’t like everyone else, that Jon could pass for normal by pushing us away… and that maybe I’d never be able to do the same thing.

  I lay there, watching the glowing numbers on my digital clock, until it was after one in the morning. Then I slipped out of bed and tiptoed down the hallway, down the stairs, to the door that led to the basement. Barely breathing, I leaned against it, pressing my ear to the grain of the wood. I could hear my father snoring. I stood there, listening for a long moment before creeping into the kitchen. My mother had given me three Oreo cookies for dessert, and the bag on the top shelf of the pantry was still almost full. I slipped six cookies into my hand and carried them up to my bedroom, where I lay in my bed and inserted an entire cookie into my mouth, underneath a David Hockney poster I’d bought at an art fair that summer—the blue of the swimming pool, the way the light moved through the water, had enchanted me. I held the cookie against my tongue until it dissolved into a slick of grainy black mush. One cookie, two cookies, three cookies, six cookies. When they were gone, I licked my teeth clean and closed my eyes and finally fell asleep.

  • • •

  “Why do you think Jon’s such a jerk?” I asked Valerie the next morning while we waited for the bus.

  “I don’t think he’s a jerk. I think he’s cute,” said Val. It was a week away from Halloween, but it was cold already, in the forties some mornings, with an icy bite to the air. Val wore stiff blue jeans rolled into clumsy cuffs at the ankle and a too-big purple sweater. She was already taller than all of the girls and most of the boys in eighth grade, skinny and flat-chested, with sharp elbows and knobby knees that she kept hidden under layers of T-shirts and turtlenecks and sweatshirts, and, inevitably, boys’ jeans. Her teeth weren’t good. There was a space between her protruding front teeth big enough to hold a quarter, and her incisors pointed in different directions. “Valerie’s got summer teeth,” Jon had once said. “You know, some are here, some are there.”

  The thing was, Val didn’t seem to know that she was weird-looking… or if she knew, she didn’t care. Each year, she’d try out for Select Choir, even though she couldn’t really sing in tune (although she was, in her defense, both enthusiastic and loud). In June she would audition for the leads in the summer music theater. She’d rehearse her song and her monologue for weeks, and still end up being cast as a glorified extra—a non-singing urchin in Annie, a nun with no lines in The Sound of Music, a tree in Peter Pan—after the kids who could sing got roles as pirates and Indians and Lost Boys. None of the rejections and refusals dented her confidence. She’d use Elmer’s glue to attach felt leaves to her green leotard, or pose in front of the mirror in her wimple as if she was the star of the show, as if everyone was there to see her.

  “Did Jon do something?” she asked, and flipped open the social studies book (Exploring Our World) that she had in her lap. “Did he do something to you?” Before I could answer, she said, “Did you finish the worksheet?”

  I handed it over. Val was smart—at least that’s what the results on the standardized tests we’d taken in fifth grade had indicated—but she had an attitude toward homework, and studying for quizzes and tests, that could best be described as haphazard. “He told my mom not to come to his cross-country meets. He’s…” This part was hard to say. “He’s ashamed of her.”

  Val pursed her lips, absorbing this. “Maybe she could go on a diet.”

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled.

  “My mom does a good one,” Val said. Her eyes were still on the worksheet as she copied my answers. “You eat a hard-boiled egg for breakfast, then an egg and half a grapefruit for lunch, and then you have salad for dinner, with a can of tuna fish and lemon juice instead of salad dressing. That’s what my mom does every New Year’s. She does it for, like, a week.” She wrinkled her nose. “It makes her really gassy. But it works.”

  “I’m not sure,” I muttered. Even though I knew by then that the world disagreed, I still clung to the idea that my mother was beautiful, a cloud come to life, and that everyone else had it wrong.

  “Or how about Deal-A-Meal?” Val asked as the school bus came groaning around the corner. “You know, with the Sweatin’ to the Oldies guy? I saw an infomercial for it. You get a videotape and cards to tell you what to eat for lunch or dinner.”

  “Maybe.” The bus ground to a stop in front of us. Val handed me my homework and bent down for her backpack. We climbed aboard and took our regular seats, three rows back on the left-hand side, and that was the end of the conversation until that afternoon, when I came home from Girl Scouts and found Val sitting before our front door.

  “I bet Jon’s having wet dreams,” she announced as we walked to the convenience store. Val didn’t have a brother, but she seemed somehow to know a lot more about boys than I did. Most of what I knew came from a book my mother had given me when I’d turned twelve. It was called What’s Happening to Me?, and it had provided me and Valerie with hours of amusement. There were cartoon drawings of a girl with breasts and a curly thatch of pubic hair, and an index in the back where you could look up “penis” and “ejaculate” and “masturbation” and “nocturnal emission,” as Val had done the instant the book was in her hands.

  “Gross.” Ever since I’d learned about wet dreams, I’d felt a mixture of queasiness and pity whenever I’d thought of them in conjunction with my brother. How awful it must be to have everything on the outside, hanging there so obvious, to have body parts getting bigger or harder or squirting stuff
on your sheets without your having any say over them.

  “Does he have a girlfriend?” asked Val. She put two cans of Diet Coke and a bag of potato chips on the counter, and I dug three dollars out of my pocket, shaking my head, even though I wasn’t really sure. At fifteen, Jon already had a life that was all his own, and I could only guess as to what that life included.

  “I’ll bet he’s got a girlfriend,” Val mused, cracking open her can.

  “Do you think…” I said. Then I stopped. I knew what I wanted to ask—do you think my family’s weird?—but I couldn’t figure out how to ask it.

  “We should be cheerleaders for Halloween,” she said. “We can wear white sweaters and get skirts at JCPenney and buy pom-poms.” For a minute we walked along in silence, past the Sheas’ house at the corner, the Buccis and the Hattons, as I tried to figure out a way to ask Val what I really needed to know: What’s wrong with us? What’s wrong with me?

  “Or we could be Barbies,” Val said. “Or witches. Whatever you want.”

  • • •

  We ended up going as witches, because we couldn’t find pom-poms at the costume shop, but they had an abundance of pointy black hats, along with green face paint and black-and-white striped tights that we wore under our black choir robes. “I’m melting!” Val screeched as I pretended to throw a bucket of water on her and my mother snapped pictures. “Oh, what a world!”

  Jon wasn’t trick-or-treating. “It’s for kids,” he’d said, coming downstairs in his jeans and team sweatshirt. A station wagon zoomed down our street, swung into our driveway, and slammed to a halt with its front bumper inches from the garage door. My mother frowned. She’d put her own witch hat on her head and wore bright-red lipstick and high-heeled red shoes.

  “Gotta go,” said Jon. He was going to a party at one of his teammates’ houses. He’d promised my mother that there would be parents there, and no drinking. He’d even given her the phone number, muttering under his breath that she had to stop treating him like a baby. But then, on his way out the door, he surprised me by digging in his pockets and coming out with two Hershey’s Kisses. “Here,” he said, dropping one in my pillowcase and one in Val’s. “To get you started.”

  “Be home by midnight!” my mother called.

  “I will,” Jon said. He hurried out the door and into the waiting car, which revved its motor and zoomed down the driveway.

  Val and I went out into the chilly darkness. We spent an hour trick-or-treating, moving through the neighborhood with throngs of little kids dressed as princesses and pirates and ghosts, shivering under our choir robes, because, in spite of my mother’s urging, we’d both refused to wear our winter coats. “Maybe we are too old for this,” Val said, swinging her sack of candy over her shoulder and pulling off her witch hat.

  “Maybe. Probably,” I said. More than one of the grown-ups who’d answered our knock had made that point. “This is the last year I’ll be giving you two treats,” Mrs. Bass had announced before winking and dropping a handful of miniature candy bars into our bags. I was shivering, and my fingers were numb, and I thought that if I never went trick-or-treating again it would be okay.

  Val grinned at me, her crooked teeth glowing against her green skin. “Poltergeist is on tonight. Remember that part where the meat was, like, crawling along the counter?”

  “Ew,” I said, recalling the scene. Val hated blood in real life, but she loved scary movies, especially the ones where, she swore, she could catch a glimpse of her father getting shot or stabbed or jumping out of a window on fire.

  “Ask if you can sleep over, okay?”

  I found my parents sitting in the darkened living room. My mom had a plastic salad bowl of candy in her lap, and my father was watching a rerun of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In on TV, with a mug of tea in his hand. “Can I sleep at Valerie’s?”

  “As long as you two don’t stay up too late,” said my mother. For a minute, I thought about not going. I could change out of my costume and sit with my parents, hand out candy when kids rang the doorbell—but Val and Poltergeist were waiting. I packed pajamas and a toothbrush and went across the street, where Val had taken off her robe and was in her sweatpants popping popcorn, with her face still painted. I wished for my pastels so I could sketch a quick picture of her, standing at the stove with her green face and her witch hat perched on top of her blond hair.

  “You look like you have food poisoning.”

  She grabbed a wad of paper towels and started wiping her cheeks. “Here. Melt this,” she said, tossing me a stick of margarine, which I unwrapped and put in a plastic bowl. I stuck the bowl in the microwave as Valerie dumped popcorn into a pan on the stove and shook it briskly until the first kernels exploded. We ate popcorn and divided up our Halloween haul, first by size, then by type, then by order in which we’d be eating it. I traded my SweeTarts for M&M’s, and we both agreed that Junior Mints were the worst candy ever. We made it until the part where the meat crawled across the counter, then burst open with maggots (“I’m sorry, but that is so cool!” Val chortled while I looked away from the screen with my stomach roiling), and then we fell asleep, bundled in blankets on the floor.

  • • •

  “Honey?” Mrs. Adler’s cigarette-and-Breck smell was in my nose; her voice was in my ear. “Addie? Are you awake?” For a minute I thought I was in the car, on our way home from the ocean. Goodnight to the front! Goodnight to the back!

  I opened my eyes. It was still morning, but very early, the sky gray, just touched with pearly light. Through the window, I saw that there was a police car in front of my house. Its flashing light painted our walls red and blue, red and blue.

  “Addie,” said Mrs. Adler. “Honey. Wake up. There’s been an accident.”

  I sat up. Beside me, Val rolled onto her side, her blond hair bright against the DiMeos’ dark old carpet. “What happened?”

  “Your brother was in a car accident. Your dad just called to let me know.”

  I got to my feet and walked to the window. The front door to my house was open, and I could see my mother in her bathrobe, standing in the doorway with both hands pressed to her chest. A police officer in a blue uniform shirt and black pants was talking to her. As I watched, he took her by the arm and led her out of the house to the cruiser.

  “I should go.” I started looking around for my shoes.

  Mrs. Adler shook her head. “Your dad said for you to stay here. They’ll call as soon as they know anything.”

  Outside, the cruiser backed down the driveway. My father ran out of the house, his pajama top so white it seemed to glow under the gray sky. He climbed into our station wagon and followed the cruiser down the street.

  Mrs. Adler put her hand on my shoulder. “Try not to worry,” she said. “I’m sure everything will be okay.”

  I climbed on the couch and sat with my face turned toward the window and my eyes trained on my front door until the sun came up and the paperboy made his way down our street, his bicycle wobbling in front of each house as he slowed to throw a paper toward the door.

  “Hey,” said Val. I turned, and she was blinking up at me from the floor. “What’s going on? Did someone TP the house?”

  My tongue felt thick. “Jon was in an accident. My parents went to the hospital.”

  “Oh my God!” Val sprang to her feet and came to sit on the couch beside me. “What happened?”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t look at her. I had to look at the house. Maybe it was a test, and if I kept watching, if I didn’t blink, if I didn’t miss anything, then maybe this would be all right. Val sat next to me, and I stared at our house, fixing it in my head, turning it into a still life. My father had painted the exterior a creamy brown that August. I’d helped him, hoisting cans of paint, bringing him glasses of lemonade, holding the ladder when he climbed down.

  I watched the house, the shutters, the brass knocker on the front door, the two elm trees in the front yard, trying not to cry, barely moving, barely breathing, until late t
hat afternoon, when my parents pulled into the driveway and my mother and father crossed the street to get me.

  • • •

  “Your brother…” my mother said. Her face was pale and puffy, and her hair stuck out from her head in staticky clumps. Tissues were balled up in one of her hands; the other was curled in a fist on her knee.

  “It was stupid,” my father said, and rubbed the back of his hand against his red eyes. “Jon should have known better.”

  “What happened?”

  What happened, as the whole town would eventually learn, was that there’d been three boys from the cross-country team in the car: two in front, and Jon in back. The boys weren’t drunk—not legally—but they’d been drinking, and they were speeding, doing ninety miles an hour on an infamously twisty road, trying to get home in time for curfew. The boy behind the wheel had lost control of the car, which had slammed into a tree and rolled over. The driver and the boy in the passenger’s seat hadn’t been wearing their seat belts. They’d both died (and, the rumor that was all over school by Monday morning had it, one of them had been decapitated). Jon, who’d worn his seat belt, had sustained cuts, bruises, contusions, cracked ribs, and a concussion. And brain damage. “They don’t know how much yet,” my mother said, twisting a tissue in her hand. “They can’t say how bad.”

  “But he’ll be okay? He’ll get better?” I looked from my mother’s face to my father’s, waiting for reassurance, for a verse of “don’t worry, Addie,” and a chorus of “everything will be fine.” Instead, my mother gulped back a sob and turned her face toward the window. My father rubbed his jaw.

  “Is Jon going to be okay?” I asked again.

  Neither one of them answered me. That was how I knew. Jon wouldn’t be okay. He wouldn’t get better. The brother I’d known, the one I’d loved and resented and envied, the one who’d talked to bus drivers and store clerks and strangers on my behalf, that swift, sure boy was gone. What came home from the rehab center twelve weeks later was a pale, pudgy, moon-faced Jon-shaped lump with seizures and an unsteady gait and faulty depth perception, a Jon-shaped lump that sat in front of the television set, or at the dinner table, staring incuriously at whatever was on the plate or screen in front of him, sometimes with a finger in his nose, sometimes, especially in the first few months, with his hand down the front of his pants. Disinhibition, said my mother, as if giving me the technical term would make it better. It will pass.