Bad Best Friend

by Rachel Vail

  Mom likes ours to look perfect too, but it’s a different kind of perfect. The throw pillows on the couch always have to be diagonal, points up. She’s very particular about those throw pillows, keeping them nice. When people are coming over, Mom dashes around cleaning in a frenzy, shoving things into closets and drawers. You don’t leave your dirty laundry out for people to see, she says. Even though it’s not laundry; it’s newspapers and toys and art supplies and, sure, I mean, what Mom calls my sock brioches, which are just my bunched-up socks when I take them off and forget them in the living room. Mom hates that, because what if people stop over? What if people see sock brioches? The horror!

  I knocked on Ava’s door.

  “Yeah?”

  I opened it. Ava was staring at her wall, her hands on her hips, looking like a miniature version of her mom.

  She barely glanced at me, so I went into her room and stood next to her, also looking at the wall.

  There were messy rectangles of white paint on her pale rose wall. Three rectangles in a row, then three more beneath them.

  “I don’t want a white that’s too yellow, but I don’t want it too bluish, either,” Ava said, pretending to be super serious.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That would suck.”

  She sighed. I sighed too. One of the things I love about Ava is how completely she commits to anything she does. Another is that it always feels like we’re in the middle of a private joke together.

  “What do you think?” she asked me.

  I shrugged slightly. “They all look like . . . white.”

  “Yeah.” She scowled at the stripes, then lunged forward with the paintbrush in her hand and made a big slash. White. I tried to match it to one of the rectangles.

  She stepped back to where I was and made a mock-serious face. Like a perfect imitation of Samantha, I realized. Ava is deadly good at imitations.

  “Mmm,” I said, standing next to her in the same mock-serious pose, as if we were two art critics, or two Samanthas. Tilting our heads, squinting, assessing. Staring at splotches of nearly identical white paint on her walls. “They’re all white, but . . .”

  “There are degrees of white.” She is such a good mimic, she sounded exactly like her mother. Who last year painted their kitchen pale blue, on a whim. My mom would freak completely out if I ever banged a nail into my wall, or taped up a poster. I honestly can’t picture how Mom would react if I painted slashes of white on my bedroom wall.

  “The just-right degree of whiteness,” Ava said. “It’s . . . elusive.”

  “Exactly.” I smiled. She’s so savagely funny. This is why it’s impossible for me to ever stay mad at her, or one of the reasons. She’s more fun, in all her edgy, subtle ways, than anyone. “How many degrees of white are we looking for, is the real question?”

  “Pure white,” she said.

  “Perfect whiteness,” I joked back.

  “Racist,” she said.

  She mockingly calls me a racist whenever I say anything about the color of anything. It always makes me a little stressed, because, I mean, racism. But she’s just kidding. It’s important to be able to take a joke.

  “Maybe I am?” I said, mock horrified. “Am I racist? How awful. Yikes. All whites look basically the same to me.” She didn’t respond, so I added, “They all just look white to me, honestly.”

  Her bottom teeth jutted out in front of the top ones as she looked down, fists on her hips, paintbrush dripping off-white paint onto the tarp. Actually mad at me?

  “‘They all just look white to me,’” she imitated.

  “They . . .” I looked at the paint stripes. “Sorry. They do! Do they look, does any one of these white blotches look better than any other?”

  “Blotches?” she asked.

  “Samples. Rectangles. Honestly! You were kidding, right? Am I color-blind or are they all basically white? Is all I am saying!”

  “No,” Ava said. “What you’re saying is that I’m basic.”

  “I’m so not.”

  “I’m superficial, wanting to choose the best paint color. My family is superficial. As if you and your mom are so intellectual and cultured and above things like paint.”

  “I think I’m above paint?” I tried.

  “That? Right there? That is exactly what I mean,” she said. “Fine, don’t help me then. What are you even doing here?”

  I pointed to one of the white stripes, the one closest to the hue of the extra slash of white. “This one,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “Hundred percent,” I said.

  “The others are too yellow, right? And this one’s too blue?”

  “Yup,” I agreed. My fingers were all prickly.

  “That’s what I was thinking, the one I keep coming back to.”

  “That’s a good sign,” I said. “That’s the one.”

  She smiled. Thousand watts, dimples deep. “Hundred percent,” she repeated.

  “I think I’m better than paint?” I asked her.

  “I think you’re better than paint,” she said. “I do, honestly. Want a snack?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She dropped the paintbrush into a can. “I have to pee. Wait on my bed. Why are your nails so dirty?”

  I shrugged.

  “Gross,” she said. “Don’t touch anything.”

  “I never do,” I said.

  I sat down on the edge with my hands clutched together while she went across her room to her bathroom and closed the door behind her. I looked around this room I knew almost as well as my own. Something was wrong, though. Not just the paint splotches. What?

  Oh yikes: all her books were turned backward on the shelves so you could only see the pages, not the spines. How creepy. It felt as off and unfamiliar as the first time I visited her room.

  Ava’s family moved here the summer before we started third grade. My mom was the agent who sold them the house. It was the first oceanfront Mom ever sold.

  Mom and Samantha hit it off right away, especially when Samantha found out my mom had a kid the same age as her daughter, Ava. My mom said we had to be neighborly, and go over to welcome them. She told me to put my other sandals on, the ones I normally only wore with a dress, even though I was just in shorts and a T-shirt.

  It was a pretty day, and not that far, she said, so she decided even though I already had the back door of the car open that we should walk over. I closed the car door. Their house was around the corner and down the hill, where the big waterfront houses are, behind the rows of tall spruces. Ten-minute walk, fifteen if you dawdle like I always did at that point, and especially that day, going to meet some girl I didn’t know.

  They had two fancy cars out front: one huge, one tiny with no top. Both super clean, no dents or dirt, I remember noticing. Their front door was wide open, no screen or anything. “Come in, come in!” Samantha yelled happily from somewhere inside. “Step around the mess!”

  When we got into the huge entry hall, Sam was up on the balcony above us, looking down and waving enthusiastically. Ava was behind her, silent, frowning.

  It was hate at first sight.

  Ava trotted down the stairs behind her mother, both of them barefoot. She was wearing a one-piece green-and-white shorts thing with spaghetti straps, and her long wavy strawberry-blonde hair hung loose around her freckled, pouty face. I had too-long bangs and a too-tight ponytail, both of which suddenly felt ugly and babyish, and my fancy sandals, overdressed for my baggy shorts and dingy T-shirt, wrong, blistering my pinky toes.

  The moms went out to the patio to look at the ocean crashing down the slope from their long back lawn. I heard Mom sighing as the door closed behind them. Mom loves the sight and sound and smell of the ocean so much. Her high school boyfriend, Jerome, who died, had a waterfront house. Our house is the kind Mom calls “plenty of charm.�
�� Meaning: small, and kind of falling apart.

  “Can you do cartwheels?” Ava had asked me. She hadn’t even said hello.

  “No,” I said.

  “Maybe I’ll teach you,” she said, and did a perfect cartwheel, right there in the entry hall, empty but for the boxes. Not even a rug.

  On the sides of the boxes next to me, there was writing in neat purple Sharpie, the same warning on each box: AVA’S FRAGILE.

  Not: The Stuff in This Box Is Fragile and Should Go to Ava’s Room.

  Not: AVA’S. FRAGILE.

  AVA’S FRAGILE.

  Like a warning.

  Ava didn’t seem fragile, but that’s how I misunderstood the message.

  Mom had said to be nice and find something to compliment if I wasn’t sure what to say. I should try to make Ava feel comfortable, welcome.

  I said, “Wow, you sure have a lot of boxes.”

  “I’m depressed about moving,” she said, doing a roundoff.

  “Okay,” I said. I didn’t know what depressed meant, then. We were seven.

  “She’s from Los Angeles,” Mom said when I complained about her that night. “Be patient with her.”

  “Does fragile mean from Los Angeles?” I asked.

  “Not no,” Dad said. When the two of them finally stopped laughing, Mom explained that fragile meant delicate, easily breakable. They didn’t ask why I wanted to know. I remember being fascinated that this new girl was delicate and easily breakable.

  The second time I had to go over with my mom and play with her, Ava had a fluffy pink lace comforter on her bed. The walls were painted rose pink with shiny white trim at the floor and ceiling and around her big windows, full of curlicues in the woodwork. I glanced out to the ocean, past her pale pink curtains, but I was much more impressed by the thousand stuffed animals, all arranged perfectly on her huge bed. It was only three days after the first time I’d been there.

  No boxes anywhere.

  “Your room looks very pretty,” I said, complimenting because I still didn’t know what to say to this girl I didn’t know, a girl who was fragile.

  She shrugged. “You want to see my toys?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Are you still depressed?”

  “What do you think?”

  I didn’t know what to think.

  She walked over to her desk. I followed her. There was a vase with three perfect white tulips in it, and matching glass jars of various sizes, filled with different sets of markers, with pink and white ribbons in various patterns tied around their necks.

  It looked beyond fancy, the most beautiful accessories ever.

  My stuff was mostly puzzles and crusty Play-Doh.

  “Don’t touch those,” Ava said.

  “Okay.” I held hands with myself behind my back.

  “Or the horses.” She pointed at a shelf full of plastic horses, carefully arranged. “I collect them. They’re very expensive. And delicate.”

  “Fragile,” I said, thinking, Like you.

  “Yes,” Ava said. “That’s why you can’t touch them. In case you’re clumsy.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was like, Fine. I don’t want to touch anything fragile anyway.

  “Do you collect anything?”

  “Enemies,” I said.

  “Weird,” she said.

  I agreed, so I didn’t answer. Enemies? I had blurted that out because I was trying not to say sea glass, which, though true, suddenly felt babyish and boring.

  Mom had said I had to be nice because Ava had just moved here from California so she had no friends. Mom had said she was proud of me for being so welcoming to Ava the first time.

  “We can play a board game,” Ava suggested. “I don’t really care about those.”

  We played Sorry! until finally Mom called my name and I said, “Do I have to?”

  That was our secret code for Please let’s go now.

  But by the time school started the next month, Ava and I were best friends. She hadn’t managed to teach me how to do a cartwheel (still hasn’t), but she had told me secrets and we played games of being orphans on the frontier or explorers in the rain forest. She was glamorous and creative, fragile and exotic. I remember feeling lucky that I had that forbidden thing: a declared best friend. Feeling chosen, and special.

  The way I have felt ever since. Until this week.

  She came out of her bathroom with fresh lip gloss on, sort of a raspberry color, and tucked her hair behind her ear exactly the way Madeleine does it.

  She looked at me. “So. What’s up?”

  “Why are all your books backward?”

  “It’s a design statement. It’s calming, the monochrome. It’s sophisticated.”

  You monster, I didn’t say. How could it be calming to not know which of your books is which?

  “Did you come over to critique my room, my style, or my personality?” she asked.

  “None of them!” I said. “Ava.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Let’s get a snack and go down to the water. We can have herbal tea; it’s good for your skin. We don’t need my mom eavesdropping on us.”

  11

  WE LEFT OUR shoes on the grass and walked beside the dock on the sandy part of Ava’s beach to the water, which was icy cold but clear enough to see the pebbles below the surface.

  The mug of herbal tea was welcome warmth in my already cold hands. I get cold when I’m stressed.

  “What’s going on?” I tried.

  “Not much, you?”

  “I mean it,” I said. “Ava. Talk to me.”

  “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, Niki.”

  “I’m the only best friend you’ve ever—”

  “I’m serious. You barged in here asking me what’s going on. I’m trying to tell you. But if you’d rather—”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  “No offense, but, I just feel like we’ve drifted.”

  I resisted making a joke about me and the piece of driftwood a few feet out from where we were standing, floating alone on the water. “Drifted?” I asked.

  “We’re just, we’re in different places, you know? I know you must have been feeling it too, lately. Since even this summer.”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “You’re . . . Niki. You still want to jump on the bed and pretend we’re orphans on a train; I’m, like, I want to shoplift a nail polish and figure out how to do cat-eye eyeliner and flirt with boys.”

  “Oh,” I said. I stepped down into the water. Numbing my toes. She wants to steal nail polish???

  “Don’t take it personally,” Ava said, behind me. “I just think, when you get that gotta go feeling, you know the one I mean?”

  “Like when you have to pee?”

  “No. Niki. That feeling like, it’s time for me to go, I’ve been here too long, I need to make a change, this isn’t right for me anymore. You know that feeling?”

  “I guess.”

  “I just think when you feel like I gotta go, you should go.”

  “Obey the gotta go,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “And that’s how you feel about—about me? Like, get me out of here?”

  “See, now you’re crying and making me feel guilty.”

  “I’m not!”

  “It’s so manipulative, Niki. You always do this, to get your way. You make me feel like I’m a terrible person and you’re so wholesome, you’d never shoplift. So you cry and I feel like the worst. . . .”

  “I’m not crying,” I said. “I’m just listening.”

  “Fine, whatever you say. As if I don’t know you well enough to see you’re trying not to cry and making sure I know it.”

  “Ava.”

  “I just, don’t you think, if we’re
really best friends, a best friend would want what’s best for her friend?”

  “Totally. Even if what her best friend wants is basically to trade up to a more popular group.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying, Niki. Why are you being mean?”

  I turned away. I hadn’t been about to cry, but now I was. I didn’t know what to do with my face other than hide it from her.

  Two lacy-winged bugs, bolted together, landed on the piece of driftwood. I tried not to be jealous.

  Ava sighed. “Why are you making this so weird and hard for me? Can’t you just . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

  “Just, all I want you to do is understand, and not make it such a big deal.”

  “But I don’t understand,” I said. “You want me to wear eyeliner and flirt with boys?” I left out stealing. Sorry, no.

  “No!” she said. “Of course not!”

  I turned around to face her. “What then? We haven’t played orphans on a train or bed-jumping Olympics in months! What do you want me to do? Or not do? You want me to steal nail polish?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know why you’re mad at me, Ava.”

  “I’m not. That’s not—you can’t change who you are,” Ava said. “I would never ask you to do that. Only a bad friend would ask that. Why do you always try to make me feel like a bad friend lately?”

  Her nails were polished green. How had I not noticed that before? I turned around again to look at the water. The two bugs had left the driftwood. I took another step deeper. The bottoms of my jeans were soaked.

  “We can still be friends privately,” Ava was saying.

  “Privately.”

  “Like, of course if something’s going on, we can text each other. I’m not, like, breaking up with you, or some weird . . . We’re just in different places, Niki, and I have to—when I’m with you, I feel like I have to be, like, honest, and . . . deep all the time.”

  “You can be any way you want, Ava.”

  “Not with you,” she said. “I have to be real, with you. When I’m hanging out with the Squad, I can just be goofy and relaxed, not, like, smart.”