Best Friends Forever (5 page)

“He was there,” she said, and shook her head. “I didn’t think…”

“Why not?” My voice was flat. Dan Swansea and his friends had been barred from graduation, but I assumed that nobody back then had thought to keep them away from future reunions. As it was, they’d turned their ostensible punishment into a joke. Half the class, in solidarity with the boys, had also skipped the ceremony, and afterward I’d heard that Dan and his pals had made the rounds of al the choicest post-graduation bashes, the ones on the west side of town, where the parents had brought in kegs and paid for disc jockeys. They’d gone to the parties, wearing board shorts and PRHS T-shirts, playing water polo in backyard swimming pools, hoisting bikinied girls onto their shoulders for chicken fights. I’d col ected my dip-loma to scattered boos from the audience and spent the afternoon helping my dad scrub the spray-painted words FAT WHORE off our driveway, while Dan and his friends were out drinking and dancing and probably fucking Val’s fel ow cheerleaders in the backseats of cars their fathers had bought for them.

“You know what? No.” I pushed back my chair and got to my feet. “I think you should leave.”

As if on cue, the big blue eyes that were more vivid than I’d remembered (colored contacts?) wel ed up. Valerie blinked, and tears coursed down her cheeks, cutting grooves in her makeup. And there were her freckles, underneath the foundation and the powder. Evidence of a simpler time.

“Please.” She stretched one fine-boned hand toward me. “Please help me.”

“What if I don’t want to?” I’d meant it to come out cool and removed. Instead, I just sounded petulant, like a three-year-old tel ing her parents that she wasn’t ready to get off the merry-go-round.

“Addie, please. ” More tears dripped down her cheeks. “Don’t be so hard.”

“Oh, please,” I muttered…and that was as far as I got. You broke my heart were the words that had risen to my mouth, but I couldn’t say them. That was what you said to a boyfriend, a lover, not your best friend. She’d laugh. And I’d had enough of being laughed at. I’d worked hard to get to a place where it didn’t happen anymore, where I didn’t move through life like a walking target, where it was just me and my paints and brushes and my big empty bed every night.

“You weren’t a good friend,” I said instead.

“I know,” she whispered. “I wasn’t. You’re right. But Addie…” She looked at me, brushing tears from her cheeks, widening her eyes and aiming the ful force of her beauty and vulnerab-ility at me like a floodlight or a tractor beam, a thing you couldn’t ignore and couldn’t resist.

“I’m in trouble. Please. ”

I didn’t say anything, but when I sat back down at the kitchen table, Valerie’s face lit up.

“You’l help me?”

“Tel me what happened.”

She lifted herself back onto the counter.

“It’s a long story.”

“How about the abridged version?” I let her see me glance at the clock above the stove. “I have to work tomorrow.” This was true. There was no point tel ing Valerie that I worked at home, so it wasn’t as if I had to punch a clock at nine in the morning. Painting greeting cards wasn’t saving lives, although I liked to tel myself that I was making people’s lives better in some tiny, transient way, bringing beauty and joy for less than three dol ars a pop. My current project was a painting of a bouquet of flowers, yel ow daffodils with one bril iant orangey-red tulip popping up from the center. You’re the best of the bunch, the card would say inside.

Valerie wiped delicately beneath each eye with a fingertip sheathed in the dishtowel she’d grabbed.

“Dan Swansea,” I prompted.

She

drew

a

watery,

wavering

breath.

“Wel .

You knew about the reunion, right?”

“I knew.” For the past nine months, a steady stream of postcards in school colors had in-vaded my mailbox, addressed to Adelaide Downs ’92, inviting me to dinner and dancing at the Lakeview Country Club, the same place that had hosted the class’s senior prom, which, needless to say, I hadn’t senior prom, which, needless to say, I hadn’t attended. Bring pictures!

the postcards had urged. Send news! I’d pitched them al , not even bothering with the recycling bin, not wanting those red-and-cream rectangles hanging around where I could see them.

“Dan was there…” She started rubbing at her dress again.

“And?” My voice was calm.

“AndIthinkImayhavekil edhim.”

I sat up straight in my chair. “What?”

She gave a shuddering sigh. “Kil ed him. I think maybe I kil ed him. Maybe. I’m not sure.

”

My mouth fel open. “You kil ed Dan Swansea?”

“Wel , somebody should have!” Val hopped off the counter and started pacing, eyes blazing, high heels banging against the floor.

“Valerie…” I got to my feet, meaning to grab her by her shoulders, but she pushed past me. “Valerie.”

She turned and stared as if just remembering I was there. I took her hand and tugged her down into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. There was the sugar bowl, my teacup and spoon, her glass and the bottle of vodka, everything just as it had been, everything the same.

I wil ed myself to be stil , praying for my voice to be calm. If I wasn’t panicking, she wouldn’t panic, and she’d give me the whole story, a story that would make sense and have a beginning and an end and would not involve a corpse.

“Tel me what happened. Start at the beginning, okay?” Another breath. “Start with Dan.”

She looked down at her lap. “I saw him at the bar,” she said. “Him and his friends.” I waited. Valerie pressed her hands together.

“I was just going to ignore him, but he walked right up to me, and it was okay at first. He said he’d seen me on TV, and how nice it was that someone from our class had gotten famous.” She al owed herself to preen briefly at the word “famous.” I didn’t have the heart to tel her that reading the weather on the nightly news did not exactly make her a movie star. The truth was, anyway, she was right—if you considered the combined resumes of the 296 surviv-ing members of our class, Valerie was the most famous…unless you were inclined to count Gordon Perrault, who’d blown out his back raking leaves, developed an unfortunate addiction to fentanyl patches, and was currently serving five to seven for robbing a drugstore while wearing a Burger King mask.

“I was just having a good time, talking to people, and I had a few drinks, and things were winding down when I heard him at the bar. He was with Chip Mason and Kevin Oliphant, remember them?”

I nodded, vaguely recal ing two hulking boys in footbal jerseys.

“And Kevin said something to Dan like,

‘Hey, Valerie’s here. You going back for seconds?’ And Dan laughed. He laughed. ”

I didn’t answer. Of course he’d laughed. Laughing was what guys like Dan did.

“They didn’t know I heard him,” Val said. Her voice was climbing higher and higher.

“So I went back to the bar, and I started flirting with him. You know. Touching his arm, asking lots of questions, acting like I was into him. I told him to meet me outside…that I’d give him a ride. I waited for him, and he came outside, and we were fooling around and then…”

She gulped. “I made him take his clothes off.”

I gaped at her. “Why?”

“Because it’s humiliating,” she said, as if this were obvious. “And it’s cold out. Major shrinkage. I took a picture with my cel phone…”

“As you do,” I murmured.

Val ignored me. “I got in the car and I was going to drive away, you know, just leave him there, let him see how he likes being the one everyone’s laughing at, and I turned the car on, and he was grabbing at the mirror, and I stepped on the gas, and I think he must have jumped in front of me and maybe I was in drive instead of reverse and then

…he was…” She buried her face in her hands.

“You hit him?”

She bent her head, shoulders shaking, saying nothing.

I said it again, only this time not as a question. “You hit him.”

“It was an accident,” she breathed, and stared at me defiantly. “I think it was kind of the car’s fault. I’ve got this new Jaguar. I didn’t know my own power.” She pushed her hair behind her ears, first one side, then the other, a gesture I remembered. “He deserved it,” Valerie said. “He deserved it for what he did to me.”

I couldn’t speak. I could only look at her. Valerie twisted her hands in her lap. “I tried not to think about it…about what happened. About what…” She gathered herself. “What he did to me. And you…I’m so sorry, Addie,”

she whispered. “You were trying to do the right thing. I know that now.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. My throat was thick with unshed tears; my eyes were burning.

“It was a long time ago.”

“But you were my friend. ” Val’s voice cracked, and I made myself look away, knowing that if she cried, I’d cry, too, and if I cried, I would remember. I would remember, for example, a cardboard box fil ed with tangled marionette wires, or my brother’s face, blank and be-wildered, as the vice principal asked him, impatiently, which boys had thrown his backpack down the stairs, or Hal oween night and the cop car parked outside my house, lights flashing, painting the wal s red, then blue, red, then blue. I’d remember Mrs. Bass’s voice on the telephone, tel ing me about my father. I’d remember covering my mother’s body with a blanket that I’d knitted, tel ing her to rest.

“So then what happened?” I asked.

“He was by the Dumpster. He was lying there, bleeding. His…his…” She touched one hand to her temple. “He wasn’t moving. I tried to get him to talk to me, but he was, like, passed out, and I was going to cal 911, but I knew they’d trace the cal and it would be in the papers, and I didn’t know what else to do, so I grabbed up al his clothes and put them in the car and I came here.” She looked up. “We have to go. You have to come with me. We have to go see if he’s…if he’s…”

“Dead?” I supplied. She made a mewling noise and reached past me, grabbing for the vodka bottle.

“Just so I’m clear here,” I asked, “you never tried to get back into the country club? You didn’t tel anyone?”

Val dumped more vodka into her glass. “I was so freaked out! I had blood on my hands, there was blood on my coat, and you know how I am with blood.”

“Which you’d think would be a deterrent against hitting people with your Jaguar,” I mused.

My telephone—a new one, cordless and sleek—sat in the same spot on the counter where my parents’ old rotary phone had been. I picked it up and pointed it at her. “Cal the police.”

“And say what?” she asked. “Hi, I think I just ran over this guy from high school, could you please go see if he’s dead?”

“That sounds about right to me.”

“We’l just go look!” she pleaded. “If he’s alive, we’l cal an ambulance and get him to a hospital! I promise!”

“And if he’s not?”

She drained her glass, wiped her cheeks, and raised her chin. “Then I wil cal the police and turn myself in.”

Ha. Valerie Adler was not the cal -thepolice-and-turn-yourself-in type.

Valerie

Adler was the steal-a-car-and-drive-acrossthe-border-to-Mexico type. She was also the type to stash her former best friend as a hostage-slash-accomplice in the passenger seat.

She was brave and clever, ruthless and fearless. It was why I’d loved her so much when we’d been girls.

“We should cal an ambulance. We shouldn’t just be sitting here.”

“Right,” she said, and grabbed my hand.

“Go get dressed. Let’s go.”

No, the rational part of my brain insisted, even as I walked upstairs to the bedroom that I stil thought of as my parents’ and pul ed on jeans and a sweater and heavy black clogs. You don’t have to do what she

tel s you!

I grabbed my purse, my keys, my wal et, watching my hands move as if they belonged to someone else, gathering my coat, my scarf, a hat I’d knitted. And then we were outside. The mist had turned into an icy drizzle, and Val’s diamond earrings flashed in the moonlight, and somewhere in the stream of time, the waters were shifting, and al of this had happened already, only I didn’t know it yet.

She handed me her keys. “Can you drive?” she asked.

“Better than you, evidently.”

“Ha,” she said, and fol owed me to the Jaguar. She got into the passenger’s seat. I looked for signs of damage—a dent, a crumpled fender, a blood-washed headlight

—but I couldn’t see a thing. God bless British engineering. I got behind the wheel, backed careful y down the driveway, and aimed the car toward the highway.

aimed the car toward the highway.

SEVEN

The Adlers moved in during the last week of June, and by July, Valerie and I were insepar-able. Every morning, I’d wake up and wave to her through the living room window, and she’d grin at me and wave back from hers. At noon, when Jon and I came home from day camp at the rec center, Valerie would be sitting on our front step, in her cutoff shorts

and

too-big

flip-flops.

Sometimes

she’d

be

reading

an

Encyclopedia Brown book, or bouncing a red rubber bal that she kept in her pocket, but most of the time she’d just be waiting there, calm and patient in the sticky heat. My mom would make us lunch, and if he was home, my dad would join us for sandwiches, potato chips, pickles, and fruit, served with Country Time lemonade that we’d mix up and drink by the pitcher.

After the first week, we got used to setting an extra place at the table, and to making extra sandwiches. I usual y ate one or one and a half of the ham and Swiss or peanut butter and jel y, and Jon always ate two, but Valerie could put away three sandwiches by herself, along with multiple helpings of chips, glasses of lemonade, a peach or a plum or sometimes both, and once, an entire quart of blueberries.

While we had lunch, my parents would ask us questions: What had we done that morning? What had we made in crafts? Who had we played with? Jon, with his mouth ful of whole wheat and lunch meat, would rattle off the names of a half-dozen boys, shoveling food into his mouth as fast as he could without my mother objecting. I’d keep quiet, letting Jon talk. There was one girl named Heather who would let me sit with her at snack time, but only if I gave her my graham crackers. When I told my mom about it, she got a sad look on her face and said it would probably be best if I just stayed with the counselors.