My Worst Best Friend (16 page)

I hesitated for a few seconds. Was she off the critical list yet? Should I say yes? If I said yes, what should I say that she’d said?

“No.” I went straight for the lie. “I called her this morning, but her mom said she’s still, you know, not well enough to talk. She’s still pretty much sleeping all the time.”

“Right.” Archie opened the door to the snack bar, but instead of walking through it he came to a stop. “Gracie?” He was practically whispering. “Gracie, can I ask you something?”

I must have known that he wasn’t going to ask me about the probable effects of unchecked global warming, but my guard was down. I walked into his question like a dolphin swimming into a tuna net.

“Sure,” I said. “What is it?”

“It’s just that … you know…” He took hold of my arm and guided me into the snack bar, steering me into a corner. Gently but firmly. “Since you’re Savanna’s best friend and everything…”

I nodded. Slowly. I was getting one of my bad feelings. Polar bears were pitching into icy seas. “Uh huh…”

“Well … it’s just … I mean…” He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. I could hear him swallow. “OK … Look, it’s just that—” He took a really deep breath. “Is Savanna mad at me or something, Gracie?” He looked really worried. “Is that what’s going on? She’s mad at me?”

“Mad at you?” I laughed the way you do when someone tells a joke that isn’t funny. “Savanna’s not mad at you, Arch. I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing going on.”

“Well, she’s acting like she’s mad at me.” He stopped shifting and stood dead still. “Like I did something … or said something…” His foot tapped against the lino floor. “You know Savanna…” Taptaptap. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

“Well, she hasn’t said anything to me.” I smiled in a bright, end-of-conversation way. “You must be having another one of your hallucinations.”

“I’m not so sure.” He didn’t smile back. “And I’m not sure you’re being straight with me. Maybe you’re just trying to spare my feelings.”

If I was, I wasn’t doing a very good job.

“Archie, I’m telling you the truth.” I crossed my heart. “Smokey Bear Junior Forest Ranger’s honour. Savanna isn’t mad at you.”

He finally managed half a smile, but it wasn’t what you’d call happy.

“Really, Archie. I’d know if she was.”

Somehow it was more horrible seeing someone as confident and happy as Archie undermined by doubt and worry than it would have been to see someone more like me bottoming out. I might have hugged him if it hadn’t meant burying my head in his stomach.

“Then why is she acting so weird?”

I said that I thought he was asking the wrong person.

“But I did ask Savanna.” Archie’s shoulders moved slowly up and down like the flippers of a dying seal. “She said that she didn’t know what I was talking about. She said there’s nothing wrong.”

I gave him an affectionate shove. “Well? What more do you want?”

“Yeah, but she didn’t hang out with me all last week, Gracie. She always had some lame-o excuse – either she had too much homework, or she was tired, or her mother needed her for something. And when I do see her at school… Well, you know how she is at lunch. She hardly talks at all any more. She acts like she’s had an iPod implanted in her brain and she’s listening to that.”

I smiled. Cheerily. “Well, maybe she’s just going through a quiet phase,” I suggested. “People do. Even really talkative people.” Even people who never shut up.

“Is that how she is with you?” asked Archie. “Quiet bordering on comatose?”

No, when we’re alone she talks about her other boyfriend so much that I don’t know when she has time to breathe.

“Well, you know, Archie… We talk about girl things. It’s different.” If my smile got any cheerier, I was going to start singing and dancing. “Except for not having much to say sometimes, Savanna seems the same to me.”

“Well, not to me,” said Archie. “It’s like every time I go to touch her, she moves out of my way. It’s got so bad I’m afraid to put my arm around her any more. I can’t even remember the last time she kissed me.”

Necessity isn’t the only mother invention has – it has desperation, too.

“Well, maybe she knew, you know, subconsciously, that she was coming down with something and she didn’t want you to catch it.”

“That’s another thing.” Archie did his dying-seal impersonation again. “Last night—”

“Last night she got sick, Archie. Unless you’re Typhoid Mary, that had nothing to do with you.”

“But she wasn’t sick yesterday morning,” said Archie. “Yesterday morning, she said she was going to be at Anzalone’s. Definitely.”

“I told you. It was sudden.” I had to resist the temptation to pat his arm. “Really, Arch, Savanna isn’t mad at you. It’s just one of her moods. She’s probably just a little stressed out. You know, with school and her family and everything.”

I thought I sounded pretty convincing – but not to everyone.

“Look, I won’t say anything to Savanna,” promised Archie. “I just want to know if she’s not into me any more or what. It’s kind of driving me nuts. And there’s nobody else I can talk to about it.”

What about Cooper? Wasn’t that what friends were for?

The only extrasensory perception I’d ever noticed in Archie was the ability to know if I had a brownie in my lunchbox before I opened the lid, but now he seemed to be able to read my mind.

“Not Cooper,” said Archie. “He thinks Sa— Well, you know what Cooper’s like. He’d say I should tell her to get a life and stop messing with my head.”

And I should have said,
Dump her! Dump her now, before she causes you even more pain, humiliation and heartbreak.
Only I didn’t.

I said, “I think that would be overreacting.”

“Well, I don’t want to,” sighed Archie. “I don’t want to break up with her. I just want her to be nice to me again.”

“Oh, Arch…” It was like hearing baby orang-utans say that they wished the men would stop bulldozing their habitat and shooting their mothers. Enough to break your heart.

“Please, Gracie. If Savanna’s through with me, I really need to know.” Archie patted my arm. “You can tell me the truth.”

No, I couldn’t.

“I told you.” I wondered if besides being able to read my mind he could tell that my palms were sweating. “I
am
telling you the truth, Arch. As far as I know, there’s nothing wrong.”

His frown softened. “You’re sure?”

I felt as if I was waving goodbye to someone who was walking backwards and straight off a cliff.

“I’m absolutely, totally positive.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

He looked as if he might cry with relief. “Thanks, Gracie. You’re a pal.” He grabbed my hand and started shaking it. “I feel much better.”

That made one of us.

“We’d better go and get the supplies.” I laughed. “Pete and Leroy will be eating the bench by now.” I was ready to run to the bright lights of the snack bar.

“Gracie.” Archie grabbed my arm. “Gracie, this is just between you and me, right? You won’t say anything to Savanna, will you?”

“Of course not,” I said. “My lips are sealed.”

“I am sooo sorry, Gracie.” Savanna pulled a box of pasta and a jar of tomato sauce out of the cabinet and handed them to me. “I mean, like, really, I wouldn’t even want that troglodyte Jemima Satz to get stuck by herself with my psycho sister, never mind you.”

“Sofia was fine.” She was in the family room, wearing her tutu and watching TV with the sound turned down when I’d arrived, and she was still there. She hadn’t said a word to me. “It was your mom who kind of gave me a hard time.”

I’d showed up at six-thirty, as we’d arranged, but as soon as I rang the bell, Mrs Zindle started shouting.
Don’t tell me you forgot your key again … Where the hell have you been? Why can’t I ever depend on you?
I knew she wasn’t talking to me. I got on all right with Mrs Zindle. I’d seen her yell at her family pretty much the way you see clouds (you know, in the background and on a regular basis), but we weren’t related so she never yelled at me. My wild guess was that Savanna wasn’t back yet.

“Poor Gracie… It’s all me me me with Zelda,” sympathized Savanna. “I mean, it’s not like she was going to the Oscars or something. It’s just some dinner with people she works with. She
has
eaten with them before.” She bent down to the cabinet where the pots were kept. “Was she totally mad-eyed berserk?”

That was one way of putting it. If Mrs Zindle had been an air force she would have been in über carpet-bombing mode.

“I am, like, really sorry, Gray.” She handed me the spaghetti pot. “I mean, I planned to be home on time, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t turn into a pumpkin at exactly five o’clock, could I? Love doesn’t own a watch.”

Or even glance at the clock on its cell phone, apparently. Savanna rolled up after seven.

“Zelda was really curious about where you were.” I went over to the sink and started filling the pot with water. “You know, because she thought you were with me.”

“Ohmigod…” Savanna covered her mouth with her hand. “I guess I should’ve warned you.” She smiled. Warily. “What did you tell her?”

I carried the pot of water to the stove. “I said we’d all gone bowling, and then you and Archie went off together and I went home to get my stuff.”

“Gracie Mooney, you’re a genius!” She took out a saucepan and handed it to me. “That was, like, totally inspired.”

“Not really.” I opened the jar of sauce and emptied it into the pan. “It was pretty much the truth. You know, except that you weren’t with us, of course.”

“What?” Savanna straightened up. She was smiling as if she thought I was pulling her leg. “You really went bowling? With the boys?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“You all went bowling without
me
?”

I looked around to see what else there was to do. “You want me to set the table?”

“You can’t be serious. I mean, like,
really
? You all went bowling without
me
?” The way Savanna was smiling made it look like she didn’t have any teeth. “Nobody even asked me if I wanted to go?”

“You were doing something else, Savanna, remember? And besides, you were sick. How could they ask you to come when you were sick?”

“But you don’t even like bowling, Gracie. You always complain when I want you to go.”

“Well, this time I didn’t.”

“Oh, and why was that, Gracie?” She was going to have frown lines just like her mother if she didn’t stop making that face. “Because Archie called you up and asked you to go bowling with him and Leroy and Pete? Without
me.
”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Besides, it was Cooper who invited me.”

This laugh was nothing like a honk – or like falling beads. It was like someone coughing out a nut that had gone down the wrong way. “Cooper? But Cooper doesn’t go bowling. He’s never gone with us even once.”

I checked to see if the water was boiling yet. “Well, this time he did.”

Savanna made an exaggerated, jokey face. “That must have been a lot of fun. You and four boys. I mean, most of the time you hardly talk to them. You usually grouch if I leave you alone with them for, like, half a second.”

“I wasn’t alone.” I lowered the lid again. “Marilouise came too.”

“Marilouise?” Savanna’s eyebrows practically hit her hairline. “
Marilouise
went with you?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Sav.” I was starting to see certain advantages in sticking to Morgan as a topic of conversation. Boring but safe. “I don’t know why you’re getting all warped out of shape about it. We went bowling. You know, like millions of American teenagers do every day. What’s the big deal?”

“That’s not the point, Gray.” Her lower lip was down. “The point is that it’s a little hurtful to see how nobody was even a tiny bit concerned about me. I mean, I was supposed to be really sick. For all Archie knew, I was on my deathbed. What would you have done if I’d died? Thrown a party?”

“You’re being completely ludicrous.” I thrust the box of pasta into her hands. To give her something to do besides fester and fume. “And anyway, Archie was very concerned about you.”

She stopped sulking aggressively. “Really?”

“Yeah, really.” When I told Archie that I wouldn’t say anything to Savanna about our conversation, I’d meant it. But I could tell that I was on the brink of breaking my promise. I turned away from her and got involved with the pasta water again.

“What did he say?”

“You know…” I shrugged. “That he hoped it wasn’t anything serious. I had to stop him from coming over to see how you were.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” said Savanna.

“No, there isn’t.” I reached for the box. “The water’s ready.”

“Are you sure there’s nothing else, Gracie?” She narrowed her eyes. Thoughtfully. “What are you holding back? Your ears are going red.”

I really had to think about growing my hair.

“
Me
?” I choked. “You’re the one who’s holding back, Sav. You haven’t said a word about your date with Morgan since you walked through the door.” I frowned. “Don’t tell me you didn’t have a good time.”

“Don’t try to change the subject, Gray,” ordered Savanna. “I know you too well. What did Archie say?”

“I can’t tell you. I promised.”

“Gracie…” She had that take-no-prisoners look in her eyes. “What did Archie say? You’re my best friend. You can’t keep something like that from me.”

“You swear that you won’t tell him I told you?”

“On a bear.” She handed me the pasta.

“He thinks you’re mad at him. You know, because you haven’t been hanging out and hardly talk to him.”

“Oh for Pete’s sake … He never listens to what I say anyway.”

“He thinks you’ve been acting weird. You know, avoiding him.” I sighed as I watched the fusilli fall into the water. “He seemed really upset.”

Just call me Little Big Mouth.

“And what did you say?”

“What do you mean
‘What did I say?’
I said there was nothing wrong. I said you definitely weren’t mad at him.”

“Thankyouthankyou, Gracie!” Savanna threw her arms around me. “I knew I could count on you.”