Friends from Home

by Lauryn Chamberlain

  DUTTON

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2021 by Lauryn Chamberlain

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  DUTTON and the D colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  has been applied for.

  ISBN 9780593182802 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780593182826 (ebook)

  BOOK DESIGN BY ELKE SIGAL, ADAPTED FOR EBOOK BY ESTELLE MALMED

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Sarah Oberrender; cover images: (front and back) Floco Images / Westend61 / Superstock

  pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  For my parents: all three of them

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  At first glance, I assumed the Instagram post belonged to a stranger.

  I squinted at my phone to see if the face of a distant cousin or an old high school friend of a friend would come into focus, but then it hit me with a jarring thwack, like colliding with someone on the street: Michelle had gotten engaged.

  The caption read, “So #blessed to finally marry my best friend,” and the post featured four photos: one of her boyfriend—well, fiancé—Jake, down on one knee in a proposal reenactment; one of the ring, a sizable brilliant-cut surrounded by a sparkling halo of smaller diamonds; and two of Michelle and Jake smiling broadly in identical poses with different sets of family members. Michelle, my Michelle. My childhood best friend was getting married.

  In the twenty-nine minutes since it had been posted, the photo had amassed 243 likes. She had more likes than I had unanswered e-mails, which was an honest accomplishment.

  I stared, stunned, for another minute, and then I double-tapped a courtesy like to bring the total to 244. This is supposed to be your best friend, I reminded myself. Who cares if she has a cliché engagement post? The voice in my head shot back, If she were really still your best friend, would you have had to find out via Instagram?

  I must have sighed audibly as I debated this, because my coworker Alan poked his head over my cubicle wall to investigate.

  “If you blew off that meeting because you were out here Instagram stalking the hot new intern, I swear . . . ,” he mock-scolded, crouching behind my desk chair to peek over my shoulder and take a closer look at my screen. Then: “Oh my God, Jules.”

  “Yeah,” I said, as we both stared, transfixed. “Looks like Michelle’s engaged?” My voice shot up, making it a question.

  After nearly three years at Thomas Miller Publishing, my first job out of college, Alan remained my only close work friend. Sharing a cubicle wall had quickly turned into sharing a daily three p.m. coffee break, and our constant proximity had fostered a work-spouse intimacy between us. Alan knew the entire story of my seventeen-year friendship with Michelle, and so although he had never met her or visited our tiny Alabama hometown, he had some idea of what the news meant to me.

  “If I ever announce my engagement by saying ‘so blessed to finally marry my best friend,’ just kill me,” I added, because it felt like I should say something else. “Not that I’m really the engagement-photos type. Same goes for you.”

  “I would never.” Alan put his hand to his heart in faux shock.

  “You wouldn’t, but only because Marcus would never let you.”

  “More evidence that he’s my soul mate.” Alan stood up to head back to his cubicle. “Anyway, uh, wow. Congratulate Michelle for me.”

  “I will if she ever bothers to call and tell me the news herself.”

  “Wait,” Alan said. “She hasn’t actually told you yet?”

  As I considered the question, I wondered if I really felt as bitter as I sounded. The last time Michelle had called me, a few weeks before, I had looked at her name, saved in my phone as “Michelle—your BFF,” and it struck me that the title seemed like more of a respectful nod to our shared history than a day-to-day fact. Somehow, though, it still stung that I wasn’t the very first person she’d think to call with news of her engagement. Or maybe she cared more about gloating on social media than actually talking to the people closest to her.

  I waved a hand dismissively. “I’m sure she’ll call. Whatever, I don’t care.”

  “If you really don’t care, then why are you acting so huffy at her engagement post?” He raised an eyebrow at me in a “caught ya!” expression.

  “I’m not huffy,” I said, annoyed. “And you’re the only person I know who would use that word,” I added, softening. “How am I huffy?”

  “You were aggressively sighing. I heard you.”

  “I was aggressively sighing because I accidentally bought a soggy sandwich for lunch again.”

  “Stop going to that cheap deli.” Alan rolled his eyes. “Go to Pret. There, solved.”

  “And also because I’m still reading that shitty manuscript.”

  He pushed up his horn-rimmed glasses, the Warby Parker frames that every guy in the office under thirty-five seemed to be wearing, moving them higher on his nose. “Well, the last manuscript to come across my desk was about a postapocalypse zombie-hunter love triangle, so I don’t even want to hear about it. Pass. What about me screams ‘dystopian-teen-romance editor’?” He snorted out a laugh. “Actually, don’t answer.”

  “Sounds hot?”

  “It’s not. What do they think it is, 2008? Hunger Games has been over for a decade!” he half shouted.

  “Shh,” I hissed.

  “Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Yeah, I get it. The social media post is eye-roll-worthy, not the marriage. Right?”

  “Exactly,” I said, but I kept turning the word marriage over and over in my mind, trying to make it fit, trying to apply it to someone my own age. I smoothed my hair behind my ears and held my hands there, cradling my head as if the very idea of what it might mean to be someone’s wife exhausted me.

  But Michelle had been trying on the word wife for years, I knew, the way some women try on earrings. She ha
d practiced and dreamed of wearing the word herself. When we were younger, I think most of us assumed we would graduate college and get married the same year. In our town, it was far from uncommon. I didn’t particularly think I wanted to be married, but it was what our older cousins and sisters did, and I didn’t give it much thought, assuming that husbands were given out right after diplomas. But I moved to Ithaca for college, and then to New York City, and I realized there were plenty of things I could want instead. A completed first draft of an essay collection, or an apartment all to myself. Getting engaged at twenty-five somehow seemed like borderline child marriage in New York, even though I knew it verged on old-maid status in our little corner of the South.

  Alan patted my shoulder and said, “She should have called. You’re right. But let it go, okay? Now, for real, back to work.” And he walked back to his desk.

  I pursed my lips and nodded.

  But I couldn’t let it go. I spent the remaining hours of my workday only half-focused on the manuscript pages.

  I stared at the shoddily affixed wall of my cubicle. In between my calendar and color-coded rows of Post-it notes, I had this photo of Michelle and me pinned up. I had quite a few photos—the rest predominantly featured Dana and Ritchie, my closest friends in New York—but that one with Michelle had always been my favorite. It was a staged shot from our high school yearbook, taken when we had beaten out a dozen romantic couples to be named our high school’s “dynamic duo.” In it, we’re sitting in the classically cool teal convertible she drove in high school, and we’re totally decked out in stylish sunglasses and colorful headscarves, doing our best Thelma and Louise impression. Our cheeks are pressed together, and we’re smiling like we have a secret.

  Michelle was Geena Davis, by the way. But that goes without saying.

  It had been her idea to use Thelma & Louise as the artistic inspiration for the photo. She was the one who always got us in and out of everything. It’d be her idea to skip class, but when we got caught she’d talk her way out of trouble just by hiding behind her pearly smile and “who, me?” southern demeanor. I, on the other hand, had hair that frizzed in the humidity, a smile that probably would have benefited from braces, and I had never successfully charmed my way out of anything.

  “It’ll be perfect,” she had said when she pitched me the photo-shoot idea. “Think about it: Thelma and Louise, Michelle and Julie. Off on the big adventure of the whole rest of our lives.”

  “As long as our adventure doesn’t end in the Grand Canyon.”

  “Right. Less death, more Brad Pitt,” she agreed.

  Thinking about that day always made me nostalgic, and I knew I should call and congratulate her on the engagement. That’s what a friend, a best friend, would do. I should shrug off the fact that she hadn’t called me, realize that she was busy, that engagements and wedding planning seemed to make even the most sensible people lose their heads—and calling Michelle “the most sensible of people” might have been a charitable description. But it certainly didn’t seem like Michelle had been very busy recently.

  Michelle and I called each other often enough to catch up, as we always had since high school. But for the past year or so, we had started talking at cross-purposes. I’d ask her about her travel plans or her family, and she’d inevitably turn the conversation to her relationship with Jake. And then I’d be guilty of it, too: She’d ask me about my boyfriend, Mark, and I’d talk about my work. Apparently, my interest in gossiping about guys had peaked in high school, and now it felt like we were losing common ground. We’d recently had our most bizarre exchange when she called me in the middle of the day on my work number. I picked up, assuming that anything that would make her call my office line had to be important. “Is it Marcia? Jonah?” I asked, terrified that something had happened to her mom or brother.

  Nothing had. She needed to know if it was ridiculous to have a new tote bag embroidered with her existing monogram, considering that, “if everything went according to plan,” she might have new initials soon enough. It was the first time in our friendship that I felt like I had nothing to say to her.

  “Aren’t you at work right now?” I asked, not caring enough to respond to her “emergency” question.

  “Yes,” she said, as if she couldn’t imagine why I would be confused. Michelle worked as a social media specialist for a Birmingham jewelry boutique. Maybe online shopping was just par for the course there, and what did I know? “Anyway, I just don’t want to have to change anything to Jake’s last name in a year or whenever.”

  I hadn’t told anyone that I felt like we were out of sync. It seemed like saying it out loud would make it true. But our Thelma & Louise days felt very far away.

  My phone started to buzz, pulling me back to the present. Sure enough, the lock screen flashed: “Michelle—your BFF.” She must have gotten the notification that I had liked her post.

  “Julie! Julie!” she cried out as soon as I answered, her voice higher pitched than her usual even, melodic drawl.

  I didn’t bother to say hello, either, but tried to match her excitement. “Michelle! I saw—”

  “I know, and I know what you’re thinking, but it just happened last night, and then Jake surprised me with a party with all our family and friends, and I drank too much champagne, and then I wanted to get the post up this morning to maximize likes, but you leave so early for work, and I didn’t want to bother you. So.”

  “So.” I laughed in spite of myself. “Do you want to tell me officially?”

  “Julie, I’m getting married!”

  “Congratulations, Miche. I mean it. And I can’t believe it!”

  “Well, I can. Finally—it took him long enough. Kidding!” She paused, and I didn’t know what to say. “But I’m actually calling to ask you something. What if I flew up there tomorrow so we could celebrate in person?”

  It was easy to forget that Michelle had the means to take $400 flights at the last minute, as well as to book a hotel so she didn’t have to share a bathroom with my two roommates. For a split second, I thought about saying no—a full weekend together in New York meant more shopping, more eating out, and more Ubering than I typically preferred, or could afford—but I realized that I did want to see her, and that it meant something that she wanted to see me, too.

  “That sounds great, Miche. If you’re sure you have the time. I know it’s last-minute.”

  “You were the only person I really wanted there last night, other than my mama, I promise,” she said, and I smiled despite myself. “Oops, it’s Jake on the other line, I have to go. But I’ll book the flight today!”

  We said good-bye, and I turned my attention back to the manuscript in front of me. But now I felt even stranger than I had before. I tried to think about what Michelle and I would do in New York together, or if I would be any good at helping to plan a wedding. Michelle had been through the process plenty of times before, whereas I had only been to maybe two weddings ever. She was still close with the people we had gone to high school with, but I had mostly lost touch with our high school group when I left Alabama for college. Many of them were engaged or married. Everyone else we knew from home seemed to have reached this point in life. But Michelle wasn’t “everyone else” to me. Everyone else hadn’t driven me to school every day in that convertible. Everyone else hadn’t been like a part of my family. I used to eat breakfast with Michelle and her mother, Marcia, at their house more mornings than I did with my own mother at ours.

  A text came in: “Flight is officially booked! See you tomorrow xx.”

  “Can’t wait!” I shot back, hoping that I really meant it.

  CHAPTER 2

  The first time Michelle and I talked about her wedding, we were in elementary school. It was actually the week we met—the first week of the third grade.

  After my parents split up, my mom and I had moved from Cleveland to Langham, Alabama. At the time, I wa
s a loner of the variety that adults called “artistic” when they were being kind, and other things when they were not. In truth, I was just a late bloomer. It took a while before friends struck me as more comforting than Judy Blume books and silence.

  We knew exactly one person in Langham, a small and unfamiliar town forty minutes from Birmingham. Right after my dad left, an old friend of my uncle’s offered my mom an administrative job in his company’s Birmingham office. So that’s where we went. On the first day at my new school, I walked hesitantly into the classroom alone, chewing on the ends of my shoulder-length hair like I used to do when I was nervous. With my eyes cast down, I ran right into her.

  “Ow!” she exclaimed, rubbing her arm, and then she looked up at me, her green eyes wide and blinking in the expression of delicate surprise that would become her trademark.

  “Sorry,” I said quietly, taking her in, all blond ringlets and impertinence. I was mortified that my first move at my new school had been to body-slam the most beautiful girl in the class. Most kids would have left it at that, but not her.

  “How do you have those Skechers?” she asked in a tone of voice both skeptical and impressed, still not introducing herself. “I wanted white sneakers like that, but my mama says I get everything dirty.”

  “I’m Julie O’Brien,” I blurted.

  “Michelle.”

  I said nothing else, but Michelle, already bubbly and confident, grabbed my elbow and hauled me toward her desk in the front row of the classroom. “We should sit together,” she announced loudly for all the class to hear, and I agreed, and pretty much from then on I was in. It’s funny how kids can be so simple like that, so black-and-white. If someone makes you “cool” on the first day, then you are. I was so grateful to Michelle, even if I was a little uncertain of her. But within the space of about two days, she became the first “real” best friend I ever had. A mutual love for the Backstreet Boys and Chips Ahoy! blossomed into something more. Even at eight years old, we clicked together perfectly. And that’s how I ended up at her house—so much bigger than anything I’d seen in Cleveland—on my first weekend in Alabama, planning her wedding to Ashton Kutcher.