We Used to Be Friends

by Amy Spalding

  And it’s hard to explain, but something was never the same from then on.

  “We’re hanging out later,” James says, and takes a sip of her coffee. “But we don’t have to, if you need me. Or you could come with me.”

  “I’m not coming with you,” I say. “You haven’t seen him in weeks. You guys need to make out and stuff. Like, full contact stuff.”

  “We’re going to a party,” she says, like a full-blown grown-up. “You could go. You could have one of those ill-advised rebound hookups I’ve heard about.”

  “I am super not in the mood for an ill-advised rebound hookup,” I say. “Probably no one will ever touch me again, and I’ll turn to stone.”

  James grins. “I’ll check with Logan, but I don’t think that’s physically possible.”

  “Why would Logan know about that?” I shriek.

  “Because he’s pre-med,” she says. “Not because he’s never been touched. Don’t worry. Logan is fine.”

  “Turning to stone isn’t a medical thing,” I tell her in between nibbling on a guava and cream cheese pastry. “It’s a curse. Doctors can’t help with curses.”

  “You’re not cursed, Kat,” James says, in such a warm calm tone that I burst into tears. She doesn’t look embarrassed that this is happening while we’re out in public; she just takes my hand and holds it. And it always feels safer to cry when James is holding my hand.

  James offers up several more invites, but I manage to escape the UCLA party. It would have been fun to tag along with Matty in tow; he’s so in his element at parties. Crowds always end up forming around him, even if he barely knows anyone when the evening starts. And I liked being the girl at his side, the one laughing first at his jokes and anticipating his moves. I’ve been one of a pair with James since we were little, but I liked being one of a pair with Matty, too.

  Anyway, maybe someday I could imagine being at a party not as a pair of any sort and having a good time, but tonight’s not it. I do hope at some point it sounds good to kiss someone else, but right now I might as well have a little cage around myself, or one of those cones our neighbor’s dog wore so he wouldn’t chew on stitches after leg surgery.

  Dad is working at the kitchen table on his laptop when I get back from hanging out with James, and he grins as I set the pastry box on the table.

  “Do I tell you enough that you’re my favorite daughter?” he asks.

  “Ha ha,” I say. “So, is your boss making you work again this weekend?”

  We both know that it’s very rare that Dad’s forced to work on weekends, or even late evenings. Since Mom’s been gone, we’re both happy to pretend that he’s not just trying to fill his time.

  “Uh, sure, Kat,” he says, and I notice the words on the window he’s minimized. Online Dating.

  “Dad!”

  He turns to look at me. “What?” And then his eyes see where mine are looking. “Oh. It’s . . . it’s nothing. I didn’t even sign up yet. You’re right, it’s dumb.”

  “No,” I say, correcting my tone. “It’s not dumb. I didn’t say that. I just didn’t know you—”

  “I won’t do it if you don’t want me to,” he says.

  “It shouldn’t be up to me,” I say, because my deep down honest answer would be that I don’t want him to. But I’m not about to make Dad’s life even worse with brutal honesty. I hate myself for even thinking brutal honesty, and I feel my heart speed up.

  The symptoms of cardiac arrhythmia are so vague—a freaking “fluttery heart”? Lots of things can give you a fluttery heart, like kissing someone or seeing otters at the aquarium. It’s hard to be constantly vigilant. Dad let me get a second and then a third opinion after Mom died, but if Mom didn’t know something was wrong until it was way too late, how can I trust them?

  “You should totally do it,” I say with all the enthusiasm I have. “Go meet someone!”

  “What should I say are my hobbies?” Dad asks, instead of ducking out of the topic, like I expect him to. “I’ve never had to worry about having hobbies.”

  “Cooking,” I say. “Cooking sounds good on a dating site, right?”

  “I don’t think heating up your weird lasagnas counts as cooking,” he says.

  “But you used to, sometimes. The salmon with veggies, and spaghetti. Your spaghetti was always better than Mom’s.”

  Dad sighs, and I feel that I’ve done the wrong thing by bringing her up.

  “You could also—”

  “Maybe I’ll wait to do this until I don’t have to lie about having hobbies,” he says.

  I feel something in me settle, even if that isn’t at all fair.

  The next time I emerge from my room, thinking about maybe watching TV, I find Dad in the living room doing exactly that. It’s my first Saturday night as a senior, and I’m having literally the same evening as my forty-six-year-old father. Maybe worse? He was at least thinking about dating. He’s not cursed.

  “I’m going to walk to Von’s,” I tell Dad. “We’re out of . . .”

  I can’t think of what we’re actually out of, but luckily he just gives me cash and waves me off. It feels good to be out of the house again, and I hope that it’s not a bad omen of my future that it also feels good to be alone.

  Up ahead of me, I hear a dog barking—but not any sort of threatening barking. It’s the sound of tiny yapping, and when I turn the corner onto Pass Avenue, a little black-and-white dog makes a beeline for me.

  “Catch him!” someone shouts, and I don’t question it. I’ve never been athletic like James, but I can be fast in short bursts. And within moments, the dog is in my arms, continuing to yap in protest.

  “Oh my god, thank you.” The dog chaser catches up with me, and I realize it’s someone from school. Magnolia Park is big, so there are a lot of people like this girl who I recognize on sight but couldn’t name if I was being held at gunpoint.

  Not even under much less stressful circumstances.

  I hold on tightly to the loud squirming dog, who’s clearly already plotting another escape. “Is this your dog?”

  “He’s my aunt’s dog.” She reaches out to clip a leash to the dog’s collar. “She’s letting me watch him this weekend and . . .”

  “It’s going super great?”

  She laughs and pushes her hair back from her face. Her hair’s tall in front, short like a boy’s everywhere else, swooped up and over, and it stays put where she shoves it. “Oh yeah, super great for sure.”

  I tentatively set the dog on the ground and breathe a sigh of relief when the leash keeps him from escaping. “He seems angry.”

  “My aunt works from home, so he’s not used to being without her. It’s pretty codependent,” she says. “It’s lucky you were here, though. Especially because you have super strength, ripping doors off of lockers and all.”

  Oh, no.

  “Oh, god, I’m sorry,” she says, and everything must be apparent on my face. “I just thought that it was funny—I’m an asshole.”

  “You’re not an asshole,” I say, which I can feel, even if I don’t really know her. It’s easy to forget sometimes that while others might get lost in the crowded halls of Magnolia Park High, Matty and I were visible. We were one of those couples, and it doesn’t hurt that Logan and James had been, too, up until graduation last school year.

  “I accidentally am.” The girl holds firm to the leash as the little dog strains against it. “All of the time.”

  “Me too.” I think of Dad and how his face looked thinking about Mom’s spaghetti. “It’s hard not to be. Maybe for some people it’s not? For me it is.”

  She watches me for a moment or two. “So where are you heading? None of your business, Quinn, is an acceptable answer, obviously.”

  “I’m just going to Von’s to buy . . .” I shrug. “Whatever. Nonvegetarian lasagna.”

  “Please don’t buy premade lasagna,” the girl—Quinn—says. “My mom’s half-Italian. Microwave lasagna is an affront to our people.”

&
nbsp; This is how I end up in Von’s with a dog hiding in my bag and Quinn loading a plastic grocery basket with lasagna ingredients. She shops with the confidence of an adult, decisively selecting meats and cheeses and pasta and asking me questions about my family’s spice cabinet.

  We walk back to Quinn’s aunt’s house to drop off the dog, and then I lead Quinn back to my house. Dad looks understandably surprised to see so much activity in the kitchen, but Quinn has such a command of everything that it somehow normalizes the situation. I don’t really help, but I don’t think that it matters.

  “I guess I should go,” Quinn says once she’s slid the lasagna into the oven. She turns and flashes me a smile. “Check on Buckley.”

  “Who’s Buckley?” I ask, and she laughs.

  “The beast from hell who ate your ChapStick,” she says, because that ended up being the only consequence of hiding the dog in my purse.

  “Good luck,” I tell her. “And . . . thank you for helping me.”

  “Tell me how it turns out,” she says with a nod to the oven.

  I take out my phone to get her number. There are five new texts from Matty, and while a strong and brave person would delete them immediately, I know I’ll read them as soon as I have a moment alone.

  “I like your friend,” Dad says once Quinn’s gone. “Why hasn’t she been around more?”

  It suddenly seems silly to admit I’d never even spoken a word to Quinn before tonight, so I just smile and shrug.

  I text Quinn until I fall asleep, and it’s not until I wake up the next morning with an imprint of my phone on my arm that I remember there were five texts from Matty I haven’t read yet.

  I screencap them, all in a row, and text them to James, and for the first time I wish I would have talked to Quinn about Matty, because I can feel how funny she’d think these were. But knowing a new person is a special kind of magic, because they don’t have to see everything. Quinn doesn’t know my mom is dead or the intricacies of Matty and me. And even though I can imagine her laughter, especially at “drnuk miss yo,” it’s nice knowing that, for Quinn, I’m a new person, too.

  CHAPTER THREE

  June of Senior Year

  JAMES

  “This is pointless,” I mutter while pulling a hair elastic off my wrist so I can sweep my long hair off my neck. We’re practically high school graduates, and instead of sitting inside having to do relatively little in the air-conditioning, we’re outside in the suffocating Burbank heat rehearsing graduation.

  “Why are you in such a crappy mood?” Mariana asks. She and Sofia are walking behind us. It’s a funny combination because all four of us have barely been together since very early in the school year, before Kat relocated the two of us to the other lunch table. Technically at this point they’re just walking behind me, though, because (unsurprisingly) Kat’s nowhere to be found.

  “We just have to walk down the aisle and take seats,” I say. “I don’t know why we have to rehearse that.”

  “Some people are really stupid and need the run-through,” Mariana says, in the most sugarcoated voice imaginable. I’ve missed her brand of salty and sweet. “This seems like a weird thing to get hung up on, James.”

  I’d text Logan to find out how useless he thought graduation rehearsal was, but it could send the wrong message. It’s incredible how many things can be interpreted as I miss you and want you back and also deeply want to have sex with you when the recipient is desperately seeking that meaning.

  “James, I feel like we haven’t hung out in so long,” Sofia says.

  I shrug, instead of saying that it’s because that’s an accurate fact. Last year, a day didn’t go by that Mariana didn’t say something so snarky that we’d laugh until we cried, and Sofia had some overly heartfelt thing to share with us (that inevitably led to another snarky comment from Mariana). Our lunch table seemed like the center of Magnolia Park, and not the way that sort of thing went in stereotypical movies about high school. Sure, people like Matty & Co. could border on being assholes, but on the whole, we just weren’t like that. I can so clearly picture sitting right between Logan and Kat while laughing so hard at something that I couldn’t even eat my lunch. Senior year should have been more of the same; it was all I’d wanted. Everything felt straightforward and decided back then.

  “Are you walking alone?” Mariana asks me.

  “No one’s walking alone,” Sofia says. “If you’re a friendless loser, school admin will pair you up with another friendless loser.”

  “Aw!” Kat bounces over, finally. “Maybe that’s how people fall in love.”

  “The rom-com no one is waiting for,” Mariana says, and I grin.

  “To answer your question,” I say, “I’m walking with Kat. At least, I signed up to walk with Kat.”

  “OK, yes, true, but here’s the thing.” A giggle escapes her lips, and I wonder just how immoral it is to wish unhappiness on someone. Logan would probably have an answer for that, too.

  I miss Logan too much for words. Is it possible that my fingers literally itch to text him? Maybe the truth is that a simple question about rehearsal or immorality would be a secret message about missing and wanting and loving. I hardly want to admit that, though. Not to Logan. Barely even to myself.

  “So now that Raina and Gretchen are together, they really want to walk together. Raina was originally supposed to walk with Quinn, so now Quinn doesn’t have anyone, so I volunteered to walk with her. But some girl from T&F was supposed to walk with Gretchen, so I’m sure you guys know each other. That’ll be fine, right? Then, like, everyone’s got someone?”

  “What girl?” I ask, instead of what I want to say, which is of fucking course it’s not fine.

  “It’s Jill,” Gretchen says, walking over with Raina in tow. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  Jill Pang is standing behind them, and she makes eye contact with me. We both roll our eyes, so I guess it’s fine. As fine as getting ditched at graduation by your supposed best friend can be.

  “Are you OK?” Kat asks me while furiously texting.

  “Sure.” I’d kept waiting for something, but at this point I’m not sure what we still have left to snap us back into place. School is nearly over, and shouldn’t something have done it by now? We haven’t talked much about prom or even, really, Disneyland, or the simple fact that I can’t remember the last time that I was the one Kat was furiously texting. While I miss plenty of things about last year, it’s less the lunch table—and maybe even Logan—and more Kat that I miss. I had no idea how you could stand right next to someone and yet have no clue how to get back to them. Though I guess that now it’s more that I’m standing behind someone.

  “Students, remain in proper formation,” Vice Principal Benway says as she makes her way down the aisle. We aren’t even moving yet. “Miss Rydell, please put away your phone.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Benway,” Kat says in her innocent little girl voice.

  “Even though we’re outside and your graduation is in a few days, we still need everyone to follow the student handbook,” Ms. Benway says. Regardless of everything, I make eye contact with Kat because there’s no way that statement can escape an eye roll.

  “By the way, Miss Rydell,” Ms. Benway continues, “I was very impressed with your prom campaign. It’s heartening seeing young people fighting for their beliefs.”

  I regret our mutual eye roll so much now. I regret there’s no one here for me to share a new eye roll with. Seriously . . . beliefs? I’ve never seen someone get so much credit for needing to be the center of attention at any cost.

  “Thank you so much, Ms. Benway.” Kat actually places her hand over her own heart. “I feel so fortunate I was at a school like Magnolia Park where we were taken seriously.”

  I glance back at Mariana and Sofia, but they look as enthralled with Kat as Ms. Benway. And, of course, that’s why I miss them to begin with. Everything felt so easy t
hen: friendships, boyfriends, the future. But now my feelings are too messy. It’s like something has been rotting from within and now there’s no way to know when it started.

  Kat swings around so that her hip knocks against mine. It suddenly feels like us, like James and Kat with no distance, no breakups, no walking separately at graduation. “You’re coming to the grad pre-party at Adrian’s tonight, right?”

  I shrug. “I might not.”

  “James!” She pulls on her necklaces, the old and new monograms glinting in the sun. “It’s our last high school party. By Saturday night we’ll be freshmen again.”

  “Oh, god,” I say. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “It’s terrifying, right? So that solves it. You’re coming.”

  For all the parties I’ve managed to avoid this year, I’m not sure why I’m ending the year with one. There was more than a brief moment earlier today when I wanted to just call it off. Even the idea of walking with anyone but Kat at graduation, much less the reality of it . . . Shouldn’t we just admit the friendship had, somehow, run its course? Sure, we might have moments where things feel just like before, but that doesn’t erase the long stretches of time when they don’t.

  So of course it might be naive that I’m thinking of tonight’s party invite as a potential magic elixir. You have no idea what you’ll believe until you have to.

  At Adrian Vardanyan’s house, I slip past Matty and Co., managing to walk past all of them without any eye contact from Matty, or even from Co. Matty doesn’t seem like the center of attention the way he used to, though, and I figure that’s because the reigning king of a high school class doesn’t do stuff like get hung up for so long on his ex-girlfriend, and definitely doesn’t say ugly, shitty things to her. Not Matty Saves the World Evans, at least.