Best Friend Emma

by Sally Warner

  Poor Annie Pat had been thinking that she and Murphy would be the only kids at their holiday meal. And you can’t really count on babies for a good time.

  “What about you, Cynthia?” one of the neighbor-friends asks. “What are you gonna do tomorrow?”

  “Same old, same old,” Cynthia says, smoothing back her already-smooth hair while she pretends to be grown-up and bored—about a major holiday.

  And that’s just rude! Also, it’s probably unpatriotic.

  “But me and my mom always go clothes shopping the day after Thanksgiving,” Cynthia adds, “and that’s fun. We get up real early, when it’s still dark outside.”

  “Oooh, shopping,” Fiona and Heather echo, as if that’s really the best part about Thanksgiving. Talk about missing the point!

  Annie Pat and I barely look at each other before we start to giggle, and then to laugh, because we just can’t help it. And then Kry Rodriguez starts laughing, too. “Turkeys drool, best friends rule!” I whisper to the two of them, which just gets all three of us laughing more.

  Where did that goofy saying come from? Maybe I made it up! But, speaking as a future nature scientist, I do not think turkeys really can drool.

  And it would be kind of yucky if they could.

  “What did you say?” Cynthia asks, springing to her feet. “Were you guys whispering bad things about me?”

  “Course not,” Kry says, soothing Cynthia’s ruffled feathers. And she’s not lying, either, because Kry didn’t necessarily know who I was talking about when I said “turkeys.”

  “Well okay, then,” Cynthia says with a sniff.

  “Sit down, Cynthia,” Heather coos, patting the picnic bench next to her.

  “Have some raisins,” Fiona says, rattling her little red cardboard box in a tempting way.

  Things are quiet again at our lunch table—in comparison to the boys’ table, anyway.

  And I think how happy I am, even though I’m divorced. I’m happy to have a best friend like Annie Pat Masterson, who I will be visiting Marine Universe with the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and a maybe-new-friend like Kry Rodriguez, and even to have an ex-friend like Cynthia Harbison, who I’m not even mad at anymore, for some reason.

  I have that … that full feeling you get when things with you and your friends are just right.

  I guess you could say I’m feeling thankful.

  A whole day early, too!