Best Friends Forever

by Jennifer Weiner

  Val stood on her tiptoes and extracted a bottle of vodka. She rummaged in the freezer and came up with a handful of ice. “Drink?” she asked. I shook my head. She dumped the ice and a slug of vodka into a juice glass and gulped. Then she hoisted herself onto the counter next to the sink—her old familiar perch, the place I’d seen her a hundred, maybe a thousand times, with her long legs swinging, dirty white socks on her feet, and usually a scrape or a Band-Aid or two decorating each knee. “Where are Ron and Nancy?” I could hear the strain in her voice as she tried for her old familiar tone, that life’s-a-lark buoyancy with which she’d formerly addressed, or discussed, my parents (how amused she’d been to learn that they had the exact same names as our president and first lady!).

  I lifted the kettle from the stove. “They died.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Yes.”

  Sadness flickered across Valerie’s face. Her lips fluttered; her carefully tended eyebrows drew together. It was the same expression she probably used to convey her sorrow when telling the people of the Chicago metro area that there were thunderstorms on the way, and just in time to spoil the holiday weekend. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I’d heard something, but my mom moved away. When was this?”

  “A while back.” I pulled two mugs off the shelf, found spoons and tea bags and sugar. “Would you like some tea, or are we sticking with the hard stuff tonight?” Val shook her head. I put one of the mugs back and filled the other for myself as she rubbed her hands against her thighs, then wrapped her arms around herself.

  “And Jon?” She hopped off the counter and circled the room, stopping to check out a painting of a Granny Smith apple in a copper bowl. “Did you do this?”

  I nodded. “Pretty,” Val said, and wandered over to the refrigerator, where she read the note I’d taped there. “Military funeral?” she asked. “Did you join the army?”

  “Valerie,” I said. “We haven’t spoken in years, and now you show up in the middle of the night, looking like you’ve seen a ghost, with blood on your coat…”

  She cringed inside her red dress. “I can explain,” she said. Instead of throaty, her voice sounded hoarse. “I’ll tell you everything, but you have to promise to help me.” I’m not promising you anything, I started to say. I’d gotten as far as opening my mouth when Val said, “It’s about Dan Swansea.”

  My skin prickled with goose bumps. My mouth felt dry as salt. “What about him?”

  “He was at the reunion.”

  I shrugged. No surprise there. Dan Swansea had been a star football player and the best-looking boy in our class. He’d also been a troublemaker, a snapper of bra straps, an instigator of food fights and Senior Skip Day, a creative and habitual cheater, the kind of guy who’d stuff the occasional nerd in a locker just to break up the boredom of the school week. For most of high school, he’d also been the object of my extremely secret crush. By senior year, he’d turned into something else altogether.

  “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 all 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 collected my diploma 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 fellow 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?) welled 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 telling 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 full force of her beauty and vulnerability 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’ll help me?”

  “Tell 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 telling 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 tell myself that I was making people’s lives better in some tiny, transient way, bringing beauty and joy for less than three dollars a pop. My current project was a painting of a bouquet of flowers, yellow daffodils with one brilliant 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. “Well. You knew about the reunion, right?”

  “I knew.” For the past nine months, a steady stream of postcards in school colors had invaded 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 attended. Bring pictures! the postcards had urged. Send news! I’d pitched them all, 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.

  “And I think I may have killed him.”

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

  She gave a shuddering sigh. “Killed him. I think maybe I killed him. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  My mouth fell open. “You killed Dan Swansea?”

  “Well, 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 willed myself to be still, 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. “Tell 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 allowed herself to preen briefly at the word “famous.” I didn’t have the heart to tell 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 surviving 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 recalling two hulking boys in football 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 cell 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 filled with tangled marionette wires, or my brother’s face, blank and bewildered, as the vice principal asked him, impatiently, which boys had thrown his backpack down the stairs, or Halloween night and the cop car parked outside my house, lights flashing, painting the walls red, then blue, red, then blue. I’d remember Mrs. Bass’s voice on the telephone, telling me about my father. I’d remember covering my mother’s body with a blanket that I’d knitted, telling 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 call 911, but I knew they’d trace the call and it would be in the papers, and I didn’t know what else to do, so I grabbed up all 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 tell 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. “Call 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’ll just go look!” she pleaded. “If he’s alive, we’ll call 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 will call the police and turn myself in.”

  Ha. Valerie Adler was not the call-the-police-and-turn-yourself-in type. Valerie Adler was the steal-a-car-and-drive-across-the-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 call 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 still thought of as my parents’ and pulled on jeans and a sweater and heavy black clogs. You don’t have to do what she tells you!

  I grabbed my purse, my keys, my wallet, 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 all 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 followed 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 carefully down the driveway, and aimed the car toward the highway.

  SEVEN

  The Adlers moved in during the last week of June, and by July, Valerie and I were inseparable. 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 ball 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, m
y 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 usually ate one or one and a half of the ham and Swiss or peanut butter and jelly, 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 full 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.

  After lunch, my mother would return to the screened-in sunporch, taking along a notebook and a pitcher of iced tea. My father would return to the basement or the garage. Jon would dump his dishes in the sink, jump on his bike, and vanish until dinnertime. I’d pack snacks—cherries and pretzels, apples and granola bars—and wait for Valerie to determine our afternoon activity. She was full of ideas, and I was happy to go along with them. Let’s try to skateboard down Summit Drive, she’d say, and off we’d go, to borrow a skateboard and give it a try. Or, Let’s ride our bikes to the mall and see a movie! I was terrified of biking on busy roads, but even more terrified of telling Val that and having her find another friend, so I’d follow her, the taste of copper pennies in my mouth as I pedaled, my hands greased with sweat as I gripped the handlebars for the length of the two-mile trip.