Best Friends Forever

by Jennifer Weiner

  Jordan told her what he could: the reunion, the belt they’d found in the parking lot, how one of Jon’s classmates had remembered that Jon had taken things. Even before he’d finished, Ms. Jennings was shaking her head again. “First of all, he’d have to have gotten out to Pleasant Ridge. And Jon doesn’t drive.”

  “No car?” Even as he asked, he remembered the non-driver’s ID.

  Ms. Jennings shook her head again. “Jon’s never had a license, far as I know. He’s got a bus pass, is all. I’d be mighty surprised to learn the bus stops in front of a country club in the suburbs, and even if it did, it’d be three or four transfers. Jon couldn’t do that without someone telling him how.”

  Trying again, Jordan asked, “Where’s his room?”

  “You can’t go in there. Not without a warrant.”

  “I don’t want to search it,” Jordan said. “I just want to see it.” She looked at him for a long moment, possibly weighing the inconvenience and the trouble of Jordan returning with an actual warrant, before leading him up a narrow flight of stairs.

  Jon’s room was at the far end of the house, a small rectangle with a single bed, a dresser, and a high window with bars on the outside, overlooking the house’s weedy backyard, and it looked like a wing of the world’s smallest art gallery. Each wall was covered, floor to ceiling, in photographs and framed pictures, paintings and drawings like the ones on Addie Downs’s walls. There were drawings of a boy—a young Jon, Jordan thought, Jon as he’d once been. In the pictures, the boy, who was slim and tanned and fair-haired, ran and jumped and swam and kicked a soccer ball. Sometimes there were other people in the pictures—a heavyset woman with blue eyes and long hair, a pale man smiling faintly with puppets dangling from his hands—but most of the pictures (some were paintings, Jordan thought, and some were drawings done with colored pencils or pastel crayons) were of the boy, doing a dozen different boylike things: dangling a fishing pole into a misty, silvery lake; riding a bike down a street Jordan thought he recognized as Crescent Drive; waiting for the school bus with a backpack on his back. In one painting the boy and a man—his father, Jordan guessed—were standing in the darkness, peering up into the starry sky.

  “They’re something, aren’t they?” asked Verona Jennings, and Jordan could only nod. He thought he saw what Addie had tried for, how she’d drawn and painted her brother’s entire pre-accident history, how she’d given him this room, this world, where he was as he had been, young and handsome and unbroken.

  He took in each of the four walls, looking at all of the pictures, finding a few of a girl he guessed was Addie, here and there, hovering behind her older brother as he held a lit candle to a candelabra (a menorah? he wondered, thinking of Holly), sitting by the side of the pool with another, skinny blond girl next to her. Their feet dangled in the water as Jon stood on the high dive, preparing to jump.

  “Five minutes,” said Verona Jennings. “I’ve got things to do.” There was a thick rug on Jon’s floor, cousin of the one in his sister’s living room, and a pair of plump pillows in crisp dark-blue cases on the bed. A laminated schedule—a twin of the one on the fridge, although this one was decorated with gold foil stars—hung on the closet door, and a half-dozen white button-down shirts, jeans, and khakis were lined up inside, along with a red polyester Walgreens pinney with a rectangular name tag reading I’m JON. How can I help you? A pair of photographs in clear plastic frames stood on the dresser. Jordan stepped close to examine one and saw little Addie and little Jon in a shot that had surely been taken on the first day of school. Both children wore backpacks and brand-new clothes, and there was a yellow school bus in the background. Addie was giving a tentative smile. Jon was squinting into the sunshine, handsome and bored. Jordan reached for the picture.

  “Don’t touch anything!” Ms. Jennings said. He let his hands fall to his sides and considered the second shot, this one of Jon and Addie as grown-ups. Brother and sister were posed in front of a Christmas tree. Jon wore blue jeans and a plaid shirt, and would have been handsome if it hadn’t been for the dazed, vacant look in his eyes.

  Addie Downs was bigger. Not enormous, but much heavier than the woman he’d met, wearing tights and a black sweater-dress that fell halfway down her calves. She had light-brown hair pulled back from her double-chinned face by a headband, thick wrists, plump hands, and she was smiling… the same sweet, tentative smile that made her size all the more heartbreaking, because it was the smile of a woman who hadn’t given up, who still dreamed of finding something wonderful underneath the Christmas tree.

  Poor thing, he thought as Ms. Jennings said, “She’s lost a lot of weight.” Poor things, both of them. He waited until her back was turned and she was heading down the hall before slipping quietly across the room and sliding the grown-up picture of Addie and her brother into his pocket. Jon didn’t strike him as a criminal… but he’d been wrong about people before.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Addie?”

  I came awake with a gasp, imagining that it was Vijay’s hand on my shoulder, that Vijay had come back to me. I opened my eyes to find Val sitting behind the wheel (she’d been driving for the last hour). We were in the old station wagon, in a McDonald’s parking lot. I could smell hot grease and frying meat, and could see the red-and-yellow sign through the windshield. The dashboard clock claimed that it was just after two in the afternoon.

  “Where are we?” My tongue felt thick. I blinked, wriggling around in the seat.

  “About a hundred miles outside of St. Louis. We need money,” Val said.

  I tried to remember what I’d had in my purse when Val had shown up. I’d taken out a hundred dollars in preparation for my date, spent ten of them on doughnuts and coffee, twenty on gas, and given twenty more to Jon. “I have fifty dollars,” I said.

  She shook her head. “That’s not enough. But don’t worry. I have a plan.” She nodded toward the entrance of the restaurant. A mother with a baby in her arms and a little curly-headed girl at her side walked through the doors.

  I looked at Val. “Oh, no. Come on. You want to rob a McDonald’s?”

  “Maybe a liquor store,” she said, a little defensively. “Or a Seven-Eleven. Don’t you always read about places like that getting robbed? I bet it’s easy!”

  I didn’t answer, thinking that I was always reading about the arrests of people who tried to rob fast-food restaurants, and liquor stores, which meant it wasn’t easy at all. “We could just go to a bank,” I offered.

  “Of course,” she said. “Because that’s where the money is! Okay, here’s what I’m thinking: we can buy masks at a drugstore. I’ll do the talking. We’ll tell them we want ten thousand dollars in unmarked bills.”

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” I said. “It’s a month after Halloween. No place is going to have masks, so we just find a TD Bank, where I have a checking and savings account, and I’ll make a withdrawal.”

  “You can’t do that,” she said. “They’ll find out! They’ll trace it, and they’ll know we were here!”

  “Oh, like they’re not going to catch us if we rob a bank in Halloween masks.” I took a swig of warm water from the bottle in my bag. “Listen. Have you thought about what happens when this is over?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest, looking sullen. “Dan will either turn up, or he won’t.”

  “And then what? What about your job?”

  “They’re not expecting me back until Tuesday, and it’s not a big deal if I take off for a few days,” she said. “They probably just think I went to get a boob job or something.”

  “You don’t need to tell them in advance?”

  She shook her head in sorrow at the extent of my naïveté. “Addie. If you tell them in advance, then it leaks. Then all the bloggers publish before-and-after pictures of you, and everybody knows.”

  “But if you get plastic surgery, aren’t people supposed to notice that you look different? Isn’t people noticing kind of the point?”

  Sh
e rolled her eyes. “You just say you got some sun.”

  “Fantastic. Look, just drop me off at TD Bank, and I’ll get us all the money we need.”

  Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that. The bank was packed and overheated, and I had to wait by the automated change-counter for a spot at the back of the line. Filling out the withdrawal slip, trying to guess just how much cash we’d need to finance an unspecified length of time at an undisclosed location, I told myself it was unlikely that Jordan Novick had already faxed my name and photograph to every bank in the chain. He was thinking of me only as the relative of a potential suspect, if he was thinking of me at all.

  He’d been nice, though, I thought as I joined the throng of upstanding citizens. It figured that the first nice, non-crazy guy I’d meet would be investigating a crime, a crime in which I was now implicated. Even if Dan Swansea did turn up and clear Val’s good name, Jordan probably wouldn’t be interested in me. “I’d like to make a withdrawal, please,” I said when the teller beckoned me forward, and I slid my slip and driver’s license across the counter. An instant later, Valerie, with the fringed scarf wrapped burka-style over her head and most of her face, sidled up beside me and snatched the withdrawal slip back.

  “This is a robbery,” she told the teller.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Val, it is not. It’s not,” I said to the teller. She had a round face and red lipstick and a felt and fake-fur Santa hat on her head. She looked from my face to Val’s and back again. “I’ve got a gun,” Val whispered. “Give me whatever’s in the drawer.” She pulled a plastic shopping bag out of her purse and held it open in front of the teller’s startled face. “Put it in here. Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt. Come with me if you want to live.” And then, apparently having run out of movie lines to quote, she waved the empty bag for emphasis.

  “Ignore her,” I said to the teller, whose name tag read TIARA. I tried to give her my license and the withdrawal slip again. Val clamped her hand down over mine.

  “We need ten Gs in unmarked, nonsequential bills,” she said through lips that barely moved. “No dye packets. No alarms. Be cool, sister, and we’ll all make it out of here just fine.”

  Tiara finally opened her mouth, revealing a wad of grape-scented gum the size of a golf ball and a silver stud through the meat of her tongue. “Ohmygod.”

  “Ignore her,” I repeated. “She doesn’t have a gun.”

  “Do so.” Val reached into her purse and pulled out a slim rectangle of what looked like sterling silver. “Now get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.”

  “Valerie,” I said. “That’s a tampon case.”

  “Yeah, well. I’ve got a gun. It’s in here. Somewhere.” Val unloaded mints and makeup and leather luggage tags onto the narrow granite ledge of the counter. Meanwhile, Tiara had unlocked her drawer and was sliding banded stacks of money at me. I was pushing them back at her as Val pulled something out of her handbag.

  “Here!”

  “That’s an eyelash curler.”

  “This?”

  “iPod.”

  “Listen.” Tiara was whispering to us. “Just leave two stacks of fifties in the green Saturn parked in the corner out back, and we’re all good. I won’t pull the alarm until you leave.”

  Val’s eyes lit up. “Seriously?” she asked in her normal newscastery voice. “You are so cool!”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Listen. Tiara. We aren’t doing this. We’re not…”

  “Here you go,” said Tiara. She’d gone pale, but her hands were working smoothly. Packets of bills tumbled into the bag. I looked around to see if anyone in the bustling bank was noticing the robbery in progress. It didn’t look that way. At the station next to me, a small, bald man was arguing with the teller about when his out-of-state check would clear, and there was a commotion over by the change-counter that seemed to have resulted from someone’s purse-dog pooping on the floor.

  “That’s ten thousand dollars,” said Tiara. “You’re gonna take care of me, right?” With one long pink-glossed acrylic nail she pointed at a picture she had Scotch-taped to the side of her computer. A little boy in corduroys was sitting on Santa’s knee. “That’s my baby.”

  “We got you,” Val promised. She looped the bag’s handles around her wrists. “Thanks.”

  I waited until Val was out the door, then took my withdrawal slip back, crossed out the $2,000 I’d planned on taking out, and wrote in $10,000. “Just take it out of my account, okay?” I said to Tiara, who nodded, continuing to work at her gum, as placid as if she got robbed every day of the week. “As long as you take care of me,” she said, and I nodded—what choice did I have?

  “Merry Christmas!” she called, and I wished her the same.

  Out in the parking lot behind the bank, we found Tiara’s Saturn. The doors were locked, but the passenger’s-side window was open wide enough for us to slip two of the wrapped money packets through. “Ho ho ho,” said Val. She stared at the bank’s backside for a minute. “Wow. She was cool.”

  “Okay, just for the record? You are insane. And we need to get out of here.”

  “You don’t want to rob the McDonald’s?”

  I thought about it. Strange as it seemed, part of me actually did. “We should go,” I said again.

  “How about you drive for a while?” she said, and tossed me the keys.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  He was in heaven. That explained everything. On his way along the road, he’d been hit by a car, and he’d died, or maybe he’d frozen to death on the road somewhere, and now he was in heaven, and heaven was a white bed with a white lace canopy on top and a cross made of scalloped white wood nailed to the wall above it, across from a doily-topped dresser covered with painted plaster dolls in elaborate gowns, the kinds of things he thought lonely women who lived alone with their cats bought late at night on QVC. “A new… day… has… come,” a sweet soprano sang. In heaven, thought Dan, Céline Dion provided the sound track.

  He sat up, groaning at the tsunami of pain that rolled through his head, as a woman came into the room. She carried a tray in her hands—there was a steaming mug of something, a bowl of what smelled like oatmeal, a small glass of orange juice so bright it looked almost psychedelic, and a larger glass of milk.

  “You’re awake,” she said as Dan hastily rearranged the blankets over his morning erection. He wasn’t sure if the woman in the pink velour bathrobe was an angel—she looked kind of grumpy and also kind of familiar—but he wasn’t taking any chances or risking causing any offense.

  “Here,” she said, and set the tray on his lap. Not gently, either. Hot tea slopped over the edge of the mug and trickled through the blankets. Dan looked at her, really looked at her, and the pieces fell into place.

  “Holy Mary?” he blurted. That wasn’t really her name. Her real name was Meredith Armbruster, but to Dan and his friends, she’d been Holy Mary, who’d joined that weird culty church that convened in a renovated gas station in Pleasant Ridge’s crummiest neighborhood; Holy Mary, who’d gotten herself excused from gym class (her faith forbade her from letting the other girls see her underpants) and biology class (no evolution) and health class (no fornication). They’d called her Holy Mary, and Carrie, after the girl from the movie who’d gotten doused in pigs’ blood and then burned down the prom.

  She blinked, then frowned. “Take your aspirin,” she said. “Drink your milk.”

  Dan lifted the cup. “What happened?” He could remember how she’d found him on the side of the road and driven him to her house. She’d helped him into the bathroom, out of his trash bags, and then, when he was naked and shivering before her, dabbed the blood away from the wound on the side of his head. Then she’d shooed him into the shower and washed him, head to toe, kneeling to soap and rinse his feet as he huddled, shivering and sick and aching and still, he realized, very very drunk, against the pink-tiled walls.

  “What happened?” he asked again, hearing the silence that surrounded them, guessing that the rest of t
he house was empty, that this was Merry’s parents’ house and that he was in what had been her high school bedroom. Where other girls might have had posters or pictures, she had that cross, draped with a set of rosary beads. Tucked into the edge of the mirror, where other girls might have kept a picture of their boyfriend or their best friend, was a mass card. Jesus had his hands clasped in prayer and his eyes tilted toward the heavens.

  “What happened,” said Merry, “is between you and Our Father.” She clasped her hands and looked heavenward, just like Jesus on her mirror.

  “Last night,” Dan said. “You found me…”

  “You were walking along the road. You were wearing garbage bags. I helped you—that was just Christian charity; any decent person would have done the same thing. I brought you back here. I cleaned you up and I let you sleep.”

  Dan gave a dry and rueful chuckle. “I guess I was pretty wasted.”

  Merry pursed her lips. “‘Do not gaze at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup, when it goes down smoothly. In the end, it bites like a snake and poisons like a viper.’”

  He nodded, grimacing as his stomach roiled and the world wobbled in front of him. “True that.”

  She closed her mouth, looking at him sternly. “You ruined those girls’ lives,” she said after a moment.

  Dan put the cup down. “What are you talking about?”

  “Valerie and Adelaide.”

  “I didn’t…” The words echoed in his head, rolling around like bowling balls on a dance floor.

  “‘And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.’”

  Dan shook his head, which made it ache even worse. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He and Val had been kids, fooling around. Val had cried afterward—he’d remembered that—but that was because it had been her first time. At least that was what he’d thought, what he’d told himself for years, and when Addie had accused him, Val had said no. She’d backed him up. She’d sat with him at lunch for the rest of the year, for Chrissake, and was that the behavior of a girl who’d been harmed, who’d been violated? No. No, it was not.