My Worst Best Friend

by Dyan Sheldon

“What note?”

  “The one I left at Java.” I should have known the girl would forget to give it to her. It wasn’t as if she had nothing else to do. “You know, to tell you where I was so you could come after me. Because you weren’t answering your phone.”

  “Ohmigod, Gracie…” Savanna’s laugh didn’t always sound like a honking goose. “You left me a note?” Sometimes it sounded like beads bouncing on the floor. “But I never made it to Java.”

  “Really? You didn’t show up at all?” That would be one scenario I hadn’t actually thought of.

  “Well, I didn’t see any point.” Savanna’s voice kind of shrugged. “I mean, it got pretty late so I figured you’d have given up and gone home.”

  Maybe I didn’t give Savanna enough credit for being practical.

  “You did?” It was just as well Cooper turned up or I might still be there, on my hundredth cup of tea.

  “Well, it’s not like it matters, is it?” asked Savanna. Another handful of beads clattered to the floor. “I mean, Gracie, you weren’t there. It really would’ve been, like, a total waste of my time if I’d gone to Java. And I called you as soon as I got home. I mean, I didn’t think you were going to go all incognito on me.”

  “Incommunicado.”

  “I’ve been calling you for hours, Gracie. Hours and hours. Why didn’t you answer your phone? You knew I’d be trying to get you.”

  “I’m sorry, Sav. I had to turn it off. And anyway, what about you? I tried to get you for hours and hours, too. Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

  “Because I couldn’t.” Savanna opened something that crackled.

  “What’s that?” I asked. “Mesquite potato chips?” Those were her favourites.

  “I know, I know… Too much salt and fat. But I’m, like, starving, Gray. I didn’t have any lunch.” She bit into a chip. “Anyway, I couldn’t answer my phone because I didn’t have it with me. The Crow’s Point Cuckoo hid it again.” The Crow’s Point Cuckoo was Savanna’s little sister, Sofia. Sofia was always finding new and imaginative places to hide Savanna’s phone. When I’d longed for a sister, it wasn’t one like her.

  I kicked off my shoes and leaned back against my pillows. “Where was it this time?” Everything was back to normal.

  “The mother found it in the hamper.”

  “But couldn’t you have called on—

  “Gracie,” interrupted Savanna. “Gracie, stop nudging me. There were really seriously extended circumstances working here.”

  “Extenuating.”

  “I mean, I have, like, the most awesome reason for not showing up today.”

  “Duh… I know that, Savanna.” Maybe it wasn’t alien abduction, but it had to be something bigger than getting a run in her tights. “What is it?”

  “I mean, like, really, Gray, you are not going to believe it! I almost can’t believe it myself.” Savanna’s voice rose with excitement.

  “Don’t keep me in suspense!” I laughed. “What happened?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Wait a second, will you? The Queen of the Nags is bellowing for me. I really don’t know why I couldn’t have been born to a normal family.” I heard her thump across her room and open the door. “Now what?” she bawled. “Can’t I even just talk on the phone in my own room without you getting on my case?” I moved my phone away from my ear. “All right … all right … I’ll turn it down. And then I’ll sit in the closet and whisper, shall I? Will that make you happy?” The door banged shut again. “Really, I’d be better off if I was being raised by wolves. She doesn’t let up on me for one teensy tiny fraction of a nanosecond. I swear she was on me as soon as I walked through the door.”

  “Savanna!” I begged. “Just tell me what happened!”

  “Are you sitting down? You have to be sitting down.”

  “I’m sitting down. Are you all right?”

  “All right? I’m like ten zillion times better than all right. I’m, like, excellently fabulous. I’ve never been so happy to be me in my whole life.”

  Since, unlike some of us, Savanna was always really happy to be herself, this was definitely something way more awesome, fantastic and phenomenal than mere time warps or alien abductions.

  “What, Savanna? What happened?”

  “It was incredible, Gray. It was, like, the last thing I expected. I mean, you wouldn’t. You couldn’t. It was like a boat from the blue.”

  I was so caught up in her excitement by then that I didn’t even correct her.

  “Savanna, for Pete’s sake! What happened? What was on the boat?”

  “You’re really sitting down, right?”

  “Savanna!”

  “And you understand that this is, like, totally and completely top secret, right? I mean, you have to promise and solemnly swear not to tell anyone, Gracie. Not even if they bribe you with a billion dollars or threaten to harm every iguana on the planet. Understood? It’s so top secret you can’t even tell yourself.”

  “Of course I promise.”

  “Reallyreallyreally?”

  “Savanna!”

  She took a big breath. “Gracie…” She paused. Dramatically. “Gracie, hold on to your socks!”

  “Savanna, I’m really begging you, just tell me what happened.”

  “I met someone!”

  That was so not what I was expecting to hear that I didn’t understand what she meant.

  “You what?”

  “I met someone! I met someone!” Now her voice was hitting heights usually only reached by panicked rabbits.

  “What do you mean, you ‘met someone’?” What kind of someone? An elephant herder? A camel driver? The President? Or did she mean like a hypnotist who made her forget she was going to the mall?

  “Oh, Gracie…” She laughed. “I mean I met someone. You know. I met a guy! This fantastic, incredible guy. I mean like really, Gray, he’s totally awesome.”

  “You met a guy?” I knew I sounded like an echo, but I couldn’t help myself. How could meeting a guy take half the day?

  “You can’t believe it either, can you? I mean, it is, like, so awesomely amazing how your whole life can change in just a few minutes.”

  I could have walked into town for the next hundred years and the only way my whole life would change was if a car hit me.

  “So you—”

  Savanna cut me off. “Ohmigod, he’s calling me! He’s calling me now! This is like so not typical guy behaviour. I mean, like, he only— Gracie, I have to go. I’ll talk to you later. Kisskissbyebye.”

  I shut my phone with a sigh.

  It was only then that I realized I never told Savanna what had happened to me.

  Chapter Six

  More Than One Surprise

  After Savanna hung up I sat down at my desk to do some homework while I waited for her to call back. I opened my math book. I got out a pad of paper. I sharpened a pencil. I turned to the first question. It might as well have been written in Urdu. I leaned back in my chair and stared at the photograph of a Jackson’s chameleon that I’d taped to the wall. He was hanging upside down on a piece of string.

  It was definitely my day for not being able to concentrate. I guess meeting someone is a lot more glamorous than discovering a talent for teaching, because all I could think about was Savanna. Who was this guy? What was his name? What did he look like? How did they meet? Where? Did she bump into him because she wasn’t looking where she was going? Did he drop something and she picked it up? Did he stop her to ask for directions? Did she stop him to pet his dog? The more I thought about Savanna’s day, the more my own seemed to pale into insignificance.

  I doodled in one corner of my pad. When I was younger and we still had a car, my dad and I used to go on camping trips in the summer. This one time we got to the campsite really late in a storm, and we pitched our tent in the dark without really knowing where we were. When I woke up in the morning, my dad was outside, calling me. “Gracie, come here!” he was shouting. “Hurry up!” I thought the car had
been stolen. I hurried up. We were camped beside a swamp. Mist was wrapped around it like a veil. Cranes and herons skimmed over the green water. An otter swam past as though we weren’t there. It was the most perfect thing I’d ever seen. That was the moment when I knew that I wanted to be a wildlife biologist. It was so beautiful it practically broke my heart. I burst into tears. But aside from that and stuff like getting choked up over sunrises and sunsets, I didn’t really have what you’d call a romantic nature. I preferred documentaries to love stories. Savanna liked love stories.

  I was still gazing at the wall behind my desk, but I wasn’t seeing the dangling chameleon with his three tiny horns, I was seeing Savanna. She was pulling her phone out of her bag as she left the dentist’s. With her dark hair and her red jacket and her nails decorated with tiny gold stars she looked like a gypsy princess – one who happened to be standing by a sign that said TL. Moreau, DDS. She flipped open her phone. She was about to call and tell me she was out of the chair and on her way. But just as she was about to hit Contacts, she looked up. This fantastic, incredible guy was coming towards her. She caught his eye. He stopped. He smiled. And then…

  And then what? Was it like that scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone first sees Apollonia and is hit by the thunderbolt? Did he shout out loud? Did he run after her? Or maybe it was more like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. He slung her over his shoulder and ran out

  of town.

  I was so lost in my thoughts that when my dad called me for supper I nearly jumped out of my chair.

  “Sanctuary!” cried Savanna. “A safe harbour in the storm-tossed seas of life!” She pushed open my bedroom door and strode through.

  I followed her into the room with the tray and shut the door with my foot.

  “Ohmigod, Gracie… Ohmigod…” Savanna dropped her bag on the floor and flung herself on my bed as though instead of getting a ride from her mother she’d run all the way and couldn’t stand up any more. “What would I have done if you weren’t home? I am, like, sooo glad you’re here.”

  And I was surprised that she was. I thought she had a date.

  “I did.” Savanna’s shoes dropped to the floor. “And I know I’m, like, truly terrible, ditching Arch at the last minute like that… But I just couldn’t deal with the Planet Archibald Snell tonight, Gray. Really and truly. I’d rather be plucking chickens. I mean, he eats through the whole movie, and then afterwards he spends, like, hours explaining the plot to me. The plot! Of a thriller! I mean, what’s to explain? They’re all the same.” She plumped a pillow and stuck it behind her. “Anyway, all I wanted to do tonight was talk to you.”

  I put the snacks down on the table next to the bed. “Are you sure you don’t want something else? I could heat up some soup.” Savanna hadn’t had any supper.

  “No, this is great.” She reached for a pickle. “I mean, frankly, I’m amazed I can eat anything. My stomach has more knots in it than a noose.”

  I sat down across from her. “Tell me everything,” I ordered. “Every single detail. I can’t stand the suspense any longer.” I couldn’t. When the bell rang, and my dad said it was either the police or Savanna Zindle, I was at the door before he finished his sentence.

  “Ohmigod…” Savanna leaned back with a sigh. “It’s been such an awesome day… I don’t think I know where to start.”

  “Start at the beginning.”

  “Well…” She looked as if there was a really high probability that she would never stop smiling. “His name’s Morgan – Morgan Scheck – and he’s, like, six-foot-two, and he’s got blond hair and the most awesome eyes, and he’s really well built, but not all muscles like he’s diseased or something, and when he smiles it’s like someone just turned on the lights, and—”

  “Savanna, that’s not what I meant.” I nudged her foot with mine. “I meant, how did you meet him? Were you strolling down the street and he just came up to you and said, ‘Hi, my name’s Morgan Scheck and I’d like to change your life’?”

  “Oh, Gracie, you are, like, sooo funny…” crowed Savanna. “Of course it wasn’t like that!” She bit into a chunk of cheese. “I met him at Dentist Tim’s.”

  I hadn’t thought of that possibility. “What?”

  “I know… I know… It is like so totally incredible.” She took another bite. “Usually the only people in the waiting room are either under twelve or over thirty. But there he was, just sitting there, suffering in manful silence and checking his emails.”

  “Are you saying you met a boy at the dentist’s?” The only thing that ever happened to me at the dentist’s was a shot of Novocain and a filling. And, sometimes, I had my teeth cleaned.

  “Not just a boy, Gray.” Savanna hugged herself. “This one’s really, really special. I just know he is. I mean, like how incredible is that? What are the chances? Like

  twenty trillion to one? There has to be, like, more chance of a blizzard in July. And get this – he was only there because he had a toothache and his regular dentist

  doesn’t work on Saturday so he was seeing Mrs Dentist Tim as an emergency. Isn’t that, like, too awesome? I mean, what if he’d gone to someone else? Or his tooth didn’t start throbbing till Sunday?”

  “If” may be a small word, but it takes up a lot of space.

  “Then you wouldn’t’ve met him.” I told you I wasn’t naturally romantic.

  “Exactly! We would’ve been like sheep that pass in the night.”

  “Ships.”

  “And you know what else is incredible?” She picked up another chunk of cheese. “He’s a Cancerian. Isn’t that amazing, Gracie? A Cancerian. I mean, that’s like my romantic ideal.” She paused to let her breath catch up with her. “It’s destiny, Gray, that’s what it is. It’s like Fate brought us together.” This time she wrapped a piece of bread around the cheese. “It can’t be anything else.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t the Tooth Fairy?”

  Savanna laughed. “Scoff all you want, Gracie Mooney, but it has to be Fate. I mean, what else could it be?”

  Dumb luck?

  Savanna made one of her Oh-Gracie faces. “I know you’re not into astrology and stuff like that,” Savanna went on, “but my horoscope did say something totally overwhelming and unexpected was going to happen today!” She waved her mini-sandwich at me. “And it did! Just like the stars predicted! I mean, how glad am I that I wore red?” Red was Savanna’s colour – the brighter the better. Mine was brown. “And I almost didn’t! I almost wore my blue turtleneck because it was already ironed and I was running really late. I mean, ohmigod, Gracie, I would’ve like blended right into the wall and he wouldn’t’ve known I was there and my life would’ve been ruined for ever.”

  It was a miracle the entire human species didn’t just stay in bed, paralyzed by the fear of wearing the wrong colour and nuking their lives.

  “Oh, don’t be unkind, Gracie. I know you’re an unbeliever, but I thought you’d be happy for me.”

  “I’m just teasing you, Sav. Of course I’m happy for you.” I was. But though I don’t have a romantic nature, I do have a cautious one. “I just don’t understand how you can be so stoked about someone you only talked to for a couple of minutes.”

  She bit into her bread and cheese. “But I didn’t. We talked for, like, hours. I don’t think I’ve ever talked so much in my life. The words just flowed from me like water down a drain.”

  In Dentist Tim’s waiting room? How was that possible? He didn’t open till nine, and he closed at noon on Saturdays. They’d have had to get there the night before.

  “Oh, Gracie…” honked Savanna. “Obviously we didn’t stay in the waiting room. I mean, it looks like an airport lounge – except for the old magazines and not being able to get a snack and stuff like that. You can’t have a real conversation in that kind of atmosphere. He was still hanging around when I came out and he asked if I wanted to get a coffee. So of course I said sure.”

  “You said sure?” People besides my dad thought
I was pretty smart, but sometimes I was so slow to get things I might as well have been in another country. If I hadn’t figured out that she’d spent the afternoon with him, what had I thought happened? That he really had hypnotized her or carried her off? “You mean that’s why you never made it to Java? Because you went for coffee with him?”

  “Morgan. And I know … I know…” She took another pickle. “You’re right. I’m, like, totally impossible. But you know me. I just don’t seem to be able to stop myself. I’m very impetuous. You’re really balanced – you always think things through – but I just kind of jump into the pool with my shoes on. I mean, I, like, had to say yes, Gray. You do understand, don’t you? My heart wouldn’t let me say no.”

  Of course I understood. I was her best friend. That was what Savanna was like. Passionate. Spontaneous. Swimming around in a pool with her shoes on. While I stood on the side, wondering how much chlorine was in the water.

  “It’s kind of too bad your heart didn’t tell you to borrow his phone so you could call me,” I joked.

  Savanna laughed. “I would have, Gray, I really would have. But you know what it’s like. I was swept away. I lost all sense of time.”

  I didn’t want to sound a sour note here or anything, but it did strike me that that wasn’t the only sense she’d lost.

  “I just have one question, Savanna.”

  “What?” She picked up a drink from the tray. “You want to know when I’m going to see him again?”

  That wasn’t it.

  “What about Archie?”

  She looked at me over her glass. “Archie?”

  “Yeah, you know, tall guy … dark hair … strong jaw … heavy earlobes – you know, the guy you already have.”

  She shrugged. “I think Archie’s great, Gracie, you know that.” She took a sip. “But it isn’t all beds and roses, is it? I mean, I was thinking just the other day that maybe Archie was just one of those summer things.”

  “You mean like sunburn or poison ivy?”

  “More like lemonade. You don’t want lemonade in the fall, do you?” She raised her glass. “You want cider.”