Best Friends Forever

by P. J. Night

  MISERY LOVES COMPANY

  Katie Walsh is miserable when her BFF, Amy, moves across the country. Then a new girl, Whitney, moves to town. Whitney is really interested in being friends with Katie and almost immediately invites her for a sleepover. Katie isn’t sure, but decides to go … after all, how else will she make new friends? There’s something a little strange about Whitney though. And then there’s her very odd doll collection. Katie doesn’t even play with dolls anymore, but Whitney seems obsessed with hers. Katie isn’t so sure about Whitney, but Whitney has made up her mind: They will be best friends forever.

  GO TO SLEEP … IF YOU DARE! THERE ARE MORE Creepy BOOKS AT YOUR FAVORITE STORE!

  LOOK INSIDE FOR SPOOKY ACTIVITIES

  FROM

  P. J. NIGHT

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON SPOTLIGHT

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.Simonandschuster.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON SPOTLIGHT and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  YOU’RE INVITED TO A CREEPOVER is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Text by Kama Einhorn

  0112 OFF

  First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4424-4150-7 (print)

  ISBN 978-1-4424-4151-4 (eBook)

  This book has been cataloged with the Library of Congress

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Preview: Is she for Real?

  About the Author

  It was very early on Saturday morning, and while most other kids were sleeping, Whitney Van Lowe was wide awake and very busy.

  She was unpacking her dolls, which were each in individual plastic boxes inside a larger cardboard box. Each time she opened one, it was like a reunion with an old friend. She felt a special responsibility to make the dolls comfortable in her new home.

  “Penelope! I know you don’t like being in your box for so long. But see, here you are in the fresh air again. Look, here’s your new spot. Right next to your good friend Irene,” Whitney spoke soothingly to a doll wearing a sailor suit. “You’re all so lucky you don’t have to go to school. I know you must hate moving around, but imagine what it’s like being me. I’m always the new girl, and I have to work so hard to make new friends.”

  Whitney looked at one doll in a Mexican embroidered dress. “What, Rosa?” she asked. “Yes, well, it’s not as easy as it looks.” She paused as if the doll was responding, and then she replied. “Gracias. I think you’re a really good friend too!” She sighed. “I’ll be back, everyone. I’ve got to go downstairs for breakfast.”

  She paused at the door, looking down at all her dolls lined up on the floor. “The name of our new town is Westbrook, everyone, remember?” she spoke like a teacher addressing a class. “It’s in Connecticut. The town of Westbrook is on the beach. The body of water is Long Island Sound, and our new house is in the woods. This region of the United States is called New England. Why do you think it’s called New England?” She paused.

  “That’s right, because English settlers moved here and started colonies.” She smiled lovingly at her dolls. “Okay, there’s obviously something more important that I haven’t said.” She sounded serious.

  “I know I had to pack you in your boxes really fast. It must have been very shocking and scary. And I do know I wasn’t very gentle. I’m very sorry about that. But you know that’s not the way I would have done it if it had been up to me.”

  She took a deep breath, and her face clouded over. “I think you know that it was up to my dad, and I think you also know that he can’t be trusted.”

  Then she went downstairs, which looked like Box City. There were towers of boxes everywhere. Her dad had set up his laptop on the kitchen table and was reading something, his brow furrowed. Whitney saw him, but he didn’t see her. A strange look flickered across her face as she glimpsed what was on the computer screen.

  “Are you reading about Wisconsin again?” Whitney asked.

  Her dad quickly closed the laptop cover. He tried to smile, but his worried expression remained. Whitney nodded knowingly. “I know you’re concerned about what happened in Wisconsin,” she said. “But don’t worry. All that’s in the past now. All I’m ever going to say about that state is that they make great cheese. And speaking of cheese, what’s for breakfast?”

  That same Saturday, but hours later, in a house across town, Katie Walsh carefully applied shiny white nail polish to her best friend Amy Fitzgerald’s thumbnails. She blew on them until they were dry, then added a large perfect yellow dot in the center of each. Ta-da—a sunny-side-up manicure!

  “Ha! Breakfast. I love it,” said Amy, opening her eyes and admiring her eggy thumbs. “Now you should make my fingernails into bacon.” Katie had planned on painting them beige, to be like toast, but bacon was way better. Amy was so good at themed manicures!

  Katie smiled and selected exactly the right three shades of brown and beige from Amy’s collection of about fifty colors, and went to work painting bacon-y stripes on Amy’s fingernails.

  When Katie had finished, Amy blew on the bacon to dry it as Katie thought about eating breakfast with the Fitzgeralds tomorrow morning. It would be their last breakfast together for a long time because Amy and her family were moving from Westbrook, Connecticut, to California.

  “Hey, leave it on till October, okay?” Katie said. “Keep it on till you come back to visit for Harvest Fair. And whatever you paint on my nails, I’ll leave that on too. Till Harvest Fair. Which, did you realize, happens to be my birthday weekend this year? Then we’ll give each other brand-new manicures.”

  “Of course I will,” Amy said, tears springing to her eyes. “I’ll cover it in clear polish if it starts to chip or wear off. And wait till you see how I’m going to do your nails on your birthday. I already have your birthday manicure planned.”

  Katie fought back tears of her own. “I’ll cover my fingertips in Band-Aids if I have to, to keep mine on till then!” She forced a laugh. They had both promised that this slumber party would be tear free until the last possible moment, when the moving van came in the morning.

  Harvest Fair felt so far away. Next week she’d start seventh grade … without Amy. Katie had lived next door to Amy since kindergarten, and they had always been in the same class.

  Now it was Amy’s turn to go to work on Katie’s nails. She made Katie keep her eyes closed the entire time, even when she was blowing on them between colors. Katie was dying of curiosity, and it seemed to take forever. “Give me a hint,” she kept saying. But Amy was being very strict. Finally she said, “Okay, open.”

  On each nail was something different. Her thumbs were watermelon slices: juicy pink background with green “rind” on the
white part of the nail, and itty-bitty black dots for seeds. Her index fingernails were red-and-black ladybugs. Her middle fingernails were tiny rainbows. Her ring fingernails were painted like miniature sunsets of pink, orange, purple, and red. And her pinkies were two different shades of blue, with both pearly and matte white painted unevenly on the tips, for waves. It was Amy’s best manicure ever.

  “It’s the ‘favorite summer things’ manicure,” Amy explained. “So you can remember them all fall, till I come back in October.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Katie told Amy. “I love it.” She blew on each finger separately, carefully, as though she were preserving it forever. “Thanks.”

  “How many sleepovers have we had altogether?” Amy asked suddenly. “Do you think it’s more than a hundred?” Since their houses were so close, it was easy to have a sleepover every weekend. Sometimes even on school nights.

  “Just in sixth grade we’ve had one almost every week,” said Katie, doing quick math in her head. “That’s fifty-two right there. So yeah, way more than a hundred.”

  Amy clapped her hands the way she did when she was really happy. But she didn’t look happy. “That’s awesome, K,” she said. They’d been calling each other “K” and “A” since the beginning of sixth grade. “We should have kept track so when we got to a hundred we could’ve had a special one or something. I can’t believe we’re only going to have them a few times a year now.” Her voice broke.

  “But we’ll have a really good one for my birthday,” Katie said quickly and a little more forcefully than she meant to. She supposed she was just determined not to cry. She grabbed a bottle of beige nail polish. “Okay, take off your socks. The chef is now ready to make your toes into waffles.”

  Katie didn’t sleep well, though Amy seemed to. Amy had a trundle bed that her parents had bought just so she could have sleepovers with Katie. The bottom part of the bed pulled out to reveal a mattress that Katie slept on. It felt so good to have her own bed there—she never even needed to bring a sleeping bag like a regular slumber party.

  They were both only children, and Katie thought that this might be what it was like to have a sister. Amy’s parents always tucked them both in, and Katie’s parents did the same when Amy slept over, though the sleepovers happened more frequently at Amy’s because of the excellent trundle bed.

  Amy’s mom came in to wake them up early so they could all sit down to breakfast before the movers came. At first Katie forgot where she was. Then she felt happy to see Amy next to her, slowly wiggling herself awake. Then all at once she remembered the terrible truth: It was moving day. It was actually going to happen.

  Today. This morning, in fact.

  Amy’s dad brought in breakfast from the Westbrook Diner. It was a sampling of their favorites: bacon and eggs, waffles, and banana-blueberry pancakes. Everyone ate a little of everything, and they ate off paper plates and used plastic utensils because all the kitchen stuff was already packed up.

  Not that that was so new. Over the past several weeks Katie had been watching the inside of Amy’s house slowly disappear. All the things she’d known and loved for so long were gone now. The wooden clock shaped like an apple with a second hand that had a bumblebee at the tip. The row of ferns on the kitchen windowsill. The big bowl of pine cones on the coffee table, picked by Amy’s mom from the woods in the backyard. The framed crayon-and-watercolor picture of an owl that Amy had made in third grade when their class was studying owls. (Katie had made one too, and it was displayed in her own kitchen.) Katie had been getting sad every time she walked in the house and something new was packed up. It was as though something big and permanent in the town, like the fire station or the post office, had suddenly been torn down.

  Soon the movers were carrying boxes and Amy and Katie were sitting on the back steps so they didn’t have to watch.

  Katie heard one of the movers talking to Amy’s dad. “California, huh?” he said. “Can’t get much farther from Connecticut than that, I guess!” The mover laughed as if it were the funniest thing ever.

  Katie covered her face with her hands and began crying.

  Amy put her arm around Katie’s shoulders. “It doesn’t matter how far away we are,” she whispered. Katie could hear that Amy was crying too. “We’re best friends. We’re best friends forever.”

  Katie nodded, her head still in her hands. “I know,” she tried to say. But she couldn’t get the words out.

  Zappers is such a nice cat, Katie thought as she looked at him sideways. Her head was on her pillow and she’d been crying for while, the kind of crying where you can barely catch your breath between sobs. When she opened her eyes, there he was, purring next to her, calmly and methodically grooming himself. He always seemed to know when she was upset, and right now he provided the only company she really wanted after having come home.

  Her parents had rushed over to her with sympathetic looks when she’d come in after the terrible good-bye, her dad extending his arms for a hug. She knew it was rude, but she’d ignored them both and stomped off to her bedroom, where she curled up in a ball, only getting up to let Zappers in. He had been meowing and pawing at her locked door.

  Zappers was a big, long-haired black cat who Katie and her parents had adopted from the local shelter a few years ago. Looking at him now, it seemed he’d always lived here. Katie remembered how when they first brought him home, her parents had joked that she finally had a sibling—a “fur brother,” they called him. It seemed so funny at the time—a fur brother!—but thinking of it now only made Katie cry harder. Amy was like my sister, she thought over and over.

  She remembered how she and Amy had once even lied to Santa about being sisters. Lied to Santa! They were in third grade, and their dads had taken them to the mall to see Santa. They waited in line together and insisted on sitting on Santa’s lap together so they could be in the same picture.

  “Ho, ho, ho, what have we here?” Santa said kindly. “Are you girls sisters?”

  Just as Katie was about to say “No, but we’re best friends,” Amy said, “Yes, Santa, we are.”

  She said it with a straight face. Katie nodded happily in agreement, not daring to make eye contact with Amy because she knew she would start laughing uncontrollably. Since then, just saying the phrase “Yes, Santa, we are” was enough to make them both crack up. And sometimes, out of the blue, one of them would say to the other, “Remember when we lied to Santa?”

  Living next door to each other, they’d gone in and out of each other’s homes without even knocking. Their parents even had keys to each other’s houses, for when they went on vacation and needed to feed the cat or water the plants or check that the heat was still on. One time Amy’s family was away and there was a blizzard, and Katie and her mom shoveled the Fitzgeralds’ sidewalk and driveway so the mail could be delivered and the Fitzgeralds could park their car when they got home. It was such hard work that once they got up to the door, Katie’s mom unlocked it, and they both took off their coats and boots, collapsed on the couch for a while, and watched television before checking on the rest of the house. Katie had sent Amy a text message that read U O ME BIG-TIME!

  Katie had never before felt lonely being an only child. Now suddenly she felt a wave of loneliness wash over her. Actually, it felt more like it was knocking her down in the sand, so hard she could barely breathe. That had happened to her at the beach once.

  Zappers was now staring at her intently with his green-gold eyes, looking sort of startled.

  “Oh, Zappers,” Katie whispered, stroking his fur. “Don’t look so puzzled. It’s called crying. Humans do it, remember? It’s like meowing.” This did not seem to help him understand.

  She got up—her whole body felt so heavy—and went to the bathroom to get a tissue. She felt kind of dazed and dizzy. Then she heard her parents calling up to her.

  “Kookaburra, come downstairs soon,” her dad was saying. He’d given her that nickname when she was born; Katie wasn’t sure why. But
it had stuck. They both called her that a lot, sometimes just “Kooka.”

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” Katie called. She examined her red, puffy eyes in the mirror. Her head hurt from crying so hard, and she was suddenly very thirsty. I guess crying is hard work, she thought. She splashed her face with cold water and blew her nose again, then started down the stairs.

  “Oh, Kooka,” her mom said when she saw her. She turned off the television. “Come sit with us.” Her mom moved over on the couch so Katie could sit between her parents. Katie suddenly felt like a little girl, not someone about to start seventh grade. She sat in her designated spot and felt a little bit like she was in a nest.

  She had to admit it felt good. Her mom was a child psychologist, and at moments like these Katie understood what made her so good at her job. Katie knew her mom wasn’t going to tell her not to be sad or try to distract her, like another parent might do. She was just inviting Katie to be sad on the couch with them. That was good because there was absolutely no way Katie was not going to be sad.

  Katie’s dad put his arm around her. “I’m really going to miss the Fitzgeralds too,” he said. “They were such great neighbors. They felt like family, right?” he said to Katie’s mom.

  Katie’s mom nodded slowly. “I remember when Jeanette and Jerry and Amy moved in,” she told Katie. “You and Amy were both such little dumplings! Wow, you had barely started preschool. We were so happy that a little girl your age had moved into that house. And look at what wound up happening. You two became best friends almost right away.”

  This made Katie start to cry again. “Moving doesn’t change the fact that you’re best friends, honey,” Katie’s mom said. “Once someone’s in your heart the way Amy is, they’re there for good. Things will be different. It’s going to take time to get used to not having her right there. But you’re going to be okay.”

  Her dad nodded in agreement. “It must be hard to think about starting school next week without Amy,” he added. “It’s sad for me to start classes without Jerry on campus too.” Katie’s dad was a psychology professor, and Amy’s dad was a history professor. They had both taught at Wesleyan University, which was about a half hour away, and sometimes drove together. But Amy’s dad had gotten a new job at some college in California. Some stupid college in California, Katie thought, suddenly furious with Mr. Fitzgerald.