What Are Friends For?

by Rachel Vail

  “Oh, good,” Morgan said. “You didn’t say anything to me the rest of the day and all through soccer, so I sort of thought . . .” She didn’t finish.

  “Thought what?”

  “Thought . . .” she repeated. “I thought you were mad at me.”

  “I wasn’t,” I told her. “I was just in shock.”

  “Because of what CJ did, fixing up Zoe and Lou, you mean?”

  “Yeah.” Should I tell her? “Remember what we were saying, about Lou?”

  “I know it! What is it with Lou Hochstetter this week? As if!”

  I just breathed and didn’t tell her. It felt dishonest but also safer.

  “And the note? Could you believe that one?”

  “Note?” I asked, nervously. “What note?”

  “You know. CJ passed that note to Tommy saying forget about fixing up Zoe and Lou. Remember? She told us at the lockers, after seventh period?”

  “Oh, yeah.” I shook my head. “But . . .”

  “I don’t think that makes up for it.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Completely insufficient.”

  “What?” Morgan asked.

  “That was completely insufficient,” I said louder.

  “Yeah,” Morgan agreed. “Well, she’s been like that ever since she got friendship rings with Zoe Grandon.”

  “Like what?”

  “What you said before.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant so I said, “Oh.”

  “Not that I care that they got friendship rings together.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Why would you?”

  “Right,” said Morgan. “It’s a free country, although those are the most boring ugly rings, if you ask me.”

  “But nobody did.”

  “Did what?”

  “Ask you,” I said.

  “True,” said Morgan.

  “That was a joke. I was being sarcastic.”

  “I know.” She forced out a laugh. “You really are funny. Much funnier than CJ. We’d never get friendship rings, you and me. Too, whatever. Corny. Right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I honestly thought the rings CJ and Zoe had gotten together were sort of pretty, in an understated way, and had even imagined that maybe someday Morgan and I might get rings together, too. “I guess we definitely wouldn’t.”

  “Why?” Morgan asked. “Would you want to?”

  “Oh, no,” I told her. “I think something like friendship rings just makes whoever doesn’t have them feel hurt and left out.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Morgan answered.

  “Which wouldn’t be moral of us at all, right?” I lay across my bed with my feet on the wall and my head hanging backward. “Besides, we don’t need . . .”

  “CJ is very needy.”

  “Olivia!” Dad yelled. “Now!”

  “I gotta go,” I said. “I just wanted you to know that I agreed with you, that CJ did the wrong thing, today.”

  “Thanks,” Morgan whispered back. “I’m glad you called.”

  “Hey, what are friends for?” I said.

  “Beats the crap out of me,” Morgan said.

  “What does?”

  “What friends are for.”

  “It was a rhetorical question,” I explained.

  “A what?”

  “It’s . . . There’s not an answer.”

  “Welcome to my world,” Morgan said.

  “Olivia!”

  “I gotta go,” I told her.

  “’Bye.” She hung up before I did.

  eleven

  So? Tell me what’s going on.” Mom stooped to check the date on a carton of milk. “You’ve seemed preoccupied, the past couple of days.”

  I gripped the grocery cart handle and didn’t answer. We do the shopping together, Thursday nights. It’s our special time.

  Mom placed a half gallon of milk in the cart and chewed on her thumb as she read over her list. “Do we need toilet paper?” Two cute guys, in their twenties maybe, passed us just as she asked that. The taller one smiled at me. I looked down at my Adidas. Mom tugged the cart toward the paper aisle. “We always need toilet paper.”

  “Mom?”

  She turned around, holding an eight-pack of toilet paper. “What, sweetheart?”

  “I like Lou Hochstetter.”

  “I had a feeling that might be it.” Mom smiled at me. She tossed the toilet paper into the cart. “He sounds like a nice boy.”

  “He is,” I whispered. I could feel my face heating up. “I’m allowed to go out with somebody, right? We’re not, I’m not. He, well, I’m just wondering, for the future.”

  “I trust you implicitly, Olivia,” Mom said as we turned the corner at the head of the aisle. “You’re smart and responsible, and when you feel ready to go out with somebody, I know you’ll handle it wisely and with self-respect.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “I will, don’t worry.”

  “I don’t.” Mom leaned against the grocery cart. “I’m happy for you. That’s exciting.”

  I smiled.

  She chose three cans of tuna, then said, “Tell me about Morgan.”

  “Why? What did Dex say?”

  “Just that he’s concerned. He says you two have become inseparable.”

  “Really?” I surprised myself by smiling at that. “I know what you think about her, Mom, from what you heard through CJ’s mother. And me.”

  Mom pulled a store coupon out of the dispenser and held it without reading it. “I know what you’ve always thought of her.”

  “Morgan says I’m her best friend.”

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “Well?” Mom crumpled the coupon and threw it in the cart. “Do you like her? Do you have things in common? Do you . . .”

  “She’s the prettiest, nastiest, angriest, most powerful, and most vulnerable girl in seventh grade. I’m none of those things. Well, except girl and seventh grader.”

  “And pretty.” Mom smiled. “She seems very different from you.”

  “That’s true, but you don’t know her, Mom. She’s been having a hard time, this past week. You know how her father left and moved to California? He’s not sending the family any money, again. She tries to act tough but she’s really scared, I think. And . . .”

  “And?”

  “And she’s fun.” I shrugged. “When she talks to me, it’s like I’m the only person in the world. I don’t know. I can’t explain.”

  “I had a friend like that,” Mom said, closing her eyes slowly.

  “Really?”

  Mom nodded. “Colleen Lusardi. She went to the parochial school down the road, and she looked so wholesome, the long blond hair and clear blue eyes, white socks and crisp linen uniform, I was afraid she’d be too boring for me. I was listening to jazz and writing self-indulgent poetry at the time. I thought I was a rebel. But Colleen. I was deceived by her appearance, to say the least. Colleen was wild, impulsive—she’d do anything and laugh. She was so unlike me, but at the same time, she was also like me—like the hidden, inside part of me nobody ever knew about. Nana hated her.”

  “I bet,” I said, throwing a box of Cheerios into the cart. “Nana thinks I’m impulsive.”

  Mom laughed. “I know.”

  “What did she do?” I asked. “Colleen, I mean. What did you do with her?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Mom placed a box of All-Bran beside the Cheerios.

  “Come on,” I prodded.

  “Colleen. She used to, OK. She wanted to smoke cigarettes in my car, and I wouldn’t let her—I hated cigarettes even then, and my father would’ve taken that car away in a second if he ever smelled smoke in it—so Colleen, one night she wouldn’t
wait till we got to the party we were going to, maybe ten minutes away. She stood up on my car seat and hung out the window from the waist up. Smoking and singing. An Allman Brothers song, I think.”

  “That sounds really dangerous.”

  “Oh, it was ridiculous.” Mom picked up the box of All-Bran and looked at it again. “I actually hate this stuff.”

  I smiled. “Put it back.”

  She put it back on the shelf and grinned at me.

  “You let her hang out the window?” I asked. “You won’t even let me sit in the front seat with a seat belt on.”

  “I know. Can you believe it?”

  “I would never do that,” I promised. “Anything like that. I’m careful.”

  “I know you are. Good.”

  “I can’t even imagine you . . .”

  “It was crazy.” Mom shook her head. “She was fun. I was fun, with her. For a little while we were best friends.”

  “Where is she now?” I asked. My mother doesn’t talk about herself as a teenager much. She mostly talks about books. It felt weird and exciting, as if she were a new girl moving into town. She seemed new.

  “I don’t know,” Mom said. “Should we get bananas? Let’s get some bananas.”

  I followed her out to the fruit area. “You lost touch? Did you have a fight? Did Nana forbid you to see her?”

  “No.” Mom placed a bunch of greenish bananas carefully into the front section of our cart. “Nothing so dramatic. We were different. I went on to Yale. Colleen, I don’t know. She had other interests. I didn’t agree with some of her choices, so I guess I pulled away. We weren’t very much alike.” Mom picked up a string bean, snapped it in half, took a bite, and nodded.

  I ripped a plastic bag off the roll, massaged it open, and held it up for Mom to fill. When the bag was loaded, I asked, “Do you miss her? Colleen?”

  “Miss her?” Mom looked up into the ceiling light and smiled. “Sometimes, maybe. I wouldn’t be friends with her now. It’s not who I am, but . . .”

  “What?” I asked.

  “There’s a part of me that she discovered, or that I discovered with her, and I guess I’m grateful for the discovery.”

  I nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  “Just be careful,” Mom said. “And make sure you keep thinking for yourself, OK?”

  “I will,” I promised. “I always do.”

  “That’s what I like to hear.” She took the handle of the cart and pushed it to the check-out area. I followed her.

  twelve

  The next day, Friday, Lou told me in math that he’d had a breakthrough on our code project. He asked if I’d come up with something, and I had to admit I hadn’t done any work on it at all. Usually I do most of the work in a group project, so as he began to explain his concept, I didn’t pay much attention—I was too busy insulting myself over what a distracted, lazy ditz I was becoming. When he said, “It’s elegant, don’t you think?” I had to ask him to repeat his idea. It was to take the symbols above the numbers on the computer keyboard and use them in the numbers’ place. “Easy to remember, and I don’t think Ms. Cress will crack it that quick, especially if she’s not at her keyboard.”

  I had to admit it was very clever. He had written down the numbers and their symbols. We played around with it, and it worked very well. We were both psyched, and started discussing making up a letter code, too. When the bell rang and Morgan grabbed me, I was startled.

  Lou watched me go backward out of the classroom.

  “We’ll work on it more later,” I yelled to him.

  “I can’t believe you got stuck with him,” Morgan said as she slammed her locker shut.

  “He’s really smart,” I said.

  She made a gagging face and jiggled my lock while she waited for me to organize my books and take out my lunch. “I’m on a diet,” she whispered. “I tossed mine in the garbage on the way this morning.”

  I asked her why. She looked very skinny to me.

  She pinched skin on her waist—there was barely enough to grip. “You wouldn’t understand,” she told me.

  “You’re right, I don’t,” I told her, pulling my lunch down from the shelf of my locker. “You’re the prettiest girl in seventh grade. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t eat lunch. That just seems self-destructive to me.”

  Morgan let out a burst of air and smiled.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Sometimes I don’t know whether to say thank you or screw you to you.”

  I closed my locker and locked it. She’d have to figure out what she wants to say to me herself.

  She grumbled, “Come on. Hurry.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  She grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me toward the cafeteria. “Don’t you hate walking in there late, feeling like everybody is watching you?”

  “I never thought about it,” I admitted. “Why would they watch us?”

  “Judging,” she answered.

  As we crossed the cafeteria, I peeked around to see who might be judging us. Lou smiled at me from his table near the front and started to stand up. “I thought of another thing we could add to the code!”

  I looked away. Out of my peripheral vision I saw him sink back down in his seat.

  Everybody else seemed too engrossed in their own lunches and conversations to take any notice of us. I looked for Dex. There were a few eighth-grade girls leaning on a table with their backs to me and their hips shifted sideways. Dex was probably sitting opposite them.

  Zoe Grandon smiled at us and waved, then pointed at a space next to her that was vacant. CJ wasn’t with her. I looked around quickly for CJ, surprised to see her unattached from Zoe. She’d been Zoe’s shadow all week. It occurred to me that maybe Zoe was angry at CJ over the Lou incident. It was sort of hard to picture Zoe angry. She waved again, a little more frantically.

  Morgan smiled at her, let go of my elbow, and walked quickly over to the spot Zoe had been pointing to. “Where’s CJ?” Morgan asked Zoe.

  “I don’t know,” Zoe said, tucking her long blond hair behind her ears.

  Morgan smiled her electric white smile at Zoe and rested her chin in her palms. I sat down opposite them and took my sandwich and pretzels and soda out of my bag. I tried to think of something to say about our homework or current events, anything but what I was thinking, which was, Morgan is MY best friend, so quit smiling at each other like that!

  I told myself to quit focusing on insipid social issues and think of a world event or political conflict to bring up as a topic instead, but I couldn’t think of any. I started insulting myself about that and then remembered how much Morgan and Zoe seem to like it when somebody insults herself so I said, “I just realized, I’m so stupid I haven’t read the paper all week!” They looked at me blankly for a minute and then they both got hysterical, thumping the table, laughing. I smiled, unsure if they were laughing at me or with me.

  They kept laughing, and I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable, so I glanced around and was startled to see CJ was standing beside me, pulling a soccer shirt out of her bag. She held it up against her body as if it belonged to her. It was number five, the number she wore last year when she only had two ballet classes a week, instead of five. This year she can’t play. She had made it up to performance level, a very exciting achievement for which she’d been working incredibly hard; our two families had gone out to dinner at the swim club the night she found out, to celebrate. CJ’s mother, whom I call Aunt Corey even though she’s not my blood aunt, was so proud of CJ that she kept squeezing CJ’s arm until CJ had to excuse herself from the table and go to the ladies’ room. CJ was proud, too, and so excited her cheeks were a little rosy. When I found her in the ladies’ room that night, she was staring at herself in the mirror, and she told me it was the first day she’d ever allowed herself to th
ink all her mother’s dreams for her had a chance of coming true. I hugged her and told her how happy I was for her, and how confident I was about her future. She really is gifted and dedicated. She deserves her success.

  So I wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that she was holding a soccer jersey. She smiled nervously, and nodded slightly.

  “But . . .” I said.

  “You . . .” said Morgan.

  She climbed onto the bench and sat down next to me. I moved my lunch over a little to make room for hers. My tuna fish was sticking to the roof of my mouth. I put it down on top of the lunch bag, and when I saw Morgan staring at it, I happily pushed it toward her. She took a bite and put it back down. I hoped she’d finish it. I get angry when I see girls trying to be so skinny they’re barely there. What kind of culture do we live in?

  CJ opened her lunch bag, looked in, and said casually, “I just decided I’d rather be on the soccer team.”

  “Rather than what?” I asked her.

  “Rather than dance.”

  “You’re quitting dance?”

  “No need to alert the media,” she said in the snottiest voice she’d ever used. I turned to her, surprised. “Or your mother,” she added.

  I felt myself getting angry, as I always do when she tries to humiliate me publicly. I took a deep breath and asked, “Well, what did your mother say? She must be devastated.”

  OK, that was mean, a low blow, since I knew that of course her mother would be devastated. CJ’s ballet career is her mother’s dream come true, and I knew that better than any of the other girls at the table. But I couldn’t help myself from giving CJ that dig, after she was so snide to me.

  CJ shrugged. “It’s my decision.”

  Of course she was right. I took a sip of my soda to avoid having to acknowledge her point.

  “When did you realize that?” Morgan asked her.

  “Yesterday,” CJ said.

  Morgan smiled at CJ. I gulped more soda. I felt totally miserable, with no idea why; like I might start punching somebody if they all weren’t careful.

  “She’s disappointed, of course,” CJ said, opening her yogurt. “She said she wished I felt differently, but that I have to do what’s right for me.”