My Best Friend, Maybe Read online

  For Greg, my love

  Contents

  Έκπληξη: (Surprise)

  Tελειότητα: (Perfection)

  Πλήξη: (Boredom)

  Διασκέδαση: (Fun)

  Eγκατάλειψη: (Abandonment)

  Aποφάσεις: (Decisions)

  Mοναξιά: (Loneliness)

  Aνταρσία: (Rebellion)

  Yποσχέσεις: (Promises)

  Oικογένεια: (Family)

  Aνωριμότητα: (Immaturity)

  Eκπαίδευση: (Education)

  Aμαρτία: (Sin)

  Mυστήριο: (Mystery)

  Mανία: (Fury)

  Φιλία: (Friendship)

  Aνακούφιση: (Relief)

  Eκδίκηση: (Revenge)

  Συγχώρεση: (Forgiveness)

  Πίστη: (Faith)

  Xαρά: (Joy)

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  Also by Caela Carter

  “So, you wanna go?”

  That’s how she asks me. Like she’s talking about a party. Or a chick flick. Or lounging around in her basement during a thunderstorm making ants-on-a-log by scraping the peanut butter out of the middle of peanut-butter crackers because everyone knows that’s the best kind.

  It’s been three years since we last did that, or anything, together.

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “It’s on my mom if you do, the whole eight days. We’ll fly into Athens from Newark,” Sadie is saying, and I’m wondering if this is real or some bizarre dream. “Then we have to transfer planes for Santorini. That’s where my cousin’s getting married. Then we’ll take a boat to Crete for the party with his family. He’s Greek.” She adds the last two words like they explain everything. Like my biggest confusion in this jumbled invitation is why Andrea is getting married in Greece.

  I slump back in my chair to put a few more inches between us, and I watch her push her white-blond hair out of her eyes. It’s streaked with red these days—a new look that blossomed for our junior AP exams last week.

  “Charlie’s bringing his girlfriend. I don’t know about Sam,” she’s saying.

  Her brothers. Who used to feel like my own brothers. It’s been ages since I’ve seen any of them. Do they miss me? Does her mom?

  “I thought about asking someone else . . .” Sadie trails off.

  After a second she says, “I ended up buying you a ticket. So let me know either way, Colette. Okay?”

  She actually bought me a ticket?

  I shake my head to clear the fog. She takes that as a no, and for a moment I see disappointment clash with triumph across her delicate features.

  Then I open my mouth. “Sure.”

  Sadie’s dark-blue eyes grow huge in shock, and I force my own not to mirror them.

  “Sure?” she asks, her casual attitude flickering. “That’s all?”

  “Yup, sure.” I slam shut my French notebook and shove it into my backpack. Technically the bell hasn’t rung signaling that we can pack up and talk, but everyone has finished their finals. Madame isn’t even in the room. She walked out twenty minutes ago. I was the only one with a book open when Sadie plopped down on my desk, her beautiful and intimidating face looming over me as she started babbling about a trip to her cousin’s wedding in a few days.

  She didn’t even say hello.

  She didn’t even look like sorry.

  “Don’t you have questions? Don’t you need to think it over?” She leans into me, an amused lilt to her voice, and I remember how she always got most aggressive right before she lost a board game or a race in the pool.

  I shake my head, not taking my eyes off my backpack. Of course I have questions. A million questions foaming in my lungs, but they aren’t the ones she thinks I’ll ask. And to ask them is to lose.

  The tension is as thick as the heat in the classroom, the morning sun knifing through the window and drawing a harsh edge across Sadie’s profile so that half her face is cast in shadow.

  “You aren’t going to ask your parents? Run it by Mark?”

  Now I look at her.

  “What’s the problem?” I say, still not sure whose words I’m speaking. I want to say Why, Sadie? Why now? If you’re going to break the silence and invite me somewhere, why couldn’t you ask me to hang out at the mall or go swimming?

  Why is everything so big and complicated with you?

  She shrugs, but she’s staring at me.

  “What?” I say. “Do you think you have a monopoly on spontaneity and adventure?”

  She raises her eyebrows, her face caught between emotions again: this time, amusement and mortification.

  “Okay, I’ll see you in Greece, Coley.” She pats my brown hair like I’m a little kid. But she always used to do that. But then again, we always were little kids.

  Coley. It’s still repeating in my ears when the bell rings. No one has called me that in years. Three years.

  Ω

  “Come on, Coley, wake up!” Sadie said.

  The words had barely wiggled their way through my hazy sleepiness before something soft but sharp crashed into my body, forcing me out of my slumber.

  Ten-year-old Sadie stood next to my bottom bunk in our tiny beach bedroom. She was holding my purple Speedo, air-dried from our swim the previous evening, right after my family first arrived in Ocean City. She was already dressed in her own red racing suit. She smiled at me and whipped my suit across my middle once more for good measure. My four-year-old twin brothers breathed deeply in the bunks next to ours. “The sun is out,” she whispered. “Let’s go!”

  I smiled and rolled out of the bed, grabbing for my suit. I knew my parents wouldn’t let us go down to the beach without them—the shore was a few blocks away and Dad was always saying how dangerous the ocean was—but I didn’t argue. I was still nervous about how it would feel to have Sadie on this vacation. This was the first time she’d been invited on my family’s beach week, and in the year we’d gone from nine to ten, I’d begun to realize all of the ways Sadie and I were different. Sadie’s house was big and extravagantly decorated; her family vacations were to places like France and Hawaii, places that required an airplane. What would she think of this typical beach vacation? What would she think of my mother’s skirted bathing suits, my father’s corny jokes? Would she get annoyed by Peter’s constant whining? Would she be embarrassed by the tiny apartment we rented each year? The outdoor shower? The small room we had to share with my brothers?

  But the thing about Sadie is, except for the ways we’re different, we’re exactly the same. Or that’s the way it used to be. Two brothers (but hers are older), skin so tanned it looked like we’d rolled in the mud pits by the bay, a love of peanut butter, and an ache to be in water whenever we were forced onto dry land.

  In the water, all of the differences washed away.

  Wearing our suits, we tiptoed down the short hallway and into the little yellow-tiled kitchen of our beach apartment. My mom was sitting at the kitchen table in her faded pink robe, a coffee mug in one hand, her book of morning meditations in the other.

  “Good morning, girls!” she whispered. “Looks like you’re all set to go.”

  “Can we?” Sadie asked as my mom handed each of us a granola bar. “Can we put our feet in, at least? The lifeguards are already on duty.” Sadie was always the brave one.

  My mom glanced at her watch and, to my surprise, seemed to consider the request.

  “You won’t go in past your knees until we get down there?” she asked.

  “Oh, no, Mrs. Jacobs,” Sadie said through a mouthful of granola. “We’ll just play trip tag until you get there. Colette has been
‘It’ since last summer. I have to give her some chance to catch me.”

  I nodded enthusiastically beside my best friend. I loved trip tag. It was better played in deep water, but we could play it in the shallow part. It was a game we’d invented with Sadie’s brothers the summer before. When you were It, you had to dive for someone else’s ankle and yank it so that he or she tilted into the water. If the tripee got her hair wet, she became the next It until we played again. And Sadie was right—I’d been It for a good nine months now.

  “We’ll be safe until you get there, Mom,” I promised.

  Mom chuckled. “Well, I hope you’ll be safe even after we get there,” she said. And I knew we had won.

  Minutes later we were sprinting down the few short blocks between us and the water, flip-flops clapping against the pavement, towels streaking behind us. By the time my parents finally got to the beach, I was no longer It.

  That’s how things went all week. Trip tag in the early morning. Jumping waves, body surfing, and making up imaginary games in the ocean all day. It was the best week of summer. My long hair turned to straw and my brown eyes were constantly ringed with an edge of red from hours and hours spent in salt water. Being in the ocean with Sadie was like being in another world, one without rules or gravity.

  My dad called us mermaids, but I knew we were more than that. We were fish. We were best friends.

  Sadie was mine and I was hers. I knew it the way I knew my backbone held me up.

  I was wrong.

  Ω

  I dart out of the classroom the minute the bell finally buzzes. I need to beat Sadie out of here. I need to get out the door without looking in her eyes, without her seeing that I’m confused. Maybe terrified.

  I dodge the start-of-summer celebrations in the hallway, hurrying through crowds of students to get to my locker. Was it a real invitation or a challenge? The tight knot of our friendship had been loosened by time and then frayed by all the ways she ignored me, all the times when we passed in the hall and I didn’t even get a small wave. It’s over. I’ve dealt with it. I’ve moved on.

  Why did I say I would go?

  I stop dead when I see my locker, and a train of squealing freshman girls crashes into my back. I wasn’t even thinking that he’d be there.

  It’s a Friday, and even if it is only noon, it’s technically the end of the school day, so of course Mark is leaning against my locker with a pink paper cone in his hands. I try not to roll my eyes as I resume walking down the hallway. It’s peonies this week. It was just peonies, like, three weeks ago.

  I used to love the Flower Routine. Back when we first started going out at the beginning of my sophomore year, it was so exciting to have this hot junior standing by my locker every Friday morning with a different bouquet. I counted the weeks we’d been dating by numbering the displays in my head: 1. White roses. 2. Purple orchids. 3. Pink carnations. 4. Red roses . . .

  As a senior Mark has been able to leave the campus during his free periods, so he switched it up about halfway through the year and started bringing me flowers at the end of the day instead of the beginning. Living dangerously! The first Friday morning that he wasn’t leaning on my locker, I was shocked at the relief I felt seeing its empty surface. Maybe we were done with the charade. Maybe we could be a real couple now. Maybe he’d start acting the way guys are supposed to: like he was into me—my lips, my hair, my chest—more than our relationship. But there he was at the end of the day, with sunflowers. That was a new one.

  I’m not supposed to want those other things anyway. I have to be the girl who wants flowers.

  “Here you go, beautiful,” he chirps when I get to my locker. “Happy week-versary.”

  I make myself smell the purple buds. I make myself say “Thank you.”

  He puts his hands on my shoulders, and I bend my neck back to look at him before he can give me a kiss. His chestnut hair falls across his forehead, into his hazel eyes. His smile makes his cheeks puff out and rearranges his freckles. I love how I never know quite where to look for them. His one front tooth is slightly crooked, something I’d never be able to see if I wasn’t standing this close to him. It makes me think about running my tongue over it. It makes me imagine crushing my body into his, jamming him against the locker and feeling his pectoral muscles stiffen as he squeezes me tighter.

  He brushes his lips lightly against mine. That’s all I’m supposed to want.

  “So, what’s new?” he asks.

  I blink hard to make the body-crushing fantasy go away. It fades but it’s always there, buzzing on the edges of my being like a siren.

  “I was talking to Sadie Pepper,” I say.

  His eyes go wide. “Seriously?”

  Yes, seriously. She was my best friend.

  I nod, then put the flowers down so I can finish cleaning out my locker.

  “What did she want?” he asks carefully, and my heart melts. He tries so hard to never say anything bad about anyone. He won’t admit he hates Sadie, even though I know he does. Even though he hates her for hurting me. He’s so good.

  “She wants me to go on her family vacation this summer. To Greece. For her cousin’s wedding.” I see him wince despite the fact that I left out the part about this Sadie-trip starting only one day before Mark and I are supposed to leave for Costa Rica for our service trip. The one we’ve been planning all year. The one that I raised thousands of dollars to go on. The one that took months of pleading and persuading and petitioning my parents before Mom granted permission.

  I crouch, concentrating on cleaning the few remaining notebooks out of the bottom of my locker, stacking them neatly to put into my backpack. But everything should go in the trash at this point. Another school year mastered. Another check in the box indicating another 365 days of doing everything right. Perfectly.

  “Really?” he asks, picking up the peonies from where I left them next to my knee.

  I suck in air. He’s staring at the flowers, chewing his bottom lip. Scared. Adorable. Maybe we’ll get to make out again after his graduation tomorrow.

  “I’m not going.”

  “ ’Course not,” he says, but I feel his relief. He squeezes my shoulder and slides down to the floor, his back against the lockers, his long sweeper-legs sprawled out in front of him.

  “Why would you give up the summer with me right before I leave for college? Why would you give up Costa Rica for Greece?” He smiles a goofy smile. “Who does Sadie Pepper think she is?” He chuckles.

  My best friend, I answer in my head. Maybe.

  “That girl,” Mark concludes, shaking his head.

  I miss her.

  It never does any good to tell him that.

  “I know, right?” I say, rolling my eyes.

  Maybe she misses me. Maybe she still thinks about the milk shake, the promise.

  Guilt bites at my heart. I try not to lie to him. Unless it’s about flowers.

  During the three-mile drive from school to the town pool, all Mark wants to talk about is Costa Rica. Fund-raising meetings this week. He’s only a few hundred dollars away from financing his trip. Of course, I’ve been budget-ready for weeks. Six days until we leave. We’ll need sunblock and bug spray and pencils . . . He goes on and on.

  At least he’s not talking about his graduation tomorrow, or complaining about the raging college parties that haunt his future, or freaking out about how to live a pure, straight-edged life at Prince ton next year.

  Yesterday I would have relished talking about Costa Rica.

  “I can’t believe we’re finally going,” he’s saying. “We’ve been talking about doing something huge like this since we first got together, you know? Almost two years.”

  I watch the houses fly by the passenger-side window. Sadie.

  “Do you think we can make an actual difference there?” He bites his lip. “Do you ever worry it’ll be just like the trip we took with your church to Appalachia?”

  I don’t want to go. But I’m not sure if I mea
n Greece or Costa Rica.

  I shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “See!” Mark says, banging the steering wheel. “That right there!”

  “Huh?” I twist to look at him, jolted out of my own head.

  “That’s what makes you so good at this stuff. You’re flexible. You’re there to lead and be of service. You’re so in tune, Colette.” He puts his right hand on my knee (exactly on my knee, no higher). “You’re brave and selfless. I’m so lucky to have you.”

  I smile at him, a wobbly smile.

  Ω

  We spend the afternoon at the pool with the rest of our high school and basically the entire town. We sit in the shade on top of the hill and play cards, Mark, me, and the other youth group kids.

  I wish Louisa, my real best friend, would hurry up and get here already so I could unload the Sadie-gossip on someone. But she won’t be around until after her Japanese tutoring.

  The pool’s grounds are sprawling, a sloping blanket of green grass surrounding a blue L-shaped jewel. The shouts of the younger kids in the water echo off the sky and bounce down to us, making me ache to join them. Everything smells like chlorine mixed with freshly cut grass. I love the smell of chlorine. I crave it when I haven’t been swimming for too long.

  I wish I were swimming right now, but it’s been complicated to swim socially since I got to high school. The girls from our school all flit around the concrete edges in bikinis and rarely get in the water. If they do, they float. Boring. And girls like me don’t wear bikinis: I’m not supposed to want to show off the way swim team has chiseled my abs. Kids like me camp out under the trees—boys in nothing but cargo shorts, girls in tank tops and cutoffs. The group shift s throughout the summer, some of us disappearing for service trips and family vacations and summer jobs at the cafés in town, or teaching vacation Bible school. But there’s always a crowd to be found under these trees, playing cards, laughing quietly, being polite. Acting like loving all of God’s children means liking each member of youth group equally.

  When Louisa is here I sometimes hang out with the self-professed nerds at the snack bar tables. Up there it doesn’t matter if you’re in a bikini or shorts or a space suit. No one notices. Sometimes they play cards, but other times they just gossip or talk about books or politics. Sometimes they read, and some of them even venture down to go swimming.