My Best Friend, Maybe Read online

  “You tried?” I interrupt. “When?”

  Sadie sighs. “Remember that last time we got milk shakes? A few days after I ditched you to hang out with the swim-team girls?”

  I close my eyes and it starts coming back to me.

  Ω

  I sucked down a huge mouthful of sugary vanilla-and-peanut-butter and watched fourteen-year-old Sadie scroll through Facebook on her phone. It was four days after our final home swim meet, the summer before freshman year. She had promised me the milk shakes would happen the next day but she’d been so busy with Lynn and all of those new girls that it didn’t happen for one day, two days, three days, four days. It took so long my muscles weren’t even sore by the time we finally met up.

  Sadie sighed and pushed the phone away before taking another sip.

  She glanced at me. She wasn’t saying anything.

  Ω

  “You were so bored that day,” I say.

  Sadie shakes her head. “I was distracted.”

  Ω

  I was taking tiny sips, trying to make the milk-shake date last as long as possible. But Sadie slurped down her treat, looked at me, and finally spoke. “You ready to go?”

  I hadn’t even finished half of my milk shake. I stood up to toss it, though. This wasn’t fun anyway.

  Then, she surprised me. “Can I come over, do you think?” she asked. “For dinner?”

  Ω

  “That was the day I tried to tell you,” Sadie is saying. “I was going to . . . but I got so nervous . . . I kept putting it off . . .”

  “Why?” I press. “Or why didn’t you tell me after that?”

  “Because of what she said to me . . . the first person . . .” Sadie is playing with her fingers, then raking them through her hair, then playing with them again.

  Ω

  On the walk back to my house, Sadie kept cracking her knuckles, then pulling her fingers through her hair. Her blue eyes stayed straight ahead as we took step after silent step. I could see her brain churning a million thoughts but I couldn’t read one of them.

  I didn’t know what else to do to cheer her up. I lunged toward her and bashed my bruised hip into hers so that she went tripping into the street.

  “Coley!” she yelped. But she was smiling. Finally.

  Ω

  I put my hand on Sadie’s shoulder, even though she just said we aren’t friends anymore. I put it there to keep her here. I need her to stay until I have the answers. I feel like this is my last chance to get them.

  “When?” I whisper. “When did you tell that first person?”

  “Then,” Sadie says. “That day.”

  My heart jumps.

  Ω

  After a few giggly steps, her hip was suddenly against mine and I was flying, my right foot across my left, my left foot landing on the side, the road moving too fast beneath me. She got me good. Wham, I fell into a patch of muddy grass.

  “Whoa! Coley!” Sadie squealed.

  She bent over to haul me up. We smiled. My heart shifted out of the panic it had been in for the past four days. We were still best friends.

  Ω

  I take a deep breath to try to stay calm. I can’t let her know I’m starting to panic because then she’ll leave. And then I won’t know. I have to know.

  “Sadie?” I say.

  She turns to me.

  “What did she say? That person who you first told?”

  Ω

  We were still laughing when we got to my street. My mother spotted us through the window of the kitchenette, where she was starting dinner.

  “Right in the shower with you, Colette,” she called through the screen. “Don’t go dragging that mud in here.”

  But she sounded happy. She was always happy when Sadie was around.

  Ω

  Sadie looks back at her feet and shakes her head. This entire breakfast patio is less sunny than it has been since we first got here, like Sadie’s mood has the power to cloud it over.

  “You don’t get it,” she says. “We weren’t meant to be friends.” It’s barely audible, but it’s there.

  My heart hammers. I can’t let her go.

  I don’t have to be her best friend. I don’t need her to need me. I don’t have to be everything to her. But I can’t let us go back to nothing.

  “Sadie,” I say. She looks at me and I feel like this is the last time she’ll ever look at me like that, like she’s ready to be honest, like we mean something to each other. I feel like I have to get the answer to every single question I’ll ever have right now. “Tell me what she said.”

  Ω

  I streaked through the kitchen in my socks and pounded up the stairs toward my room. I expected Sadie to follow and wait for me there. But she didn’t.

  She stayed in the kitchen.

  Ω

  Sadie’s eyes level into mine like she’s trying to tell me more than her words will ever be able to.

  “She said . . .” Sadie swallows.

  I hold my breath.

  “She said I was going to hell.”

  I keep my face steady but my pulse pounds in my ears, my heart becomes a gong in my chest, almost rocking me forward and face-planting me into the balcony.

  Ω

  “Sadie?” I called at the top of the steps.

  But my heart fell when I heard their voices floating softly up the stairs.

  “Want some iced tea, sugar?” Mom said. She never called me “sugar.”

  I was starting to think they liked each other more than they liked me.

  Ω

  “Who was it?” I ask quietly. Even though now I know. I already know. It explains everything. But it can’t be.

  Sadie shakes her head. “I . . . I shouldn’t have brought you here. I’m sorry, Colette.”

  “Who was it?” I ask a little louder.

  She stands and stares out at the sea.

  Ω

  “Sure,” Sadie said.

  I stood with my toes lined up on those steps, cursing the fact that I had to take a shower. Was it possible that Sadie knocked me in the mud just to get rid of me?

  “Um . . . Mrs. Jacobs?” Sadie said. “I . . . Can I tell you something?”

  Her voice was tiny, young, like we had gone back in time to before everything got so confusing, before their relationship with each other made me jealous of each of them.

  “. . . something I’ve never told anyone?”

  Oh, that’s it, I thought. First my mom told Sadie her secrets. Now, Sadie was telling my mom her secrets. I couldn’t take it.

  I got in the shower where I couldn’t hear.

  Ω

  “Please,” I say to the back of Sadie’s head, to the sea and sun, to the universe. “Please tell me, and then I’ll leave you alone.” Sadie doesn’t move.

  “Please, say it. I need to hear you say it.”

  Ω

  When I got out of the shower, Mom said, “Edie called. Sadie had to go home.”

  I felt guilty for being a little relieved.

  Ω

  Finally, she looks over her shoulder. “Your mom,” she says.

  Then she’s gone and I’m back in bed because there are some days you need to start over or skip altogether.

  I lie in bed, ignoring the cheerful sun shining through my cave windows. I turn questions over and over in my brain as I turn my body over and over in the sheets.

  What if my mom really knew?

  What if she knew the whole time and said nothing to me?

  Could she have let me think I lost Sadie, when she chased her away?

  I jump out of bed to reread the e-mails my mom has sent me. I open the new one.

  Dear Colette, your father tells me that you have called but that we simply keep missing each other. If you need me, please call my cell. Also, I imagine you have all of the information by now. Let me remind you what we believe on the subject: Leviticus 18:22 “Thou shall not lie with mankind as with womankind. It is an abomination.” Love, Mom
r />   My hands shake as I click through her other e-mails: “bad company,” “sexual immorality,” “temptation” . . . none of it was about me.

  She didn’t know about the sex dreams or my crush on Sam or the way I’ve been trying to be the opposite of perfect. She didn’t know anything about me. All of these e-mails are about Sadie. All of this has always been about Sadie.

  I pick up the phone and call home. It’s only about six a.m. there, so I call the house phone to wake her up. I imagine it ringing into the dark, my parents rattling awake thinking there’s some sort of emergency. But there is an emergency. My body might be safe, but my soul is being thrown back into the erupting volcano.

  “Hello?” Dad’s groggy voice croaks.

  “I need to talk to Mom,” I say.

  “Oh, baby,” he says, suddenly alert. “Talk to me first, okay? I think—”

  “I need to talk to Mom.” I cut him off. He’s been silent for way too long. He can’t start calling the shots now.

  “Your mom’s going to say some things—”

  “Dad! I need to talk to Mom! Now!” I shout it.

  He sighs and then it’s so quiet it’s like the line has gone dead. I wonder if he’s hung up on me. I wonder if he agrees with Mom. I wonder what the hell he was doing throwing me on an airplane and dropping me into this chaos without telling me anything.

  “She’s not here,” he says finally.

  “What?” I say. “Where is she?”

  “She . . . Call her cell.”

  I pull the phone away from my ear and stare at it, my mouth hanging open. She left? My mom?

  “Daddy,” I whisper, wishing I were an eight-year-old with a voice this small and a body to match so that I could curl up next to him and lay my head on his chest, wishing he was still big and strong and fun and not completely broken like he sounds now. “Did she really tell Sadie that?”

  Dad sighs, and I realize that he’s not just fun or quiet, big or weak, right or wrong. He’s a person. “She did.”

  “Where did she go?” I ask.

  “She . . . I don’t want you to worry about this, little lady,” he says. “We’re going to work this all out when you get back, okay?”

  “Okay.” My voice repeats his.

  “We’ll work this out when you get back, baby. But tell Sadie . . . tell her I’m sorry.”

  I nod and even though he’s halfway around the world, I know somehow he sees me.

  I call her cell.

  “Colette?” she whispers.

  Her voice sounds different, cracked, quieter, like my few days away from home could have changed her as much as they’ve changed me. A million questions rain in my skull: Where are you? Where are the boys? Why did you leave? Why did you say that to my best friend?

  “What did you tell her?” I ask. “What did you say to her?”

  And I know there’s a part of her that’s guilty or confused or a little bit unsure of all the rules because that’s all I ask and somehow, even half-asleep, she knows exactly what I’m talking about.

  “Sweetie,” she says. “I said what I had to in order to protect you.”

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  I hear her shift around and I imagine her prop herself up on whatever mystery-bed she’s sleeping in, the faded orange nightgown she wears in the summertime slipping off a shoulder, her fake straw-colored hair sticking up behind her head. “I didn’t say anything bad,” she says. There’s a highness to her voice that I’m not used to.

  “Mom,” I say, more quietly, “what did you say?”

  She sighs. “I told her to repent. I told her she didn’t have to be that way. I told her I would help. I invited her to church.”

  I nod. I can see how Sadie would misinterpret all of that.

  But Mom keeps talking. “She refused and then . . .”

  “Then, what?”

  “Honey, you have to come home, okay?” she says. “We’ll talk this over once you get home. I always knew I’d have to tell you this stuff, eventually, once you grew up, but an international phone call is hardly—”

  “You should have told me a long time ago,” I say.

  “Maybe,” she says. “I didn’t know.”

  My jaw drops. She doesn’t cite a rule or recite a Bible verse or call on a commandment. She says “maybe.” Like she cracked. Like there’s some room for what she should have done versus what she did.

  She’s still talking about why she didn’t tell me. About how I was too young to deal with something so grave. About how she was protecting me. It’s all complete nonsense. No. It’s bullshit.

  “What happened next?” I demand.

  “I asked her to leave our house,” Mom says. “I told her she was no longer welcome in our home. I told her—”

  I’m so angry my face is on fire and my hand is clutching the phone so hard I’m sure it’s about to burst into pieces in my fist. All this time they let me believe that Sadie ditched me. That Sadie walked away and chose other friends because they were cooler or more fun or had more money. They let me think that Sadie gave up on me. All this time my mother and father knew that wasn’t true.

  My mom was wrong. Wrong. So wrong.

  And I want her voice to stop. I want her e-mails and her guilt trips and her self-righteousness to stop. But I know I might never get the details if I don’t ask the last question, so I interrupt.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her I would not let her take my daughter with her where she was going.”

  “Mom?” I squeak.

  “I told her she was going to hell.”

  My heart slows and my brain spins like a top, trying to replay my entire childhood, every time my mom’s voice has invaded my brain, every rule she’s written for me, everything Perfect Colette lived by.

  The way I was taught, that’s the worst thing you can say to anyone.

  I press Cancel on the pleading voice, the voice saying that she did what was right, the voice that’s begging me not to get tempted into Sadie’s web of sin. I press Cancel on the voice, and I reject the call when the phone buzzes.

  I have too much of that voice in my brain already.

  I lie back down, sad and out of breath and utterly exhausted at the thought that after all of this, I’m going to have to figure it out myself. What’s right? What’s wrong? Who do I want to be?

  A second later the phone rings again and I almost fling it against a wall. But then I see Louisa’s name on the screen.

  “Hello?” I say.

  I didn’t think she’d be able to call me. Did my mom lie about the cell-phone thing? Is there even a phone plan like the one she told me about? Why didn’t she just tell me not to call anyone?

  “I didn’t think you’d pick up!” Louisa squeals. “How are you?”

  I shake the cobwebs out of my brain. I need to tell Louisa about all of this. But I can’t do it for a dollar a minute.

  “I’ve been better. How are you?”

  “I’m great! I’m fun!” she exclaims.

  I can’t help but laugh. Thirty seconds ago I thought I’d never laugh again. “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “I thought I’d get your voice mail,” she says. “I wanted to thank you. Listen. That whole time I thought you were mad at me for telling you to be fun, I was, like, of course she’s mad at me. How can I tell her to be fun when I’m never fun?”

  “I wasn’t mad at you,” I say. It’s so funny that she would think that. I’ve never been mad at Louisa.

  “So, look. I did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “I turned it down. I told the Japanese school I’m not going. I told my parents I want to have fun. I figured if Colette can do it, so can I.”

  “Wow!” I say.

  “Let’s have a great senior year, okay, Colette? Let’s go get pedicures as soon as you get home and plan the whole thing.”

  I agree and when we hang up, I decide to follow her example and do something I would never have had the coura
ge to do before.

  Ω

  I knock on the door.

  At first, there’s nothing but the yelling of Greek TV falling out her open window. It’s totally possible that she’s not here. She could have gotten up and gone swimming or shopping or exploring or anything else. Or she could be here. She could be sitting inside that cave, knowing I’m out here and pleading in a whisper for me to go away.

  I’m going to chicken out. She has no reason to believe me anyway.

  I knock one more time and the door swings open. Rose stands in the dark, her hair matted at the side of her head, her plum-colored silk pajamas askew, her eyes wild.

  “Oh,” she says. I see her shoulders deflate, her eyes focus. “It’s you. Come in.”

  I step inside and she slams the door closed and I freeze. I guess in my imagination I thought we’d have this conversation outside on the porch in the sunshine with the smell of Santorini around us.

  But now I’m standing in a warm cave that smells too much like Rose’s tangy perfume. Her stuff is everywhere—clothes strewn across the bench, towels hanging off the edge of her bed, an exploding suitcase sitting on the floor, and bottles of products on each surface. Her TV is blaring—some news anchor screaming headlines in Greek. What am I doing here?

  She walks over to her bed and flops on her back, throws a hand over her eyes.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” she says. “I give up. I’ll leave you guys alone, okay?”

  I stand on a clean patch of floor near the door and stare at her. She’s not so scary when she’s broken.

  “I didn’t mean to mess up your life. I wasn’t trying to screw up a real thing. I didn’t think it was real. I was hoping—” She stops abruptly. I see her shaking her head underneath her arm.

  We coexist in a charged silence for too many seconds. “Did I wake you up?” I ask finally.

  I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know anything about her. I don’t know how to apologize for pretending to steal her girlfriend because I don’t know anything about that life.

  But I have to forgive her, I think. Edie says forgiveness is a divine act. That sounds about right to me.

  She curls her full body onto her side and pushes her thick hair out of her large brown eyes so she can look at me.

  “It’s exhausting being that mean all the time,” she says. She smiles.