My Best Friend, Maybe Read online

  She’s ten or so feet away, and I can tell she wants to talk, to chat, something casual. That thing I’ve been waiting three years for from her. I give her a little wave before I climb the hill.

  “Hey,” Mark says. He throws the piece of grass he was pulling apart down at his feet. But he doesn’t stand or kiss me.

  “Hey,” I say.

  I stare down at him awkwardly for a moment before he shifts over on his towel and I drop beside him.

  Put your arm around me. Kiss me.

  “What’s up?” he says.

  Tickle me.

  I shrug.

  We’re silent for a few seconds and then I blurt, “I want to go to Greece.” But he’s talking at the same time.

  “What?” I ask.

  “What’d you say?” he says, louder.

  “What did you say?” I repeat.

  “No, no,” he says. “No, you said something about Greece.” He leans toward me, his freckles almost vibrating. “Did you say you want to go to Greece?”

  I nod.

  “With Sadie?”

  I nod.

  He gulps a huge mouthful of air and for a second I think I’m about to see Mark cry. “Really?” he says.

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  Now that he’s like this, the fantasies come back. He’s so close to broken, I want to take his head in my lap and rub the worries out of his scalp. I want to lie down next to him and put my head on his chest until his heart slows down. I want to kiss him like I did Saturday. I want to touch him like that.

  “I said I don’t want to break up,” he says.

  I hadn’t even thought about breaking up. Not today. Not as a real, practical thing that will have to happen at a specific moment in time. Still, relief floods my system. I put my hand on his far cheek to turn his face to mine and then I kiss him. Even though I feel like I’m supposed to let him take the lead, I don’t. I press my lips to his.

  He pulls back. “But do you think we might have to?” he asks.

  I freeze. This cannot be happening. Even if this has to happen somewhere, someday, somehow, it cannot happen now and it cannot happen here. I’m not ready.

  My hand still glued to his cheek, I say slowly, “Have to what?”

  He swallows again. “I don’t know, Colette. When you say you want to go to Greece, when you drink at Sally’s party, when you hang out with Sadie . . . I’m worried I don’t know who you are anymore.”

  “I’m me!” I say, afraid of what he’s saying even though I also don’t know who I am anymore. “I’m still me. You were drinking at the party, too.”

  Mark nods. His cheeks turn a little pink beneath his freckles. “I almost always have a drink or two at a party. If you aren’t there.”

  I put my head on his shoulder. It’s suddenly too painful not to be touching him. He puts his cheek to my hair, and I feel my pulse calm down.

  “Me, too,” I say.

  “What else were you hiding from me?” he whispers.

  Everything, I think.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  Now he kisses the back of my hand. “Promise?”

  Honesty. “Well . . . I hate sitting on this hill.”

  He looks startled.

  “I mean, I hate being here and not swimming. When I’m at the pool, I want to be in the water.”

  Mark smiles at me curiously, his adorable tooth finally making an appearance. Then he throws his head back and laughs. I join him.

  “Tomorrow,” he declares, “wear your bathing suit. We’re swimming.”

  He hugs me. His skin on mine feels so good.

  “Anything else?” he says.

  “I wish we made out more.” I’m feeling so good, the words explode out of my throat like it should have been easy to say them the entire time.

  Then, his mouth is on mine in a deep kiss. He pulls me up and we jog out of the gate. We run into the park and sit behind the big oak tree, where we kiss and kiss and kiss for hours.

  We should have done this years ago.

  Finally, he says, “I have to go.”

  My lips are chapped and my butt is sore against the ground and both of our stomachs are rumbling.

  I stand and help him up.

  “I love you,” I say.

  He smiles. “I love you, too.”

  We walk hand in hand back toward the parking lot. “Colette?” he asks quietly.

  “Yeah?”

  “So . . .” He hesitates, studying his bare feet. “You’re not going to Greece then, right?”

  I turn red. I understand he wants to know, but the way he’s worded it, like I no longer have a choice, irks me. “I don’t think so,” I say slowly.

  He stops walking and yanks on my hand to get me to face him. “So you still might?”

  I shrug.

  “Really?” he says. “You still might go to Greece? With Sadie Pepper?”

  I shrug again. I hate his voice right now. It’s aggressive and demanding.

  “After all that? After today?”

  “The whole Greece thing . . . it’s not about you,” I whisper. “It . . . I just . . . miss her.”

  “Wouldn’t you miss me?” he asks.

  I feel my heart soften. “Of course,” I promise. “I miss you already.”

  “But you’ll ditch me and not go to Costa Rica? After everything we’ve gone through to get there? You’ll go to Greece and end things?”

  “End things?” I say.

  He sighs. “How can you be my girlfriend if you . . . leave me?”

  “So, if I don’t go to Costa Rica, it’s over?” I ask.

  My head is spinning. Minutes ago we were making out under the tree, loving each other. Now we’ve skidded into a fight and onto the edge of breaking up. I’m wishing he’d broken up with me hours ago, when we first saw each other today. Or better yet, that he’d sent a break-up text while I was at the mall this morning. I don’t want the threats and the guilt. If we aren’t going to be okay, I want to know it. I can’t skirt this edge forever.

  He shrugs, looking at his toes. Then he nods, a tiny jerk of his head. His freckles seem to drip off his face and he looks so sad.

  My cheeks are hot. My heart is beating fast. “That’s not fair,” I say.

  He shrugs again. “Maybe not . . .” He trails off and I’m begging him silently not to level this ultimatum at me. “But I can’t have a girlfriend I don’t know.”

  I stare at him, hard.

  Right now I can’t recognize him either. He looks so sad, so broken, so utterly un-Mark, but I’m still here.

  Would the Mark I love threaten me like this? Would the me that loves Mark abandon him, let him go to Costa Rica alone?

  He’s frozen and I’m staring at him and I don’t know what to do, so I smush my mouth against his so hard my teeth can feel his teeth and I don’t know why I’m doing it or why he’s kissing me back but when I pull away, he smiles.

  I realize I kissed him because I wanted to. Simple as that.

  “Colette!” my mom is screaming when Mark drops me off the next afternoon after several hours at the pool. “Colette!”

  I haven’t heard her scream like that since the boys were little and Adam pushed Peter off the swings and gave him a concussion.

  I find her in the kitchen on the middle floor of our split-level home. “What?” I demand. I almost enjoy the brattiness underneath the word.

  She stares at me and I know why. My hair is wet, dripping all over her clean, white floor, because I said “screw it” and went swimming today. By myself. In my one-piece racing suit. At the public pool. I didn’t even care if the flitty bikinis stared at me. My lips are swollen from making out with Mark in the parking lot during adult swim. We snuck away to kiss all day, although I wasn’t able to get him to touch me like that again. When I put my hand on his waist, he backed away.

  I still don’t know which plane I’m getting on, if all of this making out is a renewed commitment or a passionate good-bye.

  “D
on’t look at me like that,” Mom says.

  I twist a finger through my wet hair, halfheartedly wringing it out so I don’t get too much water in my ears. I don’t want to fly with swimmer’s ear.

  “Would you please explain the phone call I just got from Edie Pepper?”

  My heart doesn’t skip a beat the way I thought it would. The delicious secret doesn’t immediately slosh back into guilt. Instead I think, Oh. This. This is how it will happen. And I notice she called her Edie. She always used to call her Mrs. Pepper, no matter how much Edie complained. So maybe Mom does see that some things have changed. Maybe this won’t be as bad as her screaming voice is indicating.

  Because while I’m thinking all of this, her voice is cascading around the room, words so loud they crash into the cabinets and bounce off the floor. Words like “irresponsible” and “plan” and “college” and “different” and “Christian.” Halfway through her speech she starts banging open cabinets and clanking pots onto the stove like all of this yelling I’m forcing her to do is distracting her from the task of making dinner.

  What does “Christian” have to do with anything? I wonder. I’m calm, twisting my hair, tapping my flip-flopped foot, trying not to notice the way my wet Speedo is rubbing against the skin on my butt and shoulders.

  “On top of that,” Mom is saying, “she started rattling off this list of everything you’ll need. A dress. A bathing suit. She knows we can’t afford some shopping spree. It was like she was trying to convince me not to drop you off at the airport with that crazy family of hers tomorrow.” Mom concludes, “Tomorrow. I don’t think she even wants you there.”

  Suddenly, I’m not calm. “Sadie?” I ask.

  I take a deep breath. I force my heart to slow down. She’s my mother and she shouldn’t be saying mean things to me.

  “Edie. Who knows what that daughter of hers is thinking? But why would she invite you? After all this time? She can’t have good motives.” Mom pauses to cluck her tongue. “Did you think of that?”

  My mom is across the kitchenette, three feet away from me, but it feels like she’s towering over me, like her laser eyes are shrinking me to the size of a cockroach.

  I don’t want to let her do that.

  “After all these years, when you girls have barely spoken, why would your old friend come out of the woodwork and invite you on some lavish vacation?” Mom says. I am shriveling. “I don’t think it’s as simple as her wanting you there.”

  Finally, I can’t help it. My face crumples, my shoulders fall, my eyes see nothing but the white tiled floor.

  “Oh, honey,” Mom says. She take three steps and wraps her arms around me, and even though I’m mad it feels good. It’s been weeks since she hugged me. “What is it?”

  You shouldn’t be allowed to say those things to me. You’re my mom.

  “She needs me,” I say.

  Mom backs up, holding me an arm’s length away. She plants a kiss on my forehead like she does when I’m upset or sick, even though I’m not crying. Yet.

  “Do you know why?” Mom asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Oh, honey,” she says again. She holds me to her, wet hair and bathing suit and all. Then she says, “This is why it’s so hard to have friends who are different.”

  I knit my eyebrows together and peer up at her.

  “Sadie . . . she doesn’t know how to be your friend, not really. If you keep choosing such different friends, you’re going to be lonely.”

  “Different?”

  “Louisa. Sadie,” she says. “They’re . . . You’ve always been drawn to people who are . . . Aren’t things easier with Mark?”

  No.

  We’re silent for a full minute.

  “You know you’re not going, right?” she asks me, and I know she wants to call this conversation over. I also know that she can do that. She’s the mom. She can determine when we’re done with this topic and she can keep me from going where I might need to go.

  I walk over to the breakfast nook and pull out the little stool. I look at her, standing at the stove and clanging pots and pans. Her back is to me, so I try to say it casually, like it doesn’t make my heart hammer, like it’s not a big deal. “I miss her, Mom.”

  It looks like she shudders. She keeps her back to me.

  The front door opens and I hear my dad’s heavy footsteps in the hall.

  “There’s a lot about Sadie that you don’t know,” she says quietly. “You know you’re not going, right?” she repeats.

  I sigh. “I know,” I say. I guess I always did. At least now I don’t need to worry about Mark.

  “Going where?” Dad asks.

  I turn. He’s standing there in a suit—matching gray pants and jacket even though it’s almost eighty-five degrees outside. He has on a red tie, his ex-football-player shoulders fill the doorframe, and his head almost touches the top of it. He shifts his weight back and forth and looks at me. I can’t tell if he’s smiling with his green eyes or trying to stare me down.

  At least Mom is predictable. I knew she’d scream. But Dad, he doesn’t scream. It feels like he’s barely spoken to me since Sadie stopped being my friend. “Hi, Dad,” I say, to stall.

  And, like that, he smiles.

  I want to rush at him, to jump into his arms and nuzzle his neck the way I did every day until I was eight or nine years old. To feel the stubble of his jaw on my forehead and tell him the most exciting part of my day—Sadie and I played dolphins at the pool, Sadie and I found tadpoles in the creek, Sadie and I baked a lemon cake for the boys’ birthday. He would say, “That’s great, little lady.” Then he’d put me down and pat my head and kiss my mother.

  Now he hovers in the doorway.

  Mom doesn’t turn from the stove. She says, “You better tell your father, young lady.”

  “Little lady” sounds so much better than “young lady.”

  I sink into my seat and put my head in my hands. I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want to think about Sadie or Greece or adventures until I have my own life and I can make my own choices.

  I feel both of them staring at the back of my head. The energy in the room cracks and pops. Our kitchenette is too tiny for this much energy, for this many people. Maybe if we had a kitchen like Sadie’s—with a full wooden table and a ceiling high over my dad’s head and granite countertops and pictures we drew in preschool hanging on the fridge—we could have this conversation in it.

  When I pick my head up, I see them looking at me like they don’t even know me. Somehow when I stopped being all-kid and they stopped being all-parent, our family got lost in translation.

  What comes out of my mouth is the one thing they might understand. “Sadie needs me,” I say.

  Mom turns to look at Dad.

  I gave them a reason they can find a way to take pride in. The jigsaw pieces are back in place.

  “Oh,” my dad says. His eyebrows jump. His eyes are locked on my mom’s, and I can feel their personalities zapping back and forth like they’re having a conversation in a secret language.

  “She invited me to go to Greece with her family this summer,” I say. “Tomorrow.”

  “Sadie?” Dad says. But he doesn’t look at me. He looks at Mom.

  “I think I need to go,” I say again. Because if Mom is going to forbid it, I want to make sure she knows she’s forbidding it. “We leave tomorrow,” I say again.

  “You’re not going,” my mom says, as if I’m being ridiculous. The firmness of her words does not match the alarm on her face as she stares at my dad.

  “Dad?” I say. He never says anything. He definitely never stands up to Mom. But right now I need to know what’s going on, what they’re arguing about using only their eyes.

  “Mom, I’m sorry but you can’t do this anymore.”

  She finally looks at me and even though I’m wandering into rebellious-argument territory, the room feels a little less tense than it did a second ago.

  “You can’t dismiss a
decision I’ve made, something I’ve thought hard about, without taking time to think about it. Without asking for the details or hearing my reasons. I’m too grown up. You can’t do that anymore without—I have to do this. Maybe you won’t understand, but I have to.” I hate the whine in my voice. I hate that I sound like a toddler while I’m trying to argue that I’m grown-up. “And I know you’re my parents and you can tell me not to go, but I don’t think you should. I think you’ll regret it.”

  My mom comes over to me and puts her hand on my wet hair. For a fleeting second, I think I’m about to get permission. Dad stares and stares at her, his eyes heavy and full of something I don’t understand.

  “We’re still the parents,” she says softly. “We might have to run that risk.”

  My heart plummets. “Dad?”

  He stares and stares. We freeze and wait, and minutes and hours and days pass as the silent argument snaps between their eyes.

  “Your mother’s right,” he says finally, almost in a whisper. “You’re honoring your commitment and going to Costa Rica.” Then he walks out, down the back stairs, a scared shell of his old football-hero self.

  “Mom?” I say. I’m almost being honest, almost being me more than I have been with her or Dad or Mark or anyone in so many years. “I think maybe I need Sadie, too.”

  A pained expression crosses her face. She shakes her head, her blond curls swishing back and forth across her perfect pink cheeks. “I think you need to stay away from her.” She swallows. “She’s—she’s hurt you too much.”

  I feel the space between us rip into a huge, gaping hole.

  I go upstairs, slow, sad, but also peaceful. Sad because now I know I’m not going. I’m going to break that promise after all. But peaceful because I gave it my best try. I did everything I could to get there for Sadie and it’s not my fault I can’t go. Now I don’t need to make a decision about Mark and Costa Rica and perfection versus fun. Mom made the decisions for me. And really, not going will be easier.

  Ω

  “We’re taking Edie Pepper out to dinner tonight,” Mom said.

  Dad raised his eyebrows at her across the dinner table. “I thought it was going to be just the two of us,” he said.