A Little Change of Face by Lauren Baratz-Logsted Read Free Book Online Page A

of stuff that we needed to talk about, and food was always in the immediate vicinity whenever we did so.
    And then there were those vast forty-eight-hour waste-lands of time at that suitcase college that were more commonly referred to as the weekend; weekends where the dorm cafeteria was closed and we often resorted to the Student Union for our hungover-Saturday and Sunday eating-lunch-for-breakfast meals: tuna melts and milk shakes, grilled cheese sandwiches and Funny Bones, lots of diet soda and lots of cigarettes. Eateateat, talktalktalk.
    But the most important Student Union meals of all were the rare ones that occurred late on Sunday afternoons at the tail end of rare weekends when one of us had stayed on campus alone while—gasp!—the other had gone home alone. This meant that, not only did we have a pressing need to discuss the usual pressing-need stuff—guys we were interested in, parties, other girls who annoyed us, diets, whether we’d pass any of the classes we never seemed to be going to, the inherent impossibility (slurp!) of sticking to any milk-shake-free diet while going to a school with its own agricultural college, the factthat she was indeed now a smoker since she had passed the pack-a-day mark and should therefore probably contribute to our daily nic tab, the fact that I could be petty from time to time—but we also had all of the pressing-need stuff that we’d been acquiring independently while (gasp!) apart.
    These extra-special talks, during which we each felt as though we were talking to a whole new other person, given our protracted separation, required foodstuffs that went beyond the usual Nutrasweet/Funny Bones double-whammy. It required something beyond smoking while eating. It required something extra-special to recement us as the friends we’d always been and always would be, reconfirming the fact that it would always be okay for us to grow while apart just so long as we never grew apart. And, leave it to Best Girlfriend to come up with the perfect reconnection ritual climax: miniature peppermint patties consumed while sitting on a bronze plaque commemorating some man we never knew anything about.
    â€œIt’s gotta be his face,” Best Girlfriend had said, taking a teensy bite from the patty in order to make it last longer.
    â€œYa think?” I’d asked, taking my own first nip. “How can you possibly know such a thing? How come not the feet? In graveyards, aren’t headstones at the head and plaques at the feet?”
    â€œBut this isn’t a graveyard. I mean, what’re you talking about?” It was amazing how, for two girls who’d grown up entirely within the state of Connecticut, in most of our discussions during our college years, we both sounded remarkably like Joe Pesci. “If there were a real person underneath us here, buried on the lawn outside of the Student Union, right around the area where we usually sit for movies sometimes, that would just be way too gross for words. It’s just a commemorative plaque.”
    â€œSo, wait a second, then. The reason you said we’re sitting on Irwin Lerner’s face is because…?”
    â€œIt’s because I said so.”
    â€œAh.”
    And Best Girlfriend was just enough months older than me that she always had the edge in any heated debate.
    But then she moved away after college, and there was no more sitting on Irwin Lerner’s face together for us.
    Our friendship was like being married to someone who gets sentenced to a really-really long prison term. On the one hand, you’ve sworn to wait for him and maybe you even intend to, and maybe you’ll even be able to. But in the case of a best friend that moves far away, even though she remains your official best friend, you still need to hook up with someone close by, someone you can go shopping with so that you can reject whatever the current fashion trend is together, someone with whom to attend