Best Friend Emma by Sally Warner Read Free Book Online

fingernails are dirty.

    Annie Pat’s house smells different from ours. Not bad, but different. I knock again, but Annie Pat still doesn’t answer. So I slide my apologyletter under her door—and listen hard to hear if she tiptoes over to get it.
    It is a very good letter, in my opinion, and here is what it says:

    Even if I end up with no friends at all—let alone a cool best friend like Annie Pat Masterson, who wants to be a scientist, too—at least I’m doing the right thing.
    Annie Pat’s door opens a crack, just wide enough for me to see one pigtail and one navy-blue eye. “Say it out loud,” she tells me, sounding stern.
    “The whole thing? But—but I don’t have it memorized,” I stammer.
    “Just the last part,” Annie Pat says.
    I wrinkle up my forehead.
Boy
, I think,
she’s not making this very easy for me
. “I was wrong,” I force myself to say.
    “Not that,” Annie Pat says from behind the door. “The part after that.”
    The part after that
. I try to remember. “Uh, ‘your friend’?” I say, guessing.
    Annie Pat’s door opens a little more. Now I can see her angry nose. “You were mean to me just the way Cynthia was mean to you, onceupon a time,” she tells me. “You’re exactly like Cynthia, Emma. You dummy.”

    “I’m
not
like Cynthia,” I object—but nicely, and smiling, in spite of her rude remark, so that she won’t shut the door again.
    I may be a lot of things, but “dummy” isn’t one of them. I hope.
    “Yes, you are too,” Annie Pat insists. “You were trying to decide who would be friends with who, weren’t you? And I just knew that pretty soon you were gonna tell everyone,
‘Kry Rodriguez is my first-best friend, and Annie Pat
Masterson is my second-best friend.’
Just like Cynthia!”
    “I would never say such a dumb thing,” I tell Annie Pat. “And like I wrote in the letter, I promise I won’t try to make friends with Kry Rodriguez anymore. I’ll forget she’s even in our class.”
    “I don’t care about that, Emma,” Annie Pat says, opening her bedroom door even more. Tears make her eyes look even bigger than usual, and that’s saying something. “I mean, I like Kry Rodriguez, too,” she says. “Who wouldn’t? I just don’t want you to forget about being friends with me, that’s all.”
    “Never,” I say, crossing my heart and hoping to die.
    (Not really, but you know what I mean.)
    “Then you may enter,” Annie Pat says, sounding like a queen.
    “Thank you for forgiving me,” I tell her humbly.
    And I really, really mean it.

      12      
Turkeys Drool, Best Friends Rule!
    “Hey, Kry, what is your family going to do tomorrow?” Cynthia asks Kry Rodriguez at lunch on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. Most of the girls in our class have gathered at the picnic table because it’s so pretty outside. The sun is shining, and orange and gold leaves are blowing all around the nearby playground like little holiday decorations, and two scrub jays squawk like crazy in the branches above our heads.
    Cynthia plays with a tiny plastic turkey that is pinned to her pure white sweatshirt as she waits for Kry to answer. I wonder where she got it? I wouldn’t mind having one.
    Kry swallows a bite of her pita-bread sandwich and takes a sip of milk. “We have relatives staying,” she finally says above the uproar—as loud as a garbage truck—the boys are making at a nearby table, and then she smiles at me, because I already know about the relatives.
    Cynthia does not like that smile, but I don’t even care enough to think,
Score
! Whoever Kry wants to be friends with is just fine.
    (Of course, if she wants to hang out with Annie Pat and me, that would be really, really, very, very fine. And Annie Pat agrees with me!)
    “
We’re
going to my grandma’s house in San Diego,” Heather reports, unasked. The long skinny braid that usually falls across her face has a little plastic turkey on its elastic band that matches