Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online

looked down at her lap. “I saw him at the bar,” she said. “Him and his friends.” I waited. Valerie pressed her hands together.
    “I was just going to ignore him, but he walked right up to me, and it was okay at first. He said he’d seen me on TV, and how nice it was that someone from our class had gotten famous.” She al owed herself to preen briefly at the word “famous.” I didn’t have the heart to tel her that reading the weather on the nightly news did not exactly make her a movie star. The truth was, anyway, she was right—if you considered the combined resumes of the 296 surviv-ing members of our class, Valerie was the most famous…unless you were inclined to count Gordon Perrault, who’d blown out his back raking leaves, developed an unfortunate addiction to fentanyl patches, and was currently serving five to seven for robbing a drugstore while wearing a Burger King mask.
    “I was just having a good time, talking to people, and I had a few drinks, and things were winding down when I heard him at the bar. He was with Chip Mason and Kevin Oliphant, remember them?”
    I nodded, vaguely recal ing two hulking boys in footbal jerseys.
    “And Kevin said something to Dan like,
    ‘Hey, Valerie’s here. You going back for seconds?’ And Dan laughed. He laughed. ”
    I didn’t answer. Of course he’d laughed. Laughing was what guys like Dan did.
    “They didn’t know I heard him,” Val said. Her voice was climbing higher and higher.
    “So I went back to the bar, and I started flirting with him. You know. Touching his arm, asking lots of questions, acting like I was into him. I told him to meet me outside…that I’d give him a ride. I waited for him, and he came outside, and we were fooling around and then…”
    She gulped. “I made him take his clothes off.”
    I gaped at her. “Why?”
    “Because it’s humiliating,” she said, as if this were obvious. “And it’s cold out. Major shrinkage. I took a picture with my cel phone…”
    “As you do,” I murmured.
    Val ignored me. “I got in the car and I was going to drive away, you know, just leave him there, let him see how he likes being the one everyone’s laughing at, and I turned the car on, and he was grabbing at the mirror, and I stepped on the gas, and I think he must have jumped in front of me and maybe I was in drive instead of reverse and then
    …he was…” She buried her face in her hands.
    “You hit him?”
    She bent her head, shoulders shaking, saying nothing.
    I said it again, only this time not as a question. “You hit him.”
    “It was an accident,” she breathed, and stared at me defiantly. “I think it was kind of the car’s fault. I’ve got this new Jaguar. I didn’t know my own power.” She pushed her hair behind her ears, first one side, then the other, a gesture I remembered. “He deserved it,” Valerie said. “He deserved it for what he did to me.”
    I couldn’t speak. I could only look at her. Valerie twisted her hands in her lap. “I tried not to think about it…about what happened. About what…” She gathered herself. “What he did to me. And you…I’m so sorry, Addie,”
    she whispered. “You were trying to do the right thing. I know that now.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said. My throat was thick with unshed tears; my eyes were burning.
    “It was a long time ago.”
    “But you were my friend. ” Val’s voice cracked, and I made myself look away, knowing that if she cried, I’d cry, too, and if I cried, I would remember. I would remember, for example, a cardboard box fil ed with tangled marionette wires, or my brother’s face, blank and be-wildered, as the vice principal asked him, impatiently, which boys had thrown his backpack down the stairs, or Hal oween night and the cop car parked outside my house, lights flashing, painting the wal s red, then blue, red, then blue. I’d remember Mrs. Bass’s voice on the telephone, tel ing me about my father. I’d remember covering my