Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner Read Free Book Online Page B

us for sandwiches, potato chips, pickles, and fruit, served with Country Time lemonade that we’d mix up and drink by the pitcher.
    After the first week, we got used to setting an extra place at the table, and to making extra sandwiches. I usual y ate one or one and a half of the ham and Swiss or peanut butter and jel y, and Jon always ate two, but Valerie could put away three sandwiches by herself, along with multiple helpings of chips, glasses of lemonade, a peach or a plum or sometimes both, and once, an entire quart of blueberries.
    While we had lunch, my parents would ask us questions: What had we done that morning? What had we made in crafts? Who had we played with? Jon, with his mouth ful of whole wheat and lunch meat, would rattle off the names of a half-dozen boys, shoveling food into his mouth as fast as he could without my mother objecting. I’d keep quiet, letting Jon talk. There was one girl named Heather who would let me sit with her at snack time, but only if I gave her my graham crackers. When I told my mom about it, she got a sad look on her face and said it would probably be best if I just stayed with the counselors.
    After lunch, my mother would return to the screened-in sunporch, taking along a notebook and a pitcher of iced tea. My father would return to the basement or the garage. Jon would dump his dishes in the sink, jump on his bike, and vanish until dinnertime. I’d pack snacks—cherries and pretzels, apples and granola bars—and wait for Valerie to determine our afternoon activity. She was ful of ideas, and I was happy to go along with them. Let’s try to
    skateboard down Summit Drive, she’d say, and off we’d go, to borrow a skateboard and give it a try. Or, Let’s ride our bikes to the
    mal and see a movie! I was terrified of biking on busy roads, but even more terrified of tel ing Val that and having her find another friend, so I’d fol ow her, the taste of copper pennies in my mouth as I pedaled, my hands greased with sweat as I gripped the handlebars for the length of the two-mile trip.
    Most days, though, we’d end up at the pool. Jon and I had summer passes to the Kresse Rec Center. Once Val’s bike was unpacked, we’d ridden there together. While I’d careful y locked my bike to the bike rack, Val had squinted at the sign above the desk that said admission was fifty cents. “I don’t have any money,” she’d said.
    “Oh.” My face heated up. This was a complication that hadn’t occurred to me.
    “We could go back home. I’ve got my al owance…”
    “Let me think,” said Val. She frowned at the sign. “Wait here,” she said, then hopped back on her bike. A few minutes later she was back, flushed and sweaty and looking pleased.
    “Okay,” she said. “Here’s what we’l do.” Her plan was for me to present my card to the bored, magazine-reading, gumchomping teenage girl at the booth, then spread out my towel at the far edge of the deck, near the chain-link fence, and slip the card through the fence to Valerie, who’d use it to get herself in.
    “But isn’t that stealing?” I asked.
    Val shook her head. “You’re real y just paying for the lifeguards, and I don’t need a lifeguard. I’m a very good swimmer. In California, I swam in the ocean.” I was meant to be impressed by this, and I was. I locked my bike to the rack, flashed my card at the girl behind the desk, who barely looked up from her Cosmopolitan, and made my way to the edge of the concrete. A minute later, Val was there waiting for me. I rol ed my card into a tube, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and passed it through one of the chain-link diamonds. A minute later, Val was walking past the pool, a raggedy towel tucked under her arm, the knot of her bathing suit halter top sticking up from the back of her T-shirt. “See?” she said, spreading her towel out next to mine.
    “No big deal.”
    On rainy days we’d stay in the kitchen, making concoctions of peanut butter and