MWF Seeking BFF by Rachel Bertsche Read Free Book Online

do you mean the age talk?” I ask. “How old is he?” I assume she means he’s too old to want kids.
    “Well, how old do you think I am?”
    Yeah, right. I know this game.
    Natalie jumps to my rescue. “Anne looks so young,” she says before directing attention back to the conversation at hand. “How old is this law student?”
    Anne explains that he’s 29, six months older than her last boyfriend. That she’s counting his age by months is a tip-off, but if I were to have answered her question I would have guessed 33. Maybe 35. She’s tall, blond, and has a dancer’s body. I’d kill to look like her at 35.
    “I’m 41,” she says. “But it’s not like I’m a cougar. I just tend to like younger guys.”
    When talk turns to the book, I finally forget I’m the baby of the group. Those of us who’ve read it have a stimulating discussion. Anne is actually quite fabulous—she sews yoga matbags and has a contagious laugh. The fact that she’s fourteen years my elder is much less an indicator of our friendship potential than is the fact that she owns her own dog-sitting and -walking business. (I’m not an animal person, but three of the women here refer to their dachshunds as their babies. As in, “My baby has a yeast infection in her ear.”) And while allergies alone would never allow me to go to her apartment—she houses up to eight dogs at a time—she seems to have BFF potential. She too loves
Les Miz
and eighties movies, and clearly she believes age is nothing but a number.
    What a cute buddy trio we could be. Twenty-seven-year-old me, Natalie, who’s 32, and Anne. I can see the women’s magazine spread now: Best Friends Span the Decades. There’ll be a
Real Simple
-esque black-and-white photo of us laughing together about that time when Anne told Rachel she wasn’t a cougar. Ah, the memories.
    Natalie’s taking me under her wing. I can feel it. She says she’s going to send me an invitation to her friend’s upcoming cookie party, where each guest must bring three dozen homemade cookies. I laugh to myself at how Suzy Homemaker it sounds, then realize that cookie parties are the kind of thing people in the market for friends can’t laugh at. There was a time when I would’ve scoffed and made some snide remark about cookie parties being for moms in the suburbs, but I guarantee that some of the guests are, in fact, moms in the suburbs. And, I have to keep reminding myself, there’s nothing wrong with that.
    I’ve spent much of my life with an us-versus-them mentality. Us: the young, hip urbanites who would never leave the bustling city for the station-wagon lifestyle of the ’burbs, who are too young for kids and would never give up our careers for babies and the stay-at-home life. Them: the family folk who’vesettled down and have two ear-infected dachshunds, composters, and cookie parties. It’s like I always say to Matt, “It’s so weird that we’re married. We’re too young to be married. Marriage is for grown-ups.”
    Or, us: the too-old-for-going-out-on-weeknights worker-bees, who laugh at the drunk college kids yelling outside the bar. Them: the just-out-of-college workforce who arrive at the office hungover because, I mean, it was Thursday night.
    I’m straddling the line, slowly becoming a grown-up without ever having realized it, while still keeping a foot in the post-grad life. And beggars can’t be choosers. If I limit my best friends to an age or life-stage, I’ll probably be pretty lonely in eleven months.
    I tell Natalie to count me in.
    The morning after the book club I receive an email subjected “Catch Up.” I see that it’s from Rebecca, the former office intern who my coworkers called a virtual mini-me. Mostly because she has the same brown curly hair as I do and goes to Northwestern. Rebecca is seriously wrapped up in college life, saying things like “It was just me and my sixteen best friends,” or, “If you went to Northwestern now, you would
totally
be in