My Life in Black and White by Natasha Friend Read Free Book Online Page A

live with themselves, whether it was just the one night or if it had happened before. My head was spinning so fast, and my stomach was twisted up in so many knots that I thought it couldn’t get any worse.
    I had no idea.

 

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    THE NEXT DAY I met with a new plastic surgeon, a specialist in reconstruction, who examined my face for all of two seconds before concluding that the skin wasn’t healing properly. I would need another procedure, a “split thickness skin graft,” taken from my buttocks. While my mother cried, I had one nauseating, hysterical thought. I’ll be a butt-face! Literally!
    As if that wasn’t preposterous enough, not thirty minutes after Dr. Ass-Graft dropped his bomb, Taylor’s mom showed up. Unannounced. Holding an enormous cellophane-wrapped duck.
    Seeing Mrs. LeFevre standing in the doorway of my hospital room, I felt a slow burble of crazy juice rising in my throat. I didn’t know whether to barf or cry.
    “What is she doing here?” I hissed to my mother, who was perched on a chair next to my bed. “I told you no more visitors.”
    “You know what they say…” Taylor’s mom called gaily from across the room. “If Mohammed won’t answer her cell phone, the mountain will come to Mohammed!” She plopped the duck down on a chair and ran a bejeweled hand through her red, spiky hair. “You would not believe how crowded the gift shop was. Everyone and their dog seems to be having a baby today! All they had left were ducks!”
    I watched my mom glide across the room like an ice dancer, her face morphing before my eyes. “Bree,” she chirped as though Taylor’s mom were a guest arriving for a dinner party. “It’s so good of you to come.”
    “Hello, Laine.”
    The mothers clasped fingertips.
    “How are you holding up?”
    “Fine, just fine. How are you holding up?”
    You would think, watching the two of them, that they were old pals. But the truth was, even after all the years Taylor and I had been friends, our parents barely knew one another. Whenever they overlapped at school functions and sleepover drop-offs, they would exchange pleasantries, but that was about it. Taylor’s mom tried once, when we first moved to town, inviting my mother to one of her ladies’ cocktail parties. I never heard what happened. I just I remember my mother telling my dad she wouldn’t be doing that again.
    Laine Mayer vs. Bree LeFevre was like milk vs. whisky. Talbots vs. Juicy Couture. If my mother were a bumper sticker, she would read THAT’S NOT APPROPRIATE . Taylor’s mom would read WHY THE FUCK NOT?
    “Oh, Lexi.” Mrs. LeFevre shifted her gaze to me. “Oh, sweet girl.” When she reached my bed, my ex–best friend’s mother took my hand in hers, cupping it gently. Her voice dropped three octaves. “I am so sorry this happened.”
    “That’s okay,” I mumbled. The lie of the century.
    Taylor’s mom held my hand tighter.
    She read my palm once, I remember. It was during a thunderstorm. I was ten and I was sleeping over at Taylor’s when a humongous boom woke me up. I was so scared I ran downstairs, where Mrs. LeFevre was sitting alone at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of wine. She took my hand to comfort me, and then she started reading it. My heart line, she said, was the deepest she’d ever seen.
    “Taylor is worried sick about you,” Mrs. LeFevre said now.
    Right.
    “She wanted to visit sooner, but since you didn’t return any of her calls…”
    Uh-huh.
    Mrs. LeFevre turned to my mother. “Taylor and Jarrod are down in the cafeteria, getting some ice cream to bring up for Lexi.”
    Ice cream. Sure. That will fix everything.
    “Oh!” my mother said brightly. “Alexa’s father and sister are in the cafeteria, too.”
    “Oh?” Taylor’s mom said.
    “Mm-hm. Maybe they’ll run into one another.”
    Then, right on cue, like some terrible TV sitcom, the door opened. My dad, Ruthie, Mr. LeFevre, Jarrod, and Taylor filed in,