My Worst Best Friend by Dyan Sheldon Read Free Book Online

I was in. All I’d know was that I was alive, and on this amazing and beautiful planet. But since I wasn’t at the waterfall, I watched the street outside instead, trying to imagine what Crow’s Point looked like before the town was built, way before any white people decided this was a good place to settle – when there was a village by the river and it was just trees and mountains and hunters and gatherers and the stuff they hunted and gathered.
    When I finished my tea I checked the time. I’d been sitting there imagining bears lumbering through the
traffic and mountain lions sunning themselves on the roof of the bank for half an hour.
She’ll be here any minute
, I told myself. I picked up the sugar wrapper and folded it into a teeny tiny rectangle. I took out my phone to check that I hadn’t turned it off by accident. I called Savanna and left a message. “Hi!” I said. “It’s me. Just so you know, I’m at Java. See you soon.” I slurped the last couple of drops from my cup, and then I made an origami duck from my napkin. After that, I got myself another tea. When I finished drinking that, I texted Savanna: WH R U? The next time I called I said, “Hi, it’s me again. Are you OK? Phone me when you get this.” The time after that I texted again: STL @ J. & U?
    I did that for over an hour, but since she never answered or phoned or texted back, eventually I gave up and got one of the newspapers from the rack by the door. You know, so everyone would think I was there to catch up on current events and wasn’t just some short, loser dweeble who had nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon but sit by herself in a busy café, checking her phone.
    I wasn’t really worried. To be honest, Savanna was late on a pretty regular basis. The sun rose, the clouds drifted by, cows mooed, and Savanna Zindle was late. As Marilouise said, Savanna was easily distracted. She might be an expert on her inner girl, but she didn’t really have what you’d call a highly developed sense of time. So, because Savanna was always late, if I wanted to meet her at five I’d usually tell her to meet me at four – and I usually brought a book with me. But today I hadn’t done either of those things because she had an appointment with her dentist at ten and I figured I was safe. If she’d been coming from home she might have been delayed because she had to spend a couple of extra hours looking for something to wear that matched her mood or her horoscope or something like that, but since she was coming from Dentist Tim that stuff would all have happened before nine-thirty.
    I turned one page of the paper after another, slowly, reading the words without taking them in, and looking at the pictures.
    She’s on her way…
I told myself.
The dentist is on the other side of town… Maybe it took longer than she thought… Maybe she was confused because she was coming from his office and got lost… Maybe she has a blister on her foot from her new shoes so she’s walking really slowly… Maybe she left her bag at Dentist Tim’s and had to go back for it… Maybe she left her bag at home and had to go all the way back there… Maybe she had to run an errand for her mom before she met me… Maybe there was an accident or a fire or something like that and the road was closed off…
I looked at my phone, sitting on the table like a dead mouse.
Maybe she ran into someone she knows… Maybe she ran into someone she doesn’t know…
    As the clock on my phone crawled past hour two I started worrying that maybe I was wrong not to worry about Savanna. Something could have happened to her. It could have been something bad – she could have been hit by a car or her appendix could have burst – but I didn’t want to get started on that. I figure that fear is like a bag of potato chips. Experience suggested that once you open the bag and eat that first chip, you don’t stop until you’ve eaten them all. If I started thinking about all the really awful