Friends Like Us Read online

  “Yeah … no one really calls me Pop anymore,” he says, still holding on.

  “Well, not that many people call me dingbat, either.”

  He puts his hands on my shoulders and takes a half step back. “Look at you.”

  “Look at you,” I reply.

  “You look exactly the same,” he says, and then mumbles something and glances away nervously: this is the Ben I remember, indecipherable and endearing.

  “You look completely different,” I say. He meets my eyes again, and we both laugh.

  “Well, I’ve had some work done.”

  I squint at him, considering. “You had your lips plumped, didn’t you?”

  “Plus, a little Botox.” He stares into the distance, his eyes wide. “See? I’m raising and lowering my eyebrows, but you can’t tell.”

  I want to say that I’ve missed him, that I’ve been furious and confused and, finally, resigned to his absence from my life. But it all adds up to too much, and I can’t tease out anything reasonable from the mess. “I didn’t think you’d come,” I say finally.

  “Why not?”

  The room is quickly filling up with our former classmates; I watch as each of their faces seems to register a preprogrammed sequence, from apprehension to eager recognition, uncertainty to confidence. They move around the room like amoebas, forming and re-forming into the social configurations of 1999. “Because we hated high school.”

  “We did,” Ben agrees, following my gaze.

  And that’s when I realize that I came here tonight to see him, and he to see me, a sudden and visceral understanding, shocking both for its obviousness and for the fact that I didn’t know it until this second. I take a deep breath, inhale the woolly, crowded warmth of the room. “Why did we … what happened?” I ask, but the background noise is a din of voices, and I’m not sure he hears me, because it’s at this moment that Alexis Moody glides up and flings her arms around me in an unexpected hug. Alexis and I sat next to each other in homeroom. She was the kind of girl who pasted the inside of her locker with words she cut out from magazines to describe herself: SPECIAL! OUTRAGEOUS! UNIQUE! WOW! For two or three minutes every day for four years, she shared the juicy details of social dramas I had no part in. Her self-assurance was like a big umbrella. She could shelter anyone under it.

  “Wendy?” she says. It takes me a minute to realize she’s talking to me.

  “Willa.”

  “No, it’s Alexis!” she says loudly, laughing, tapping her name tag. “Poor Shelby, huh? Awww!” Then she looks at Ben with frank admiration but not a hint of recognition. “Is this your boyfriend?” She pronounces the word like it’s something she’s just spotted bobbing in the ocean: buoyfriend.

  “Yes!” Ben smiles brightly at her, offering his hand.

  “Oh, my gosh!” she says, her own smile twitching a bit. “Mine is over there! Actually he’s my fee-ahn-say!” She points to a group of identical-looking men in casual wear. “Rich!” she says proudly, and I’m not sure whether she’s telling us his name or describing him.

  There’s an awkward moment when nobody has anything to say, and, with a measure of relief, I’m plotting my escape (Is it 8:05 already?) when suddenly a cluster of women in little black dresses swoops down on us, arms waving, fabric flapping—a colony of pretty bats. They emit a strong, collective odor of fruity perfumes with names, I imagine, like Delicious and Happy and Adorable. (Mine, if I were wearing any, would be called Wary or Irritable.) The bat-ladies simultaneously surround and ignore Ben and me, and I find myself moved along, Alexis’s hand gripping my arm, into the larger crowd.

  A woman I don’t recognize holds a camera up to her face and starts snapping photos; she looks like an emergency vehicle, the camera flashing over and over. “Okay, everyone!” she shouts, and I remember who she is—Leah Reilly, former student council president and friend to everyone. “I just had a totally great idea! I’m going to take pictures of people with their former crushes!” She starts laughing maniacally. “Who did you like back in high school? Who did you like?”

  A few people chuckle uncomfortably. All of our shoes are suddenly extremely interesting.

  “Oh, come on, you guys!” Leah says again, her left hand on her hip, and somehow, from her, this chiding is amiable, more misguided camp counselor than plotter of evil. “We’re all grown up now! High school was eight years ago! Come clean. Who did you like back then? Who did you like?”

  Alexis turns to me and leans in close. Her lips brush against my ear. “I forgot how much I hated high school,” she whispers, and I think that it is endlessly surprising, how everyone has a secret life. A short, dimple-cheeked woman giggles and points to someone on the fringes of the room, and Leah grabs her and takes off, warning the rest of us to stay put, that she’ll be back.

  A few of the women are murmuring to each other and flipping their hair around, clearly beginning to enjoy the opportunity to rekindle a thing or two, and I’m feeling like I actually am back in high school, complete with the attendant stomachache. I’m thinking about Ryan Cox, track star, math whiz, occasional contributor to the magazine Ben and I edited and secret hero of my fantasies (I never knew you were so pretty behind those glasses!); I’m thinking about how loneliness starts growing early and takes root like a weed. I’m starting to feel very sorry for myself.

  And then Ben reappears and taps my shoulder. I automatically look down to find his face and then, seeing only torso, tip my chin up. “Let’s make like a banana,” he says, and I remember what it was like, ten years ago, to be rescued from myself. As fast as I can unhook Alexis Moody’s fingers from the flesh of my upper arm, I’m following Ben out the door and into the wintry night.

  Chapter Two

  My freshman year of high school, I was constantly on the verge of a panic attack. That fall, my parents were busy lobbing grenades in their escalating marital combat zone; my brother, Seth, had morphed from beloved protector into bullying tormentor; I was suddenly three inches taller than the tallest girl in school; and overnight I had grown a pair of boobs so terrifyingly huge they threatened to rear up and smack me in the face. I felt like something out of The Origin of Species—a three-legged gazelle, a knock-kneed kangaroo—a certain kind of animal so clumsy and unappealing, I could only be destined for extinction. I blushed and stammered if I was called on in class. I trembled if a boy so much as looked at me—even if that boy was someone I didn’t know in the lunchroom or my middle-aged math teacher with his chronic coffee breath or the janitor. If I spoke at all, I whispered. It was becoming pathological. Before I knew it, I’d be whiling away my days fingering my collection of fragile glass animals and pining over an indifferent gentleman caller.

  And then I met Ben. We were paired up in our second semester honors English class and given the task of creating a literary journal.

  “I do not want you to settle for average in your forays into the world of high school literary talent,” Ms. Barnum advised us. Her cheeks were flushed with passion; she raised her hands to her face to cool her own ardor. “As editors,” she said, “you will see that you can coax exceptional writing from students.” It was her first year on the job, and she was frequently filled with this kind of exhilaration, the kind of naked optimism that perched on its hind legs and begged us to destroy it. “I want these journals to be exceptional,” she said, bouncing on her heels. “I want you to find writing that soars.”

  “Like herpes?” Ben whispered to me. He was physically awkward and hadn’t yet come to terms with the need to shower daily; he liked to share his arcane knowledge of the unusual foods of foreign cultures with anyone who’d listen (Every country has its own version of the dumpling!). He had the tendency to interrupt a person by interjecting peculiar synonyms into the conversation (Did the movie make you lachrymose? Oh, do you mean to say you bungled the science quiz?); he frequently thought people were talking about him when they weren’t; he laced his neurotic paranoia with biting wit; and he saved me.

  We named our jo
urnal The Prose Shop, congratulating ourselves on our brilliance, and, against the odds, alone among the mediocre work of our classmates, our journal became a success. Ms. Barnum was delirious. We had submissions, subscribers, a budget. Ben did the copyediting, and I made sprightly ink drawings to fill the empty spaces and the margins. (For a short story about an average kid who wakes up one morning and discovers he’s suddenly a genius, I drew a cockroach brandishing a protractor and wearing a contemplative expression; for a rhymey, earnest poem about the power of female friendship, I drew a car careening over the edge of a cliff, two clasped hands visible through the windshield.) By myself, I was a stammering nitwit. With Ben, I was confident. I was brave.

  At five foot three (eight inches shorter than I was) and sporting a small, round potbelly, Ben wasn’t exactly a guy, in the same way I felt I wasn’t quite a girl. Together, we were a third sex, an unsexed sex, and so, like siblings, like twins, like some sort of human/lemur hybrid, nothing was weird between us. We nurtured each other with great doses of sympathy and a tiny, shimmering sparkle of mutual superiority. We made up dirty movie titles for Dickens novels—David Cockerfield, Little Whore-it, Hard Times—and laughed about them as if we were worldly and sophisticated instead of unkissed and clueless. We memorized passages from Shakespeare competitively, for fun. On the weekends, we devoted hours to creating a comic book called The Overachievers, about a band of misunderstood high school superheroes with stellar SAT scores. We wrote the story together, and I did the illustrations. We were the dorkiest of dorks. An oddball on her own is a pitiable creature, but two weirdos together are a fortress.

  As close as we were in high school, for reasons unclear to me we lost touch after our first year of college. It’s not that I haven’t analyzed the end of our friendship, but it wasn’t an obvious break; it was death by attrition, a slow dwindling, and although I still think about him often, I’ve never figured out why it happened. Sometimes I can practically convince myself that it didn’t happen, that we’re just very, very bad at keeping in touch. Other times I lie awake at night going over every detail of the final months of our friendship, replaying the last time I saw him. The one thing I know for sure is that it was Ben’s doing: I called and wrote for months before I finally realized that he had stopped calling and writing back. Our distance has lived in me like the aftermath of a bad dream—I carry it around, the knowledge that we were once close, that something was lost; it’s the lingering sadness of unfinished business.

  The heavy restaurant doors close behind us with a whoosh. The parking lot is shimmering and surreal, the night sky swollen with snow. The wind has picked up since I got here an hour ago; it whips my hair across my face in hard little slaps. I feel around for nonexistent pockets in my skirt.

  “This is just like that one time,” Ben says, zipping his jacket.

  “I know!” I glance at him, his shoulders hunched against the wind, his breath coming out in little puffs. The person who knew you best when you were seventeen will always have a claim on you, no matter how much you change. There’s something seductive and magnetic about it, the feeling of being understood like that. I suppose it goes both ways.

  Ben stomps his feet and blows on his hands. “Where’s your coat?”

  “You know me,” I say, my nonchalant shrug turning into a shiver. “I live on the edge.” My eyes are watering, my face slowly growing immobile. It’s starting to snow, mean icy clumps hurling down like snowballs from God.

  “Willa.” Ben says my name with a sudden, sharp irritation that reminds me of the last summer of our friendship. “Come on.” He grabs my hand and pulls me to his car, and we wait in the front seat while it warms up. It feels like we were just here five minutes ago.

  The wind rattles the windows. I could ask him where he’s been for the past seven years, why he ended our friendship and broke my heart. Or I could tell him he’s an ass and slam the car door after myself. But here he is, next to me, rearranged, and I am, too, although maybe not as noticeably. The snow is starting to stick to the asphalt and to the other cars, turning the dark parking lot into the moon.

  “So,” I say, when I can feel my face again. Heat blasts out of the vents, and the windows are fogging. I watch him as he fiddles with the car radio, which is not on. Like we always did in high school, we’ve created our own little universe without even trying. I’m catapulted back into a world of grateful love for my best friend. Still, I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until his bones clatter. Is there an explanation in there somewhere?

  “Awesome party,” Ben says, finally. He smiles without showing his teeth, moves his hands to the steering wheel, and plants them at ten o’clock and two o’clock, as if we’re going somewhere.

  “Who did you like?” I say.

  The last time we saw each other was at the end of summer vacation before our sophomore year of college. Things had been strained between us for three months; I had been plagued by the constant, uncomfortable feeling that Ben was angry at me. He undercut our usual ease with inexplicable silences and frequent sighs; he snapped at me when I teased him and often tuned out of our conversations entirely. Still, through stubbornness or habit, we hung out most nights, meeting for coffee or ice cream or for beers at the High Road, the dive bar we knew that didn’t card—which was especially fortunate, since Ben still looked about thirteen. That night we were marking the end of the summer. We arranged to have dinner together at the Cottage, a downtown bistro with an outdoor patio. Ben had a flight the next morning.

  He met me at the door, muttering a greeting, seeming more nervous than usual. His hair was unusually neat, and he looked like he’d picked his clothes out of the closet, as opposed to grabbing whatever wrinkled T-shirt and shorts were closest to his bed when he woke up in the morning. He was fidgety, alternately tightening and loosening his watch band and tracing the design on the tablecloth with his fingertips. I remember noticing the hair on his arms—I hardly ever thought of Ben as male, and then something, a shadow across his face, a change in the tone of his voice, would remind me, just briefly. He looked like he had something on his mind, but the summer had been long and tense, and I didn’t think I wanted to hear it. We were sitting outside and had just ordered our food when a guy I barely knew from school walked past our table. Without really thinking about it, I flagged him down and asked him to join us.

  I could tell that Ben was annoyed with me for inviting my new friend to crash our private party, but I didn’t care. I was relieved that the difficult, tiresome summer was ending; I felt as if I could finally breathe in the heat of the August night, like something important was shifting, and that Ben needed proof: if he was going to treat me shabbily, I would find someone else to be close to. So I turned my attention to Matt, laughing at his jokes, staring, rapt, as he talked, mostly about baseball. I flirted tirelessly with him, a skill I had just picked up and hadn’t yet perfected. When Ben got up to leave abruptly at the end of the meal, I gave him a quick hug good-bye, and then I asked Matt if he wanted to order dessert. He did.

  We could sit here all night without saying anything real. But a high school reunion, even an eight-year one, is nothing if not a reminder that time passes. “I’m glad you showed up,” I try. Ben doesn’t answer. “And I am pleased that you, Willa, showed up as well,” I say, my voice pitched low.

  He stares straight ahead, the muscles in his jaw working. He exhales loudly, as if he’s been holding his breath. Without warning, he smacks his palm against his forehead. “Jesus!”

  The force of this—whatever it is—takes me completely by surprise. A sudden pressure builds behind my eyes. I move toward the door, my fingers on the handle. Given the option of fight or flight, I’ll always flee. But seven years of silence and repressed feelings will make their inevitable escape. “What?” I say, pressed against the door, my voice loud and shaky. “What is it?”

  “Who did I like?” I can see, even in the dim glow of the parking lot lights, that Ben’s face has gone red. “Are you th
at stupid?”

  This is not my friend. This is someone else—Ben’s mean but distractingly manly cousin. “Apparently, yes, I am, thank you.” And just as I’m saying it I understand, and then four years of friendship vaporize, just like that. I look down at my hands, long and alien, pinkish in the snowy light. “Oh. Shit.”

  “Which, in all the years I’ve thought about it, is not the response I’d hoped for.” His voice is quieter, slightly hoarse, as if there are big Swiss-cheese holes in it where the nastiness has just been.

  I scan the dashboard, trying to make sense of this revelation, but understanding only that the car has 78,997 miles on it. I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear; I can tell without looking that it’s gone frizzy in the damp heat. If I had met Ben tonight, my boyfriend detector would have been clicking away; I might have positioned myself at a table near his, made some clever comment, and then turned away, waiting, faking quiet confidence. But this-Ben, new-Ben is just a superimposed image on top of the boy I used to know, my short, chubby, hygiene-challenged pal, my friend, my best friend.

  “I just mean, you know, I had no idea,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “Also not on my list,” Ben says, but he sounds more like himself, like he finally remembers that beneath every statement lies the opportunity for self-mockery.

  And all of a sudden I’m thinking about Jane, Jane whose friendship is a direct descendant of this one, Jane who wears sparkly eye shadow to clean a house, who never met a karaoke machine she didn’t love, who dressed up last Halloween as a turkey sandwich, the why-not to my no-way. What would Jane do? I ask myself this question frequently; for her birthday last year, she bought me a WWJD bracelet. I move toward Ben, unsure of myself, but certain of the answer. He’s still sitting straight in his seat, staring at the foggy, wet window as if there is an important answer encoded in the dripping blobs of slush. “Well,” I say. “Like what’s-her-name said, high school was a long time ago.” I reach over and put my hands on either side of his face. We’ll tell our grandchildren that we were friends for years before we realized we were in love, that Ben knew long before I did, that it all came together in our first kiss, in a steamy car on a freezing cold night.