Best Friends Forever Read Free Page B

been, and what she would have made of the woman I’d become. I imagined the little me standing at the doorway of my bedroom, once my parents’, in a neat cotton sweater and a pleated skirt, dark-brown hair caught in a ponytail and tied with a ribbon that matched her kneesocks. At first she’d be pleased by the rich color of the paint on the bedroom wal s, the oil painting that I’d done of a lighthouse casting its beam of gold over the water, hanging above the window. She would like the enameled vase on the bedside table, the crisp linen bedskirt and the trel ised iron headboard, but then she’d realize that it was my parents’ bedroom. Stil here? she’d think, and I’d have to explain how I hadn’t meant to stay, how I’d tried to go away to col ege, how I’d planned to live in a big city, to have boyfriends and an interesting job, to make friends and take trips and have an apartment that I’d decorate with souvenirs and statues and photographs I’d have taken on my travels around the world, how I’d planned on al of that, but somehow…
    I rol ed onto my side. My blood buzzed, and my thoughts were darting wildly, jumping from my date who’d looked so promising, to the website where I’d found him, to my exboyfriend Vijay, who’d been “ex” for four months, and who’d never exactly been a boyfriend. You couldn’t cal him a boyfriend, I guess, if we’d been out together in public only once, but I’d loved him with an intensity that I thought—or at least hoped—was reserved for the first man you’d wanted who’d broken your heart.
    I squeezed my eyes shut and let my hand rest briefly on my bel y, holding my breath as I pressed. Stil there. The lump—it was actual y more of a stiffness than a lump
    —was stil there, between the ridge of my pubic bone and my bel y button. I pushed at it, prodding with my fingertips. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it didn’t feel normal, either. I didn’t know how long it had been there—for years I’d been so fat I could have been gestating twins and probably not noticed
    —but I was sure that I knew what it was. Hadn’t I watched my own mother die of the same thing? First her breasts, then her liver, then her lungs and her bones, then everything, everywhere.
    I’d scheduled an appointment with my doctor for next week, the soonest they could take me. The receptionist’s chirpy voice had cooled noticeably at my name, and I knew why. Last year I’d cal ed in a panic after my fingers
    had
    found
    an
    odd-shaped
    protuberance on the side of my abdomen
    …which had turned out to be my hipbone. Wel , how was I supposed to know? I thought, as sul en as I’d been when the nurse delivered the verdict, then stepped outside the exam room to laugh her stupid highlighted head off. You spend ten years in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds and see how wel you recognize your own bones when you find them again. your own bones when you find them again. Besides, this time it felt different.
    Big, strangely
    stiff,
    growing
    each
    day.
    I
    knew
    what
    it was, and deep down, I’d known that it was coming. Bad luck always found me. I was a bad-luck kind of girl. The cancer had eaten my mother and found her sweet, and now it had returned to Crescent Drive, hoping I’d taste the same. And maybe that wouldn’t be so awful, I thought, as I lay on my fancy bedding, staring up at the crown moldings I’d hot-glued in place with my birthday clock ticking quietly beside me. I could just give up on everything, starting with Internet dating. No more freaks and geeks and unexpected mustaches; no more regular-looking guys who turned out to be from the Twilight Zone. I could just read, stay in bed eating shortbread cookies and gelato, and wait for the end…and with that, I heard the knock at the door, and I went downstairs to find my best friend standing there, just like old times.
    FOUR
    By the time Jordan Novick, Pleasant Ridge police chief, arrived at the parking lot