Frenemies Read Free

be better than a boyfriend so perfect that other women plotted ways to impress him? A boyfriend who I’d actually been friends with for years? With Nate, finally, everything was as it should be. I could see our future stretch before us, one perfect fantasy after the next. I had nothing to fear from thirty. I was a
complete
adult, life was going along
as planned
, and there would be no need for the stereotypical I’m-about-to-turn-thirty breakdown.
    And the fact that Nate was so cute that even Amy Lee sighed over him was just a bonus.
    Across the room, Nate shifted position on his bar stool, so I could see his puppy-dog eyes for myself. And also the person those eyes were focused on: Helen.
    I felt rage sweep through me, prickling along my scalp and then shooting along my skin to the tips of my toes.
    The thing about Helen was that she was
that girl
, I thought as I knocked back my beer, and then helped myself to the rest of Oscar’s. He didn’t complain, he just raised his brow at Amy Lee and then launched himself toward the bar for refills.
    You could say that I’d conducted a study of Helen, I thought then. It began the day she sauntered into the tiny, concrete-walled room we would be sharing for our freshman year, smiled at me and the remains of my high school hair, and claimed the bed beneath the windows. The better bed. I didn’t even put up a fight. I was dazzled.
    Helen, with her fashionably ratty jeans and casual assumption that everyone wanted to hang out with her, was cool. Impossibly cool. Even the fact that she had one of those jarring donkey laughs like Janice on
Friends
just made her interesting, when on anyone else, a laugh like that would be dorky beyond belief. Nothing about Helen was dorky.
    Helen had no qualms about walking up to the cutest boy in our dorm and asking him what was going on that terrifying first night at college, and then inviting herself along. She didn’t care if the more insecure girls hated her. She intimidated our RA simply by turning up and draping herself across a chair in that boneless way she had. She didn’t seem to notice any of the tension or envy she kicked up in her wake.
    Helen was a guy’s girl. She never met a guy, in fact, who didn’t want to be her friend. She never met a girl who did. I, meanwhile, was very much the opposite. My knowledge of boys at eighteen came entirely from fantasy novels and certain classic WB shows. I was a girl’s girl. The moment I met Georgia and Amy Lee, I knew I would be friends with them, because we were all the same beneath the skin. Living with Helen was like seeing behind a curtain. I got to see what it was like to be everything I couldn’t be.
    She was
that girl.
The one I had believed for eighteen years existed only in the imaginations of Hollywood screenwriters. And the fact that she was my roommate meant that I got to be
that girl
along with her, if only in my own mind.
    Between worshiping her at eighteen and wanting to leap across a crowded bar to strangle her at twenty-nine, however, there was the entire span of our friendship. There were the random nights out we’d had in those chaotic years after college, just the two of us, where I would marvel at her near-superhuman ability to attract cute boys and she would tell me how much she relied on my friendship. There were the phone conversations when she’d tell me long, hilarious stories about her romantic exploits that always ended with some guy begging for another chance while Helen tried to extricate herself. These were the things that made me roll my eyes when I saw her number on caller ID, and they were also the things that made me smile when I thought about her. There was no one quite like Helen. I’d known that even as a teenager.
    When she’d started playing her little games with Nate over the summer—all those sidelong glances and overly intimate smiles she was so good at—I’d just gritted my teeth and ignored it. That was just Helen being Helen, I’d