Frenemies Read Free Page B

When he looked up, his expression made me feel sad.
    “You’re just not what?” I prompted him, although everything felt precarious and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear his answer.
    “I’m just not who you want me to be,” he whispered. “I wanted to be. I really did. More than you’ll know.” He dropped his hand and stepped back. “It’s better this way, trust me.”
    As I said, I blame Janis Joplin. And Amy Lee for introducing the Jägermeister, as well as the thought of singing, into the night. Mix Janis with a few too many beers and unnecessary anesthetic shots, roast it all on the flames of a broken heart, betrayal, and
It’s better this way
and what did anyone expect?
    It started with Bon Jovi. When I was growing up, no one admitted to listening to Bon Jovi, and now that we were almost thirty everyone seemed to know every line of “You Give Love A Bad Name.” The bar erupted in sound, as everyone indulged in air guitar and the birthday girl herself rocked out in the middle of what was, on some nights, a makeshift dance floor.
    This was probably what made me believe that I, too, should take to the floor.
    The guitar kicked in.
    Janis started to wail, “
Come
on,
come
on,
come
on—”
    What happened next was probably inevitable.
    Which didn’t make it any less embarrassing.
    I started off just singing. Then, right around the second chorus, something flipped inside me and I thought,
what the hell?
    This was always, I had discovered through years of trial and error, the moment at which I should stop whatever it was I was doing and take deep breaths until the
what the hell
feeling passed. The
what the hell
feeling was not my friend.
    So, obviously, I ignored every lesson I’d ever learned in the span of my twenties and kept right on singing. Even louder than before.
    Janis Joplin lured me on, with her scratchy voice and obvious pain. I thought,
Janis and I have a bond.
Then I thought
what the hell
again, and the next thing I knew I was shouting out the lyrics.
    Directly to Nate and Helen.
    Into their faces, to be precise.
    My memory got a little foggy on the details, whether from Jägermeister or shame I would never know for sure, but I retained a crystal-clear recollection of myself
standing on a chair
as I towered above the two of them, shrieking out my extremely drunken version of “Piece of My Heart.”
    I didn’t know which was worse: the appalled look on Nate’s face, Helen’s frozen smirk, or the sympathetic expressions both Amy Lee and Oscar wore as they drove me home to my little apartment around the corner from Fenway Park. All I knew was, I’d be seeing them play inside my head for the foreseeable future.
    Outside my apartment building, I waved the car away and paused to take a deep breath while I reviewed the wreckage. I didn’t feel blurry any longer, just slightly sick. The late October night was so cold and dark, however, that it was hard to take a deep breath. I was reduced to taking a few shallow ones instead. Somehow, that made it all seem worse.
    I was turning thirty years old on the second of January, my perfect boyfriend had cheated on me with my freshman year roommate and then dumped me, and I had just humiliated myself in front of every single one of our mutual friends.
    The good news was, it couldn’t get worse.

chapter two
    I t was clear to just about everyone that I was meant to be a librarian when, in the fourth grade, I spent my winter vacation alphabetizing, arranging, and cataloging all the books in my parents’ house. For fun.
    It wasn’t clear to me, however. My plan was to take the Broadway stage by storm (which, perhaps, puts the Janis Joplin horror into perspective). When I wasn’t sorting my books into appropriate stacks, I was belting out show tunes.
Evita
,
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
,
Phantom of the Opera
,
Miss Saigon
,
Les Misérables
,
Anything Goes
, and so on. If it had been up to me, I would have sung all day. I took voice lessons,