Mike, Mike & Me Read Free

gravy.
    Whenever Valerie was on her low-fat diet, I had to sneak my indulgences so that she wouldn’t be tempted to stray from her oat-bran-strewn path. Of course, sooner or later, she always did, but at least I knew it wasn’t my fault.
    “This is new. Don’t you like it?” I asked Valerie, gesturing at the black spandex minidress I was wearing.
    I wiped a trickle of sweat from my forehead as she contemplated my appearance. Damn, it was hot, despite the open window and the rotating floor fan in front of it. This was my second summer in Manhattan. Last year, I was so thrilled to actually be living here that I guess I didn’t notice the heat in our fourth floor, un-air-conditioned one-bedroom walk-up.
    I do remember noticing the street noise—the round-the-clock horn-honking, sirens, construction-site jackhammers, the throbbing bass from passing car radios and neighborhood bars. It took me a while to get used to the incessant din that accompanied daily life on the Upper West Side. After I did get used to it, whenever I went upstate to visit my family, the nights seemed preternaturally quiet.
    Valerie shrugged, set aside the bottle of pale frosted pink polish and said, re: my outfit, “I don’t know, Beau. Don’t you think it’s kind of…”
    “Short?”
    “Yeah, that. And…”
    “Dark?”
    “That, too. But also kind of…”
    I opened my mouth again, but this time Valerie finished her own sentence.
    She finished it with “slutty,” and I grinned.
    “I haven’t seen Mike since April, Val. After three months apart, maybe I want to look slutty.”
    “No, you want to look sexy. The red one is sexy. This one is slutty. There’s a big difference. Hey, I love this song!” She reached toward the stacked plastic milk crates serving as a nightstand between our two beds and turned up the volume on the boom box.
    “I hate this song,” I grumbled, recognizing the all-too-familiar opening strains of Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl.”
    “I thought you loved it.”
    “I didn’t ‘love’ it, I liked it. And that was last month, before they played it every five minutes on every radio station in New York.”
    As Valerie sang the opening, “Hey, baby,” in an off-key falsetto, I couldn’t resist adding, “Anyway, I like new-wave stuff much better than pop. Pop is so over.”
    “That’s what you said about Madonna last year, and now look. She’s everywhere again.”
    “I give her five minutes,” I said darkly. “And Paula Abdul gets ten. Nobody will ever have heard of either of them in a few years. But INXS and The Cure will be around forever, like the Beatles. Mark my words.”
    She was too busy singing along with flash-in-the-pan Paula to mark my words, so I picked up the hanger draped with the red dress. It was a month old and I had worn it at least three times already, but of course Mike had never seen me in it. Holding the hanger against my shoulders, I surveyed my reflection.
    The short skirt had a ruffled flare, reflecting the lambada craze that had overtaken everyone’s wardrobe that summer. My light brown hair was pretty much bigger than the skirt: long, kinky-permed and teased on top, with the bangs sprayed fashionably stiff and curving out from my forehead like a tusk.
    “I don’t know,” I told Valerie. “I think I like the way the black clings better.”
    Lying on her back and waving her legs around in the air to dry her toenail polish, Valerie interrupted her singing to say, “I’d kill to like the way something clings on me.”
    I never knew how to respond when she made comments like that. It wasn’t easy being five foot seven and a hundred and twenty pounds when your best friend was six inches shorter and a good thirty pounds heavier.
    I know, I know…it was probably much harder to be the shorter, heavier one. But I couldn’t help feeling awkward whenever Valerie looked at me with blatant envy…like she was right now.
    I tried to think of something nice to say about the