Someone Like You Read Free Page B

were then. We’re at the Grand Canyon, at one of those overlook sites, with it spread out huge and gaping behind us. We have on matching T-shirts, sunglasses, and big smiles as we pose, arms around each other. We have never, in any picture before or since, looked more alike. We have the same small nose, the same stance, the same goofy smile. We look happy, standing there in the sunshine, the sky spread out blue and forever in the distance. My mother framed that picture when we got home, sticking it front and center on the mantel where you couldn’t help but see it. It was like she knew, somehow, that it would be a relic just months later, proof of another time and place neither of us could imagine had existed: my mother and I, best friends, posing at the Grand Canyon.
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    Scarlett was sitting on her front steps when we pulled up. It was early evening, just getting dark, and all up and down our street, lights were on in the houses, people out walking their dogs or children. Someone a few streets over was barbecuing, the smell mingling in the air with cut grass and recent rain.
    I got out of the car and put my bag on the front walk, looking across the street at Scarlett’s house, the only light coming from her kitchen and spilling out into the empty carport. She lifted one hand and waved at me from the stoop.
    â€œMom, I’m going to Scarlett’s,” I said.
    â€œFine.” I still wasn’t totally forgiven for this, not yet. But it was late, she was tired, and these days, we had to pick our battles.
    I knew the way across the street and up Scarlett’s walk by heart; I could have done it with every sense lost. The dip in the street halfway across, the two prickly bushes on either end of her walk that left tiny scratches on your skin when you brushed against them. It was eighteen steps from the beginning of the walk to the front stoop; we’d measured it when we were in sixth grade and obsessed with facts and details. We’d spent months calculating distances and counting steps, trying to organize the world into manageable bits and pieces.
    Now I just walked toward her in the half-darkness, aware only of the sound of my own footfalls and the air conditioner humming softly under the side window.
    â€œHey,” I said, and she scooted over to make room for me. “How’s it going?”
    It seemed like the stupidest thing to ask once I’d said it, but there really weren’t any right words. I looked over at her as she sat beside me, barefoot, her hair pulled away from her face in a loose ponytail. She’d been crying.
    I wasn’t used to seeing her this way. Scarlett had always been the stronger, the livelier, the braver. The girl who punched out Missy Lassiter, the meanest, most fiendish of the pink-bike girls that first summer she moved in, on a day when they surrounded us and tried to make us cry. The girl who kept a house, and her mother, up and running since she was five, now playing mother to a thirty-five-year-old child. The girl who had kept the world from swallowing me whole, or so I’d always believed.
    â€œScarlett?” I said, there in the dark, and as she turned to me I saw her face was streaked with tears. For a minute, I didn’t know what to do. I thought again of that picture tucked in her mirror, of her and Michael just weeks ago, the water so bright and shiny behind them. And I thought of what she had done all the millions of times I’d cried to her, collapsing at even the slightest wounding of my heart or pride.
    So I reached over and pulled her to me, wrapping my arms around her, and held my best friend close, returning so many favors all at once. We sat there for a long time, Scarlett and me, with her house looming over us and mine right across the street staring back with its bright windows. It was the end of summer; it was the end of a lot of things. I sat there with her, feeling her shoulders shake under my hands. I had no idea