The Kind of Friends We Used to Be Read Free

easy stuff. In Kate’s opinion, E minor sounded great.
    “Where did you go this morning?” Marylin asked. “When I woke up and didn’t see you there, I was worried sick.”
    “So how come you’re only calling me now? It’s after lunch.” Kate strummed another Eminor, which sounded satisfyingly dramatic and sad at the same time.
    “Well, it took forever to eat breakfast, because Mazie kept burning the pancakes, and one time the smoke alarm went off, and that made everything completely crazy. And to be honest, it wasn’t until about eleven o’clock that I realized you were missing.”
    “That makes me feel great,” Kate said. “You have no idea how much you’ve just improved my self-esteem.”
    Marylin didn’t say anything for a minute. Kate could practically hear her thinking. Then she gasped and cried out, “You’re right, Kate! You’re right. That’s awful that I didn’t notice earlier! It’s just with everyone running around all over the house, and the alarm going off, well, I guess I must have thought you were in the bathroom or something.”
    For three hours? Kate wanted to ask. But she didn’t. Because from her twelve years’ experience of being alive, she knew that very few people could admit they were wrong the way that Marylin just had. It was a trait you didn’twant to squash out with a sarcastic remark.
    “Anyway,” she told Marylin, flipping through the guitar book to find another easy chord, “I just decided to come home. You were the only person there who’s actually my friend.”
    “That’s not true!” Marylin exclaimed. Then she was quiet again for a moment. “Okay, well, maybe it’s sort of true. But you’re friends with Ashley. You’ve been friends with Ashley since kindergarten.”
    Kate rolled her eyes. The problem with being friends with Marylin was that she was such an unrealistic person. She thought cheerleaders and regular people could be friends. True, Kate and Ashley had been friends before Ashley had become a middle-school cheerleader. In fourth grade they had done a science project together, where they used Play-Doh to show the different layers of the earth, brown for the crust, yellow for the mantle, orange for the outer core, and red for the inner core. They’d spent an entire Saturday afternoon at Ashley’s house constructing the layers and making an interesting-to-look-at presentation.Ashley’s mom brought in snacks and lemonade, and her little brother kept stealing bits of Play-Doh to make a Star Wars Millennium Falcon.
    That’s what killed Kate about middle school. You could share a history with a person, know their mom and their little brother and what kind of laundry detergent they used (in Ashley’s case, her family used Mountain Fresh Tide, which smelled a million times better than the baking-soda brand Kate’s mom bought), but the second that person became a middle-school cheerleader, forget it. It’s like all that stuff never existed.
    It was different with Marylin, of course. But that’s because Marylin was the sensitive type. She was the sort of person who got mad if you picked up a daddy longlegs by one of his spindly legs. “You’re hurting him!” she’d yell, like the daddy longlegs was a person. True, she and Flannery had given Kate the silent treatment in sixth grade, a memory that still made Kate go cold all over, but in the end she and Marylin had become friends again. Nowtheir friendship had cracks in places, like a vase that had fallen off a shelf and had to be glued back together. But Kate had a theory: Maybe cracks could make a friendship stronger. Cracks said, We don’t fit together a hundred percent, but that’s okay.
    “What’s that noise?” Marylin asked. “Do you have the radio on?”
    Kate realized she’d been strumming an A chord sort of loud. It was hard not to. The A chord, which was almost but not quite as easy as an E minor, sounded so nice and happy. It sounded like the beginning of a song you’d sing to a