Best Friends Forever Read Online Free PDF

bus would rol past them every morning, lined up on the platform, wearing suits, carrying briefcases, reading newspapers folded into thirds. The truth was, I liked having my father around; I was never happier than when I was down in the basement, snug on the couch, working on long division or fractions or spel ing words, and he’d cal me by a private name, Pal. I loved that name. At school, I was nobody’s pal. Even though I’d known most of my classmates since nursery school, it felt like they’d made a complex set of secret al iances when I wasn’t looking; like every girl was paired off and spoken for by a best friend, and I was on my own, unless one of the teachers took pity and let me eat my lunch at my desk or work on my paintings during recess. Later, I would realize that my early exposure to al of that comedy hadn’t helped. Word-for-word recitations of Bil Cosby’s trip to the dentist or George Carlin’s routine about there being no blue food were not the way to attract other little girls.
    Jon and I watched as a faded red VW Bug pul ed up behind the moving van. The woman who got out of the driver’s seat was tal and tanned, with an ankle-length Indianprint skirt wrapped low around her hips, and blond hair piled on top of her head. She wore movie-star sunglasses, huge and opaque, leather thong sandals, and a stack of turquoise-and-silver bracelets piled on one wrist.
    “Hippies,” said my father. He’d tucked the pancake-batter bowl under his arm and come to the window to see. He was freshly shaved. His hair was neatly combed back from his high white forehead. My guess was that he’d slept on the couch in the basement last night. He has bad dreams, my mother told me when I asked. Jon had another theory: he said that my father slept in the basement because they didn’t love each other anymore. Mom’s a cow, he’d said, and I’d punched him on the arm as hard as I could, then started crying. He’d stared at me for a minute, then hugged me roughly around my shoulders with his un-punched arm. Don’t cry, he’d said. It’s not your fault. Which was not the same as tel ing me that it wasn’t true.
    “Hippies on Crescent Drive?” my mother cal ed from the kitchen. Jon pursed his lips in a soundless whistle as the woman with the bracelets stretched her arms over her head, exposing a sliver of midriff. Then the passenger’s-side door of the Bug opened and a girl about my age got out. She wore droopy cutoff denim shorts and a dingy white T-shirt. There were ratty white high-top sneakers on her feet ( boy’s sneakers, I thought, and felt myself blushing on the girl’s behalf). She was tal and gangly, with knobby elbows and narrow wrists.
    “They’ve got a little girl, Pal,” my father reported.
    “Isn’t that nice!” cal ed my mom. “Addie, maybe you can go over and say hel o.”
    I shook my head. There were people—my brother was one of them—for whom talking to strangers came easily. Then there were people like me, who had to plan out what they’d say in advance and rehearse the words in their heads, and stil wound up drymouthed and stam-mering, or blurting out lengthy passages of Bil Cosby, when the moment arrived.
    “Come on,” my mother cajoled. “We can bake them cookies!”
    The cookies were tempting, but not tempting enough. I shook my head again. My mom came back to the living room. She took my hand in hers and squeezed. I could smel her: Ivory soap and vanil a mixed with hair spray and her perfume that came in a white bottle with flowers painted on the sides and was cal ed Anaïs Anaïs. “Addie,” she said, bending down to look at me. “Imagine if you were that girl. You just moved to a new town, you don’t know a soul…wouldn’t you like it if someone came over to welcome you to the neighborhood?”
    I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure about this new girl, who seemed utterly at ease, in a way I never was, like she had no idea that her clothes and shoes and hair were al