Best Friends Forever Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrong. Jon peered out the window again.
    “She’s looking at us,” he said. I held my breath, watching, as the girl stood in the street with her hands in her pockets, checking out our house. There was a hopscotch grid chalked on our driveway, next to my bike, with a banana seat and purple-and-silver streamers hanging from the handlebars, which added up to the equivalent of a bil board stuck in our yard: Nine-year-old girl here!
    The girl squinted toward the window, and it seemed for a minute that she was looking right at me. Then she crossed the street, walking decisively across our lawn. We heard a knock, and I turned to my mother.
    “Answer it!” I whispered.
    She shook her head, bemused. “Adelaide, you can answer the door by yourself.”
    I shook my head, wondering if I had time to dash back to the kitchen and gobble a fast half pancake. Jon sighed, then got to his feet. “Come on,” he said. He took my hand, not unkindly, marched me to the door, and pul ed it open. The girl was standing there. “Hel o,” she said. Her voice was husky and low, a memorable voice. “I’m Valerie Violet Adler. Who are you?”
    “I’m Jon, and this is Addie. It’s nice to meet you.” My brother gave me a pat on the back that was almost a shove and left me there. For a minute, the girl and I just looked at each other. She had freckles, big splotchy ones dotting her cheeks, and buck teeth that were jagged along the bottom. Around one of her ankles was fastened a loop of colorful beads on blue thread, an item it had never occurred to me to want, a thing I was now certain I couldn’t live another day without.
    “We just moved here from California,” she told me, pushing the hair that had escaped from the ponytail behind one ear.
    “Hi,” I said. My own voice was so soft I could barely hear it.
    “I like your bike,” said the girl.
    “Do you want to ride it?” Oh, no, I thought as the tips of my ears got hot. That was wrong.
    I should have asked if she had a wrong. I should have asked if she had a bike, should have said, Maybe we can go
    for a ride together…
    The girl shook her head. “Mine’s in there.”
    She cocked her thumb toward the van.
    “Maybe we can go for a ride later. You can show me around.”
    I looked at the new girl, ready to offer her the most valuable thing I had, the secret that probably nobody else would tel her. “The lady who used to live in your house died there.”
    The other girl’s eyes widened. “Real y? She died in the house?”
    “Uh-huh. It was the middle of the night, and the ambulance came and woke everyone up.”
    I didn’t tel her how Mr. DiMeo had walked outside alongside the body, holding his wife’s hand, weeping, and how a week later he’d moved into the Presbyterian Home, where he’d eventual y died. I’d save that for later.
    “Huh,” said Valerie. “That was my grandmother.”
    “Real y?” I stared, wondering why I’d never seen her before.
    The girl ran her tongue along the jagged ridges of her front teeth. “Do you know which room it happened in?”
    “The big bedroom, probably,” I said. I was already plotting when I’d ask her if she’d be my bosom friend, and whether “bosom” was a word I was prepared to say out loud.
    “Don’t worry. Your parents wil probably sleep there.”
    “My mom,” she said. “It’s just me and my mom. My parents are divorced.”
    “Oh.” I didn’t know anyone whose parents were divorced. It seemed both tragic and glamorous. Mostly tragic, I decided, thinking about my father singing in the basement, using his pocketknife to cut a Snickers bar in two pieces and offering me half.
    “That’s why we moved. My dad’s a stuntman, so he had to stay in California. That’s where the movies are.”
    “Oh,” I said again. “Wow.”
    We stood there for a minute, Valerie on the threshold, al freckles and scabs and tangled hair, me with my hand on the doorknob, my starched skirt rustling around my knees. I can remember the