When We Were Friends Read Online Free PDF Page A

but then I shrugged. “Okay, let’s.” So we went inside, for a knife.
    Sydney’s kitchen was even smaller than ours, a galley with avocado-colored Formica counters, and a half-sized fridge holding mostly Budweisers and nonfat yogurts. And also, a block of knives with black handles and sharp, serrated blades. Sydney approached them, widening her eyes at me in mock terror. I gasped exaggeratedly (in alarm that I’m sure sounded quite real), and she grinned back as she chose the knife. Long and skinny and curled at the tip, the kind you’d use to cut roasted chickens.
    We sat on the floor of her bedroom facing each other, Sydney’s eyes fixed on the knife. “You know what this means, right? We’ll be like real sisters, except even more related. Almost like twins.”
    I gave a shallow nod. “Cool,” I said.
    And then without hesitating, she squeezed her eyes shut and sliced the knife across her palm.
    The slash on her skin was a brilliant red, brighter than I’d remembered blood could be. She started breathing fast and I thought maybe she was going to throw up, and I suddenly loved her morethan anybody in the world, that she’d risk puking in order to share blood with me.
    She looked down at the oozing slash, her face pale. “After we do this there’s no going back,” she said. “My blood’s going to be inside your veins until you die.”
    “I know,” I said, wondering if parts of me would suddenly change, if I’d start liking Barbies or grow the tiny boob-bumps I’d just today noticed under Sydney’s bathing suit. I took the knife and hunched my shoulders and then fast, before I could think of what I was doing, I sliced the knife across my palm.
    I sucked in my breath, scared at first I might have cut my hand in two, but when I looked down there was just a large blob of blood, shiny and oval like something that might look nice on a ring.
    We watched each other as she reached for my hand, holding it so tight I could feel my cut screaming. I looked into her eyes and both of us were halfway crying because it hurt, it hurt more than anything we’d ever known. But we both knew this was much more important than the pain. We just gritted our teeth, and held on.
    I put about as much faith in Star’s prophecies of doom as I did in my grandmother’s stories about Elvis. I was reasonably sure I’d never see Sydney again, but I couldn’t deny that I thought about her every day. Every hour of every day, wondering if she’d call to offer me the painting job. At the end of the conversation she’d pause and say, “Let’s have coffee,” and I’d shrug. “If you want,” I’d say. And she’d want.
    But two days passed, then three. And I hated the fact that I cared, hated that I’d let myself give a damn when Sydney obviously didn’t. She could at least have called to say they’d found someone else for the job. She’d think I’d interpret it completely casually, but I’d know what it meant. That she couldn’t face what she’d done to me.
    But a week went by without a word. I got a call from a natural foods shop that would pay me three thousand dollars for approximately two weeks’ boring work, walls painted with wooden barrels of beans and crates of tomatoes. And so I took the job, set out with brown paint and wide brushes, and let the strokes drown any other thoughts.
    And then, just when I’d managed to stop obsessing, she called. I was in the back mudroom I used as a studio, working on a still life. The room was cluttered with my canvases, the semi-abstract images I’d been painting over the past few years, of children catching butterflies in nets or blowing dandelion fairies, of young mothers with babies, a man’s hand resting on a woman’s knee or playing with her hair. But since seeing Sydney, looking at these paintings had started to hurt for a reason I didn’t quite understand. I’d turned them all to face the wall, and the only images I’d painted in the past week were a bowl of