When We Were Friends Read Online Free PDF

unrealistically neon fruit and the painting that was in front of me when Sydney called, a perfect vase of flowers on a shiny glass table.
    “Listen,” she said. “I’ve thought about calling you probably fifty times since last week. I actually picked up the phone twice but then, I don’t know. I guess I got scared.”
    “Really,” I said.
    “It was just weird to see you, it brought a lot of stuff back. And it made me compare my life then to now, and what I thought my life would be now, and I hated where that was making my mind go. I don’t know, I’m not explaining myself well.” She paused, then said, “I was wondering, d’you want to go get coffee or something? Jacqueline’s with her dad for the weekend, so I’m all alone and I could use somebody to talk to.”
    I looked down at the smudges of paint on my hand, spread my fingers, and then nodded for several seconds before I said, “Okay, why not.” And smiled.
    •   •   •
    We met at Chelsea’s, a café in downtown Hilton Village. Hilton Village was a planned community, set up in the early nineteen hundreds to house shipyard workers during World War I. The homes were mostly English village style, Jacobethan or Dutch Colonial, with steeply sloped gables or hipped roofs. Which made the town quaint from the outside but inside, many of the homes, like ours, were showing their age: walls in desperate need of replastering, small rooms with chipped hardwood floors, narrow staircases and low doors. Downtown was charming though, with its wide brick-paved, tree-lined sidewalks and pavilions, and I walked through it slowly, waving at the shopkeepers and passersby I knew, stopping to chat, stalling.
    This was what I’d wanted. Almost exactly, but what would we possibly talk about? I understood for the first time how Star must feel, how terrifying it could be to leave the confines of your home because it was so uncontrolled. Anything could happen.
    My last meal with Sydney had been at Custard Queen. I hadn’t been out with her for weeks. Star had stopped going outside that year, and I stayed home after school partly to keep her from freaking about the myriad of dangers I might be encountering, and partly because I hadn’t had anything better to do.
    But that morning Star had done a reading as she’d begun to do nearly every morning. Something important was going to happen today, she said, something that would change my life forever. So I’d invited Sydney out for ice cream so we could try and guess what it might be.
    I’d sat with a dish of pistachio, pushing it forward so Sydney could taste, but Sydney wrinkled her nose and pushed it back. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “You know Mike Garnett? On the swim team? Well we’ve been dating for a while now, and he’s been taking up a lot of my time.”
    I’d choked in surprise—
they had?
—and a pistachio flew across the table. Sydney flinched, following it with her eyes. And in that one look, with that one stiff-faced recoil, I’d understood what Star had meant. Everything had changed.
    Now I turned down an alleyway toward the café, stood behind one of the spindly trees along the sidewalk and checked my watch to ensure that I’d be fashionably late, then steeled my shoulders and entered.
    Chelsea’s was my favorite café. Partly because the walls were filled with my paintings and I’d sold quite a few of them from here. But mostly because Chelsea was the kind of person you had to love. She treated everyone who came into the shop like her new best friend, and she showed the customers she knew an affection that seemed completely genuine and personal. These things also made Chelsea’s the perfect meeting place to attempt to prove the awesomeness of my life.
    Sydney was already at a table, so she got to see Chelsea’s reaction when I came in. “Lainey!” Her face lit up, and she came from behind the counter to take both my hands into her own. So I gave my attention to her rather than