Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

I could be that person.

It hits me like a hurricane: the realization that what I’ve labeled friendship is-on my end, anyway-more than that. And the understanding that what I want from Zoe is something I will never have.

I’ve been here before, so I know how to act, how to pretend. After all, I’d much rather have a piece of her than nothing at all.

So I move away from Zoe, letting my arm drop, intentionally putting space between us. “Well,” I say, forcing a smile. “I guess you’re stuck with me.”

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The Last (3:25)

My very first best friendship was grounded in proximity. Ellie lived across the street in a house that always looked a little tired at the edges, with its droopy window wells and frayed clapboards. Her mother was single, like mine, although by choice and not by fate. She worked in an insurance company and wore low heels and boxy suits to the office, but I remember her glamorously affixing fake eyelashes and ratting her hair before heading out to a dance club on weekends.

I was completely unlike Ellie, who-at age eleven-was a stunning girl with sunshine twined in the curls of her hair, and long colt legs with a perpetual summer tan. Her room was always a mess, and she’d have to dump piles of clothes and books and stuffed animals on the floor in order for us to have a place to sit on the bed. She thought nothing of stealing into her mother’s closet to “borrow” clothes for dress up or sprays of perfume. She read magazines, never books.

But the one thing Ellie and I had in common was that, of all the kids in our class, we were the two without fathers. Even kids whose parents were divorced saw the missing parent for weekends or holidays, but not Ellie and me. I couldn’t, obviously. And Ellie had never met her dad. Ellie’s mother referred to him as the One, in a reverent tone that made me think he must have died young, like my own father. Years later I learned that this wasn’t the case at all; that the One was a married guy who’d been cheating on his wife but wouldn’t leave her.

Ellie’s older sister, Lila, was supposed to watch us on the nights when her mom went out, but Lila spent all her time in her bedroom with the door closed. We weren’t allowed to bother her, and most of the time we didn’t, even though she had the coolest fluorescent posters that glowed under a black light behind her bed. Instead we cooked ourselves Campbell’s soup and watched scary movies on the premium cable channels, shielding our eyes from the screen.

I could tell Ellie anything. Like how, sometimes, I woke up screaming because I had a nightmare that my mother had died, too. Or that I worried I would never be brilliant at anything, and who wanted to be average her whole life? I confessed that I faked a stomachache to get out of taking a math quiz and that I had once seen a boy’s penis at camp when his bathing suit slid off during a jackknife dive. On school nights I called her before I went to sleep, and in the morning, she phoned me to ask what color shirt I was wearing, so that we would match.

One weekend, during a sleepover at Ellie’s house, I climbed out of the bed we shared and crept down the hallway. The door to her mother’s room was open, and inside, the room was empty, even though it was after 3:00 A.M. Lila’s door, as usual, was closed, but there was a purple line of light bleeding out from beneath it. I turned the knob, wondering if she was still awake. Inside, the room was magical-cloudy with incense and lavender streams of light, those ultraviolet posters coming alive in 3-D. One, a skull with rosette eyes, seemed to be moving toward me. Lila was lying on the bed with her eyes wide open and a rubber hose tied around her arm, like the kind I’d seen at the doctor’s office when I had to have a blood test, once. A syringe was in the palm of her open hand.

I was quite sure she was dead.

I took a step forward. Lila was incredibly still, and faintly blue in the eerie light. I thought of my father, and how he collapsed on the lawn. I was gathering the loose threads of a scream in my throat, when suddenly Lila rolled over in one languid move, scaring the hell out of me. “Get lost, you little shit,” she said, her words as round and thin as bubbles, popping as soon as they hit the air.

I do not remember the rest of that night. Except that I ran home, even though it was three in the morning.

And that, after what happened, Ellie and I were never really friends anymore.

When I was in high school, my mother used to make up alternate names for the kids I invited over to our house. Robin became Bonnie, Alice became Elise, Suzy became Julie. No matter how many times I corrected her, she preferred to call these girls by names that felt comfortable to her, instead of what was accurate. After a while, my friends even started answering to whatever she called them.

Which is why it’s so extraordinary to me that my mother has never-not once-messed up Vanessa’s name. The two of them hit it off the moment they first met. There is no end to the things they have in common; and they seem to think it’s funny that it drives me crazy.

It’s been two months since Vanessa and I bumped into each other at the Y, and she has slipped seamlessly into the role of my closest friend at a time when I desperately needed it-since my former closest friend happened to have recently divorced me. So much of a friendship is like a love affair-the novelty and sparkle wearing down at the edges to become something comfortable and predictable, like the cardigan you take out of your drawer on a rainy Sunday because you need to surround yourself with something cozy and familiar. Vanessa is the one I call when I am procrastinating on organizing my taxes; when I am channel surfing and find Dirty Dancing on TNT and cannot stop watching; when the homeless guy in front of Dunkin’ Donuts looks at the five-dollar bill I’ve given him and asks if he can have it in ones. She’s the one I call when I’m bored in traffic on I-95, and when I’m crying because a two-year-old patient with burns over eighty percent of his body dies in the middle of the night. I’ve programmed her cell number into my phone, on the speed-dial key that used to belong to Max.

It is easy, with twenty-twenty hindsight, to see how I got to a point where I didn’t really have any friends. There’s that necessary shift that comes with marriage, when your best confidant is now the one you’re sleeping with at night. But then the other women I knew all started having babies, and I distanced myself from them out of self-preservation and jealousy. Max was the only one who understood what I so badly wanted and needed. Or so I’d told myself.

Here’s what girlfriends do for you: they provide the reality check. They are the ones who tell you when you have spinach between your teeth or when your ass looks fat in a pair of jeans or when you’re being a bitch. They tell you, and there’s no drama or agenda, like there would be if the message had come from your husband. They tell you the truth because you need to hear it, but it doesn’t alter the bond between you. I don’t think I realized how much I missed that, until now.

Right now, Vanessa and I are about to be late to a movie because my mother is talking about a breakthrough with one of her clients. “So, I bought two dozen bricks and loaded them in the back of my car,” my mother is saying. “And then, when we got to the cliff, I had Deanna write on each of the bricks with a Sharpie marker-keywords, you know, that signified her emotional baggage.”

“Brilliant,” Vanessa says.