Best Friends for Never Read online

  School had just ended for the year, and my mom and I were sitting and reading at the kitchen table, waiting for Dad to get back with our breakfast bagels. In my memory, it was a perfect moment: the summer sun streaming through the window onto the table, warming both the morning paper and our gigantic gray cat, Champ, spread on top of it. There was a breeze, and the scent of jasmine from the backyard four floors below. I knew I would be spending some summer nights back there catching fireflies with the little kids who lived on the first floor until my mom would call out the kitchen window for me to come up and go to bed. It was going to be a great summer, even if Rae was going to be visiting family in the Dominican Republic for part of it.

  “I was so happy in that moment!” I told Rae later. “I was just, like, la-di-da-ing my way through a Saturday morning, thinking about how you and me were going to meet up at the pool later, and then … BOOM. Dad came home, and he didn’t just bring bagels. He brought a bomb.”

  Dad pulled the bagels, warm little bundles of happiness, from a white plastic bag printed with I ♥ NEW YORK. I’d put my book down on the table, using my index finger to save my page, and was trying to unwrap my bagel with the other hand, when I noticed that both my parents had gone still and were looking at me.

  “What?” I asked, a little alarmed, my first thought being: Bugs! “Is there a bug?” I asked, staying perfectly still. “Is it on me? It’s on me, isn’t it? GET IT OFF!”

  And that’s when they dropped The Bomb: no bug, but something even worse. Dr. Liu, who was my dad’s favorite dentistry professor, a guy he still quoted on major holidays—“Celebrate with sugar, pay the price with the drill”—was retiring. Again. He’d already retired from teaching at a college in the city years ago and had set up a practice in some podunk town in the middle of nowhere, something Dad had always joked about doing whenever the Yankees were winning or the subways broke down, two things that unfortunately happened all the time. Except now he wasn’t joking. Dr. Liu was moving to Florida and selling my dad his practice. And Mom had found a nursing job at a local hospital. And we were leaving the apartment my parents had rented since before I was born. Our apartment. With its slanted floors and tyrannical radiators and sunny kitchen and a bathroom so small you could sit on the john and brush your teeth at the same time, unless your parents saw you and told you it was unhygienic. With the three sets of neighbors from three different continents who would sometimes bring up plates of food, depending on who was celebrating a holiday, and who would come to my dad with toothaches.

  We were leaving Brooklyn, going to some random place called …

  “Trepan’s Grove?!” I wailed. “That’s the name of a soap opera, not a town!”

  “It’s so cute! You’ll love it!” Mom said, her voice going shrill with the effort of using exclamation points to convince me this would not be the worst thing that’s ever happened in the history of our family, ever.

  I looked out the window over the backyard. My school uniforms hung drying on the clothesline outside our window, freshly out of the wash and ready to be donated. I watched them sway a little in the breeze. “I don’t want to move upstate!” I said, my chin quivering. Mom and Dad didn’t say anything. “What?” I asked, a cold feeling of doom blooming in my belly.

  “Well,” Mom said carefully, “it’s actually not upstate; it’s in Massachusetts. Where Daddy’s from.”

  “It’s not even in NEW YORK?!” I screeched, jumping up and knocking over my chair. “Are you kidding me? Leave New York? Who does that?”

  I could see that, for some reason, they found my outburst adorable, like when I disagree with them about what directions to give cabbies. “Don’t smile at me, you traitors!” I shouted, righting my chair.

  “Hattie, we just think that living in a place where you had more of a relation—”

  My jaw dropped. “Oh my gosh, if you say ‘RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE,’ I am going to scream and barf at the same time, and it’s going to be DISGUSTING!”

  “Hattie,” my dad said, a warning in his voice.

  I ignored him. “We have trees in New York. We have wildlife! We have squirrels and chipmunks and … and … and rats! We have whole colonies of rats just”—I wiggled my fingers—“skittering around the subways. That’s nature!”

  I couldn’t keep my mouth from twisting into a smile as my parents fought back laughter.

  “Oh, Hattie!” my mom said, pulling me into a hug. “I know it will be a big change, but you’ll see. This is going to be wonderful for our family. We’ll be close to your uncles and your cousins!”

  They showed me some pictures then, on Dad’s laptop, my first glimpse of Trepan’s Grove.

  “Cute, right?” my mom said, pointing out the town common with its green, sloping lawn. “That’s the elementary school at the top. Look at the picket fence around the playground! And down there at the bottom.” She clicked through another picture. “That’s a statue of Joseph Trepan, the town’s founder.” I was beginning to think she’d rehearsed this little slide show. “You’ll be going to the middle school. It’s brand-new. Look at its library!” she trilled as I studied the images of a brick-and-glass building on top of a hill close to the adorable center of town. There were athletic fields hemmed in by gray stone walls.

  “Built by Pilgrims!” Dad said. “I think!” My dad’s new office didn’t look like an office at all, because it was inside a pretty yellow Victorian house across from the town common. There was a neat brick path leading from the sidewalk up to the wide front porch, and at the foot of the path was one of those old-fashioned wooden signs that said DENTIST’S HOUSE, and below that hung a smaller sign reading DR. MATTHEW LIU. “Everybody in town says, ‘I’m going to the Dentist’s House,’ when they have an appointment. Isn’t that so small-town charming?” Mom said excitedly. Most of the houses around the common were like this, something out of a postcard, pretty old houses with gables and picket fences.

  “So we get to live there?” I asked, pointing to the Dentist’s House. “Upstairs or something?” The house was so cute, with its front porch and flower boxes, that maybe I was a little excited about living there.

  “Oh, no,” my mom said quickly, “we’re renting a great place to live across town.”

  “Anyway!” Dad said, clicking to a picture of a small blue cottage with white trim and a glassed-in porch. “This is the Trading Post. It’s like an old-fashioned general store. It’s right on the common. They sell penny candy in little blue paper bags … ”

  I gasped and looked at Mom. “J’accuse!” I said, remembering the blue paper sack of candy she’d brought back when she and Dad went on a trip a few months ago, leaving me to sleep over at Rae’s house.

  “She’s onto us!” Mom stage-whispered to dad. “I’m going to distract her with another hug.”

  “We’re going to get eaten by bears,” I said into her shoulder, as she squeezed me close.

  “Not on our first day!” she said brightly.

  Mom was right. We haven’t been eaten by bears.

  But I came close!

  I am sure that I was almost bear food on the Night That Would Not End, otherwise known as the night my new friends thought it would be fun to invite me camping in the woods behind Fee’s farm to celebrate-slash-mourn the end of our first summer together.

  Nobody told me that throwing a piece of apple pie as hard as I could into the woods when nobody was looking might attract bears. I would have just sucked it up and eaten the thing if I’d known that. I don’t care if apple pie is the official town snack of Trepan’s Grove, I think it’s the most disgusting dessert ever created. But I didn’t have the heart to tell my pie-loving friends that. Hence, the pie flinging. It wasn’t until we were all tucked into our sleeping bags and Fee was zipping up the tent that I realized I’d basically flung a COME EAT US sign outside the tent. Fee had said, “You guys don’t have any food, right?” Then she said in a funny voice, “Cuz this is BEAR COUNTRY!” and everyone laughed. Except me. Because even if I didn’t have food in the tent, I knew there was some in close proximity because the truth is, I’m not super athletic, so throwing something as hard as I can means it’s not going to go very far. And that’s why, as soon as Fee had gotten into her sleeping bag, I announced I had to pee, and bravely said I was going to go in the woods because, you know, it’s part of the experience, instead of walking the fifty yards back to Fee’s farmhouse to use actual indoor plumbing.

  Using a flashlight to search for apple pie in a dark forest is a terrifying experience. Actually, that part wasn’t so bad. What was truly terrifying was that, once I saw the piece of smooshed pie on the ground, I was suddenly gripped with a frantic urgency and grabbed the slimy mess, clutched it to my heart, and then ran as fast and as far as I possibly could into the dark forest, my pulse thumping in my ears, my flashlight beam bouncing and shaking on the ground in front of me, until I could go no farther, and I heroically flung the piece of pie away from me into the darkness, into the inky maw of the forest. As my breath slowed and the sweat cooled on my skin, I raised a victory fist in the air. And then I turned to follow the lights of Fee’s farmhouse back toward the tent but discovered the lights were gone.

  Here’s what I was taught to do if I ever got separated from my parents in Brooklyn. If I got off the subway and they didn’t, then I was to stand on the platform and wait for them to get off at the next stop, get on another train, and come back for me. Same thing goes with elevators. If we got separated in a crowd, I was to stay in one place for a few minutes, and then if they didn’t come back, find some lady with kids and ask to use her phone. Though the few times it happened to me, someone always noticed the panicked look on my face before I even had a chance to ask for help, and then stood there with me until Mom or Dad pushed through th
e crowd with panicked looks of their own.

  But Mom and Dad never went over What to Do When Lost in a Deep Dark Forest Full of Bears.

  I took a step and then thought maybe I should stay in one place, and then I took a step back to exactly where I’d been. And then … I’m not going to say that nature and I “had a moment.” It’s not that standing there in the cool summer darkness, I fell in love with the great outdoors and all it has to offer and now I’m going to be outside all the time on purpose … It’s just that, all of a sudden, I understood two things: darkness and silence—and that there really was no such thing as either one in the forest. You just have to stand still for a minute and you’ll hear and see all sorts of things.

  The best thing I saw were pinpricks of light sweeping back and forth, flickering between the tree trunks, and the faint sounds of my friends’ voices. “Hattie! Hattie!”

  I screamed out, louder than I ever had before, my voice powered by fear and relief and self-preservation, “I’M HERE!”

  Which is when I was suddenly engulfed in a beam of light from the back porch of Fee’s next-door neighbors, in whose wooded yard it turned out I was standing and onto whose back porch I had flung my piece of pie. The neighbor lady stepped in it with her bare feet when she came out to investigate why there was a screaming kid in her backyard, and I think she thought it was dog poop because as she stepped in it, she yelled out, “UGH!” and then sort of shook her foot at the same time that she was saying, “Are you okay?” And then she yelled, “AAAHHHH!” because all of my friends came tearing out of the forest at that very moment, screaming their heads off and tackling me with hugs so hard we fell into her kids’ sandbox, a tangle of pajama pants and headgear. I ended up with a sleeping bag over my face (“We brought it because what if we found you and you were hypothermic?”), half a bottle of Gatorade down my front (“Because you might have been dehydrated!”), and Celeste’s knee on top of my right ankle, making it bend in a new and painful way. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d kneecapped my ankle, so I kind of pretended I’d twisted it in the woods.

  The Goodys’ neighbor grumbled and washed off her pie-coated foot with the garden hose as my friends sat on the wooden rim of the sandbox and watched, with the giddy giggles that come post-adrenaline-rush, as Mr. Goody tenderly felt around my ankle and declared it probably sprained but not broken. With a stern look, he silenced my friends’ request to let them carry me using the three-person stretcher technique they’d learned in Girl Scouts, and instead carefully picked me up himself and accepted the neighbor’s offer of a lift back to the farm.

  It was that night, gathered at the Goodys’ farmhouse table, cracking up as we relived our adventure, that something in our new friendship slid into place. My ankle was propped on the chair next to me, resting on an apple-shaped pillow and covered with a growing mound of the frozen vegetable packages that Piper kept disappearing to fetch from the freezer, returning each time to place them carefully upon my ankle, and laughing so hard, tears streamed down her cheeks. We took turns reenacting my desperate cry in the woods—“I’M HERE!”—and I laughed tearfully as my friends explained just how scared they were when I didn’t come back from peeing in the woods.

  The Goodys had me call my parents and tell them what had happened, and then Mom and Dad talked to Mrs. Goody, who assured them I was okay and welcome to stay. By that time, it was past three in the morning, and we were all one hundred percent awake. So Mr. Goody made us middle-of-the-night pancakes and bacon and hot chocolate. But before I had any of that, my friends, who had disappeared from the table, solemnly reentered the room. Piper was in the lead, holding a plate high in front of her, and it took me a moment to realize that a lit birthday candle was on top.

  “In honor of the fact that you were not eaten by a bear and that you didn’t fall off a cliff into the gully—”

  “I didn’t even know that was a possibility!” I yelped.

  Piper giggled, then continued. “Or get stung to death by hornets or trapped between a rock and a hard place or—”

  Fee snorted, “Come on, Pipes.”

  Piper set the plate in front of me. “We present you with this We’re Glad You’re Alive, Hattie, Pie. Please eat!”

  “Oh, um … ” I faltered, looking at the plate-size slice of apple pie, a pink glob of candle wax pooling in its center. “I love it!”

  It took the whole last week of summer vacation for my ankle to heal, a week of my dad calling me Igor and my mom checking the swelling each morning before driving me to the town pond, where I would spend the day on Piper’s giant blanket under a willow tree, playing hearts with my friends. Most evenings that week, I would come home and find a delivery of back-to-school clothes waiting, and I’d sit on the couch with my sore ankle on the coffee table and work my fingers into the thick plastic shipping bags and tear them open, excited and a little nervous to see what was inside.

  Fee was actually the one who ordered most of the stuff for me the week before I hurt my ankle, clicking skillfully through site after site, adding things to shopping bags like she was checking them off a list, occasionally asking my size or color preference but mostly just joking that she was my personal shopper and knew what was best. I stood hovering behind where she sat at my desk in my bedroom, sometimes switching to perch nervously on the edge of my bed where Piper and Celeste sat with their heads pressed together, flipping through my old elementary school memory books, before I would jump up to look over Fee’s shoulder again.

  “Pipes,” Fee said at one point, “you should let me pick out some new stuff for you!”

  Piper snorted in response. “Please. My mom still has eleven industrial-size trash bags full of my sisters’ hand-me-downs in the attic for me to get through, and, like, three-quarters of that are the exact same things you’re looking at, except just different enough to make me look like a total dork. I’m lucky she buys me new underwear.”

  Fee harrumphed. “Celeste?” Celeste turned a page in my third-grade memory book before she answered. “I’m good. I’ll be wearing mainly skate stuff anyway. Easier than changing after practice before school. Why do we have to be matchy-matchy anyway? We’re not Zooey and the Ts.”

  Fee didn’t respond, just clicked extra hard through to another website. I couldn’t actually buy anything right that second. I needed Mom for that. So that night, she and I went through all of the stuff Fee had put into the shopping bags, deleting bunches of it until what I chose was within the budget Mom gave me, plus my leftover birthday money. This led to a neat stack of new clothes that I arranged and rearranged each night in the days before school started. I had corduroys I was determined to like despite the fact that they were sure to make that annoying zip zip zip sound, and a certain type of jeans and these shirts I’d never heard of and Converse high-tops, which I actually really liked. Most important, I had a “stripy,” which was a brightly striped zip-up sweatshirt with a hood, lined with thick faux sheep fur. It’s the most expensive thing we bought, and Mom said, “Better hope your arms don’t grow, because I am never spending that much on a sweatshirt again.” That’s the item I tried on the most. I didn’t expect Celeste to ditch hers for her skating sweatshirt.

  By the time the first day of school came, the tenderness in my ankle was gone, and my attention shifted to a different kind of discomfort: the feeling you get in your belly the moment before you leap from a great height, like your stomach makes the jump before you do. Because what if certain clothes and six weeks of summer weren’t enough to carry a friendship over into the school year? Actually, it was six weeks with Piper and Fee. Celeste had come home in mid-August, so when school started, I’d only known her a couple of weeks. That’s like no time at all in a town where people remember each other in diapers.

  It turns out there was no reason to worry. I zip-zip-zipped through the glass double doors of school the first day, and before I even had a chance to stand awkwardly in the fancy front atrium, figuring out where to go, Piper was beside me, grinning her toothy Piper grin, linking her arm through mine, and pulling me toward the sixth-grade locker corridor, where Celeste and Fee were waiting with a piece of apple pie. “It’s your Happy First Day of School, Hattie, Pie!” Piper said gleefully.