My family is not the sort of family to vacation at an exotic beach each summer or spend the Christmas holidays in a faraway ski lodge. Although Katie's family has the money to travel, her parents seem to work all the time. We depend on each other for entertainment during those breaks from school. My mother says it is rare for friends to remain close over so many years.
"People change, Annabelle," she says. "If you want to remain best friends, you might want to take a little break from each other from time to time."
We do not always agree with each other. Just last Halloween she quit speaking to me after we argued over whether we were going twinsies to the school dance. She wanted to wear something Britney-ish, as in Britney Spears. I wanted us to go as Thing One and Thing Two from Dr. Seuss or even as twin penguins. If we were going to go all twinsie like in junior high, she said, we should at least be Kardashians. Katie whispered her arguments nonstop from the seat behind me in algebra class until Mr. Erikson stopped his lecture to stare her down.
As she walked out, she dropped a tiny corner of notebook paper on my desk with the words "U R ON YR OWN" underlined three times. Ouch. It wasn't even a text message. When your best friend chooses to write the message on an actual piece of paper rather than send a text, she is probably pissed.
That little drama lasted until the next day, when we were suddenly part of an elaborate plan with everyone in our English class to go as vampires in protest against the teacher's refusal to let us read Twilight as a class. I don't remember what, if anything, we said to make up. By the end of English, we were just over the whole thing. The penguins, Britney, and the Kardashians were forgotten without as much as a whispered apology. Our friendship did not seem to require acts of reinstatement. It was, as Mr. Erikson would say, "a given."
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The Trouble Is
Teen FictionAnnie has a list for everything. At two notebooks a year since kindergarten, she has thousands of lists stored in her perfectly aligned closet. There's List #27: How to Go Unnoticed in Class. And List # 93: What I Want in a Boyfriend. But let's not...
