Friends Like Us (3 page)

And then I met Ben. We were paired up in our second semester honors English class and given the task of creating a literary journal.

“I do not want you to settle for average in your forays into the world of high school literary talent,” Ms. Barnum advised us. Her cheeks were flushed with passion; she raised her hands to her face to cool her own ardor. “As editors,” she said, “you will see that you can coax exceptional writing from students.” It was her first year on the job, and she was frequently filled with this kind of exhilaration, the kind of naked optimism that perched on its hind legs and begged us to destroy it. “I want these journals to be
exceptional,
” she said, bouncing on her heels. “I want you to find writing that
soars.
”

“Like herpes?” Ben whispered to me. He was physically awkward and hadn’t yet come to terms with the need to shower daily; he liked to share his arcane knowledge of the unusual foods of foreign cultures with anyone who’d listen
(Every country has its own version of the dumpling!)
. He had the tendency to interrupt a person by interjecting peculiar synonyms into the conversation
(Did the movie make you lachrymose? Oh, do you mean to say you bungled the science quiz?);
he frequently thought people were talking about him when they weren’t; he laced his neurotic paranoia with biting wit; and he saved me.

We named our journal
The Prose Shop,
congratulating ourselves on our brilliance, and, against the odds, alone among the mediocre work of our classmates, our journal became a success. Ms. Barnum was delirious. We had submissions, subscribers, a budget. Ben did the copyediting, and I made sprightly ink drawings to fill the empty spaces and the margins. (For a short story about an average kid who wakes up one morning and discovers he’s suddenly a genius, I drew a cockroach brandishing a protractor and wearing a contemplative expression; for a rhymey, earnest poem about the power of female friendship, I drew a car careening over the edge of a cliff, two clasped hands visible through the windshield.) By myself, I was a stammering nitwit. With Ben, I was confident. I was brave.

At five foot three (eight inches shorter than I was) and sporting a small, round potbelly, Ben wasn’t exactly a guy, in the same way I felt I wasn’t quite a girl. Together, we were a third sex, an unsexed sex, and so, like siblings, like twins, like some sort of human/lemur hybrid, nothing was weird between us. We nurtured each other with great doses of sympathy and a tiny, shimmering sparkle of mutual superiority. We made up dirty movie titles for Dickens novels—
David Cockerfield, Little Whore-it, Hard Times
—and laughed about them as if we were worldly and sophisticated instead of unkissed and clueless. We memorized passages from Shakespeare competitively, for fun. On the weekends, we devoted hours to creating a comic book called
The Overachievers,
about a band of misunderstood high school superheroes with stellar SAT scores. We wrote the story together, and I did the illustrations. We were the dorkiest of dorks. An oddball on her own is a pitiable creature, but two weirdos together are a fortress.

As close as we were in high school, for reasons unclear to me we lost touch after our first year of college. It’s not that I haven’t analyzed the end of our friendship, but it wasn’t an obvious break; it was death by attrition, a slow dwindling, and although I still think about him often, I’ve never figured out why it happened. Sometimes I can practically convince myself that it didn’t happen, that we’re just very, very bad at keeping in touch. Other times I lie awake at night going over every detail of the final months of our friendship, replaying the last time I saw him. The one thing I know for sure is that it was Ben’s doing: I called and wrote for months before I finally realized that he had stopped calling and writing back. Our distance has lived in me like the aftermath of a bad dream—I carry it around, the knowledge that we were once close, that something was lost; it’s the lingering sadness of unfinished business.

The heavy restaurant doors close behind us with a
whoosh.
The parking lot is shimmering and surreal, the night sky swollen with snow. The wind has picked up since I got here an hour ago; it whips my hair across my face in hard little slaps. I feel around for nonexistent pockets in my skirt.

“This is just like that one time,” Ben says, zipping his jacket.

“I know!” I glance at him, his shoulders hunched against the wind, his breath coming out in little puffs. The person who knew you best when you were seventeen will always have a claim on you, no matter how much you change. There’s something seductive and magnetic about it, the feeling of being understood like that. I suppose it goes both ways.

Ben stomps his feet and blows on his hands. “Where’s your coat?”

“You know me,” I say, my nonchalant shrug turning into a shiver. “I live on the edge.” My eyes are watering, my face slowly growing immobile. It’s starting to snow, mean icy clumps hurling down like snowballs from God.

“Willa.”
Ben says my name with a sudden, sharp irritation that reminds me of the last summer of our friendship. “Come on.” He grabs my hand and pulls me to his car, and we wait in the front seat while it warms up. It feels like we were just here five minutes ago.

The wind rattles the windows. I could ask him where he’s been for the past seven years, why he ended our friendship and broke my heart. Or I could tell him he’s an ass and slam the car door after myself. But here he is, next to me, rearranged, and I am, too, although maybe not as noticeably. The snow is starting to stick to the asphalt and to the other cars, turning the dark parking lot into the moon.

“So,” I say, when I can feel my face again. Heat blasts out of the vents, and the windows are fogging. I watch him as he fiddles with the car radio, which is not on. Like we always did in high school, we’ve created our own little universe without even trying. I’m catapulted back into a world of grateful love for my best friend. Still, I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until his bones clatter. Is there an explanation in there somewhere?

“Awesome party,” Ben says, finally. He smiles without showing his teeth, moves his hands to the steering wheel, and plants them at ten o’clock and two o’clock, as if we’re going somewhere.

“Who did you
like
?” I say.

The last time we saw each other was at the end of summer vacation before our sophomore year of college. Things had been strained between us for three months; I had been plagued by the constant, uncomfortable feeling that Ben was angry at me. He undercut our usual ease with inexplicable silences and frequent sighs; he snapped at me when I teased him and often tuned out of our conversations entirely. Still, through stubbornness or habit, we hung out most nights, meeting for coffee or ice cream or for beers at the High Road, the dive bar we knew that didn’t card—which was especially fortunate, since Ben still looked about thirteen. That night we were marking the end of the summer. We arranged to have dinner together at the Cottage, a downtown bistro with an outdoor patio. Ben had a flight the next morning.

He met me at the door, muttering a greeting, seeming more nervous than usual. His hair was unusually neat, and he looked like he’d picked his clothes out of the closet, as opposed to grabbing whatever wrinkled T-shirt and shorts were closest to his bed when he woke up in the morning. He was fidgety, alternately tightening and loosening his watch band and tracing the design on the tablecloth with his fingertips. I remember noticing the hair on his arms—I hardly ever thought of Ben as male, and then something, a shadow across his face, a change in the tone of his voice, would remind me, just briefly. He looked like he had something on his mind, but the summer had been long and tense, and I didn’t think I wanted to hear it. We were sitting outside and had just ordered our food when a guy I barely knew from school walked past our table. Without really thinking about it, I flagged him down and asked him to join us.

I could tell that Ben was annoyed with me for inviting my new friend to crash our private party, but I didn’t care. I was relieved that the difficult, tiresome summer was ending; I felt as if I could finally breathe in the heat of the August night, like something important was shifting, and that Ben needed proof: if he was going to treat me shabbily, I would find someone else to be close to. So I turned my attention to Matt, laughing at his jokes, staring, rapt, as he talked, mostly about baseball. I flirted tirelessly with him, a skill I had just picked up and hadn’t yet perfected. When Ben got up to leave abruptly at the end of the meal, I gave him a quick hug good-bye, and then I asked Matt if he wanted to order dessert. He did.

We could sit here all night without saying anything real. But a high school reunion, even an eight-year one, is nothing if not a reminder that time passes. “I’m glad you showed up,” I try. Ben doesn’t answer. “And I am pleased that you, Willa, showed up as well,” I say, my voice pitched low.

He stares straight ahead, the muscles in his jaw working. He exhales loudly, as if he’s been holding his breath. Without warning, he smacks his palm against his forehead. “Jesus!”

The force of this—whatever it is—takes me completely by surprise. A sudden pressure builds behind my eyes. I move toward the door, my fingers on the handle. Given the option of fight or flight, I’ll always flee. But seven years of silence and repressed feelings will make their inevitable escape. “What?” I say, pressed against the door, my voice loud and shaky. “What is it?”

“Who did I like?” I can see, even in the dim glow of the parking lot lights, that Ben’s face has gone red. “Are you that stupid?”

This is not my friend. This is someone else—Ben’s mean but distractingly manly cousin. “Apparently, yes, I am, thank you.” And just as I’m saying it I understand, and then four years of friendship vaporize, just like that. I look down at my hands, long and alien, pinkish in the snowy light. “Oh. Shit.”

“Which, in all the years I’ve thought about it, is not the response I’d hoped for.” His voice is quieter, slightly hoarse, as if there are big Swiss-cheese holes in it where the nastiness has just been.

I scan the dashboard, trying to make sense of this revelation, but understanding only that the car has 78,997 miles on it. I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear; I can tell without looking that it’s gone frizzy in the damp heat. If I had met Ben tonight, my boyfriend detector would have been clicking away; I might have positioned myself at a table near his, made some clever comment, and then turned away, waiting, faking quiet confidence. But this-Ben, new-Ben is just a superimposed image on top of the boy I used to know, my short, chubby, hygiene-challenged pal, my friend, my
best friend.

“I just mean, you know, I had no idea,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“Also not on my list,” Ben says, but he sounds more like himself, like he finally remembers that beneath every statement lies the opportunity for self-mockery.

And all of a sudden I’m thinking about Jane, Jane whose friendship is a direct descendant of this one, Jane who wears sparkly eye shadow to clean a house, who never met a karaoke machine she didn’t love, who dressed up last Halloween as a turkey sandwich, the
why-not
to my
no-way.
What would Jane do? I ask myself this question frequently; for her birthday last year, she bought me a
WWJD
bracelet. I move toward Ben, unsure of myself, but certain of the answer. He’s still sitting straight in his seat, staring at the foggy, wet window as if there is an important answer encoded in the dripping blobs of slush. “Well,” I say. “Like what’s-her-name said, high school was a long time ago.” I reach over and put my hands on either side of his face. We’ll tell our grandchildren that we were friends for years before we realized we were in love, that Ben knew long before I did, that it all came together in our first kiss, in a steamy car on a freezing cold night.

His jacket makes a shushing sound as he leans toward me. He reaches his hand around the back of my head, cradling it like a baby. His mouth meets mine, and for one perfect second I’m in laser-sharp focus, I’m the culmination of Ben’s drawn-out affection, I’m the fine point on it, and I close my eyes.

And then our teeth bang together. And Ben laughs, a moist, nervous exhalation right into my mouth, and I’m leaning across a gear shift kissing my old friend, which, as it turns out, is sort of like kissing my grandmother, although to be fair I’ve never actually felt her tongue on mine, but there’s something similar about it, close and earthbound and familiar. But it’s Ben! So I soldier on, praying for transformation, bracing my suddenly heavy body so that I don’t collapse onto him, and I am struck by the sensation of a kiss in a way I never have been before, that it is two people trying to eat each other, one hot mouth inside the other. Then again, his lips are soft, his hand in my hair reassuring.

“Can I ask you a question?” Ben says, when we’re finished.

“Please.” His face is still next to mine. There is a stray eyelash on his cheek.

“Did you eat pretzels today?”

“What kind of a question is that?” I ask.

“You taste … pretzel-y.” The rogue strand of hair has fallen in front of my eye. Ben gently places it back behind my ear.

“Is that what you ask the girl you’ve just kissed after pining for her for twelve years?”

“I didn’t pine for you.” He laughs. His breath is warm, close. “Okay, maybe I, you know, thought about you from time to time, but no, no pining.”

“You pined!”

“Just tell me if you had pretzels, and we can move on.” He shifts in his seat, his jacket rustling again, like wings.

“No,” I say. “But I had a raw onion for lunch.”

“Ah, that’s it.”

“And some garlic bread, and clam chowder.”

“Oh, Wendy,” Ben says, shaking his head and smiling. He reaches for the vent blowing on us and tips it away. Neither of us says anything for a minute, our silence punctuated by the hiss of the heater, the wind, the tinny plink of icy snow. The kiss, so clear to me just a moment ago as a misguided expression of sympathy, an intimate mistake, is beginning to transmute into a confused longing. I glance at Ben for a reading on the situation, but his brow is just slightly furrowed, his expression opaque. He pushes his hand through his hair. “So, that, uh, what we just did,” he starts.