My Worst Best Friend (3 page)

In my heart, I knew this wasn’t true. Experience suggested that anything one of us could do by herself in an hour – like baking cookies or mowing the lawn – would take the two of us together at least half a day. Probably much longer. But all I said was, “Um…”

“Oh, come on.” She squeezed my arm. Affectionately. “I’ll be, like, a gazillion times happier, and you’ll be maybe ten minutes later getting home than you would’ve been.”

This last part wasn’t true either. I rolled my eyes. “Ten minutes?”

“OK, twenty. Thirty tops.” If I’d been taller, she would have leaned her head on my shoulder. She leaned her head on my head. “Pleasepleaseplease
please
, Gracie. Who can I count on in this cold, cruel world if I can’t count on you?”

“All right, but we’re not stopping for a drink or anything—”

“Of course not.” Savanna threw her arms around me. “Only first we have to drop by the drugstore. It won’t take long.”

“Ohmigod,
will you look at this?” Savanna flapped Zelda’s shopping list over the fruit section. “All it says on this is
oranges. Oranges!
What’s that supposed to mean? There are, like, dozens of kinds of oranges.”

Choice does have its downside. You could see why it took Savanna hours to get dressed every morning.

“Temple … navel … blood …” recited Savanna. “Valencia … satsuma … mandarin.” The shopping list fluttered in the air. “It’s like the UN of citrus fruit. And they all have the same last name, Gray. They’re all called oranges. Exactly what kind am I supposed to get?”

I leaned against the cart. After several delays, we’d finally made it into Food First, but it didn’t look as if we were going to get any further than Fruits and Vegetables for a while. I didn’t bother checking the time. “Well, what kind do you usually get?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Gracie.” Savanna tossed her hair and sighed. “Nobody, like, told me they have names.”

“Well, is the kind you usually have big? Small? Dark? Light? Does it have pips? Does it—”

“They’re
orange
, Gray. That’s, like, the big clue.” She turned to look at me. “I don’t kn—” Her eyes locked somewhere behind my right ear.

“What’s the matter?”

Savanna gazed into the cart. “Don’t turn around,” she ordered. “But there’s a guy over by the salad stuff who’s, like, staring at us.”

I didn’t turn around. I knew he wasn’t staring at me. Not unless I’d started growing antlers.

“He is, like, seriously cute,” Savanna reported. “Tall and lean, but really well-built. Dark.” She reached down and moved the bag of potatoes from one side of the cart to the other. “I mean, like, really seriously cute.”

“Is he from our school?”

“No way.” Savanna shook her head. Slowly. “You know what? Why don’t you pick out the oranges, Gracie? I’m just going to get some tomatoes.”

Sure she was. And right after that she was going to save the world.

I sighed. “You mean you’re going to go over and flirt with that guy.”

“No, I’m going to get some tomatoes.” Savanna smiled. “But I can’t help it if
he
flirts with me.”

Needless to say, nobody ever flirted with
me
. Savanna said it was because I dressed like a boy. I said it was more like a natural law: Whatever goes up has to come down; two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time; and no one flirts with Gracie Mooney. But everybody flirted with Savanna. And Savanna flirted right back. She was a natural.

“Oh, come on, Savanna. Tomatoes aren’t even on the list.” We’d already spent half an hour more in the drugstore than we had to while she tested lipsticks on the back of her hand. Experience suggested that flirting could take even longer. “I have to get home
today
, remember?”

She made a face. It was long-suffering. “As if I could forget. You’ve been reminding me, like, every five minutes.”

I pushed the cart forward a couple of inches to encourage her to move. “Savanna—”

She patted my arm. “Relax, Gracie. I’ll be right back.”

So if you weren’t completely clear about what it means to be one of Those Girls, here’s an example. A classic. In a situation where someone like me would turn red, knock thirty or forty oranges to the ground and roll the shopping cart over her toes, Savanna merely raised her head and smiled — and sailed towards the tomatoes like a man-of-war overtaking a dinghy. She was already flirting before she’d passed the root vegetables. There was a part of me that couldn’t have been more in awe of her if she could bend steel with her bare hands.

Mr Seriously Cute was studying the tomatoes as if he was searching for fingerprints. But only with one eye. He looked up when Savanna docked beside him. She hugged herself and swayed. He smiled. Savanna smiled back. She had a smile that could sell ice to an Inuit. And then she turned to pull a plastic bag from the roll. Her hair moved like a curtain blown by a soft sea breeze. Mr Seriously Cute said something. Savanna gazed back at him. She said something. He said something else. He was bobbing his head and grinning like one of those dogs people put in the back windows of their cars. I’d never actually seen a guy blush before. Savanna picked up a tomato and held it out to him. He gave it a squeeze. She said something. He said something. She hit him playfully on the arm. Besides the what-you-need-in-that-igloo-is-a-big-chunk-of-ice smile, Savannah had a laugh that made people look around to see what was happening – in case she was being attacked or someone was strangling a goose. Mr Seriously Cute joined in. Everybody else looked at them.

It was obvious that Savanna was having fun – which made one of us. Watching someone flirt is even less interesting than watching someone test lipstick on her hand. I turned my attention back to the oranges. I picked out some navel oranges, and then I took one of the free recipe cards from the dispenser. I was reading how to make lemon sauce (recommended for chicken, fish and green vegetables) when Savanna got back with the tomatoes her mother hadn’t asked for.

“There.” She dropped the bag into the cart. “Happy? That didn’t take long, did it?”

I had to laugh. “You’re too much, you know that? You really are too much.”

“And you sound like my mother.” She smiled, but she wasn’t laughing along. “You’re way too young to be such a pole in the mud.”

“Stick.”

“Anyway, Gracie, I was only being friendly.”

“Really? And what about Archie?”

Savanna’s eyes widened. The only way she could have looked more innocent was if she’d had wings and a halo. “What about him?”

“You and Archie are practically going steady.”

“
Practically
isn’t the same as
are
, Gray. I mean,
practically
inheriting a million dollars isn’t anything like
having
a million dollars, is it?”

“Well, no…” Besides selling ice to an Inuit, she could probably argue him out of his last blanket.

“And anyway, I didn’t do anything. All I did was talk to some other guy. Talking to some other guy is not, like, a criminal offence.” She looked down at the list again and squidged up her nose as though the next item was something gross like the still-warm heart of a newborn lamb. “Cereal. Where’s the cereal, Gracie?”

I could only hope that she knew what kind the Zindles ate for breakfast. There were a lot more cereals than oranges. I looked up at the signs that hung over the end of each aisle. “Aisle four.” I pointed left. “Over there.”

Savanna led the way. Grumbling. “I’d rather eat McDonald’s every single day, no matter how fat it makes you, than have to do this. This is like totally my idea of hell.”

“It can’t be hell,” I said as I followed her to the back of the store. “Hell has fire and brimstone, not lights fuelled by mercury and energy-guzzling chill cabinets. This has to be purgatory.”

Savanna honked with laughter. “You see? That’s why I wanted you with me. You make even this bearable.” She waved her arms. “But I’ll tell you one thing – when we have our own place we’re getting takeouts on the nights we’re not being wined and dined by gorgeous men with serious incomes. I’m not doing this every week.”

Having our own place together was our big dream. When we got out of college, we were going to share an apartment in some major city – preferably one with easy access to The Great Outbores (as Savanna called it) for those of us who liked tramping through mud. We had it all planned. We’d talked about it so much that we knew what colour we were painting each room. We were going to be sophisticated and cool and leave the dishes in the sink for as long as we liked. Savanna was going to get a job in TV and work her way up to being a news anchorman, and I was going to be a wildlife biologist and work for some organization trying to save what’s left of the planet. But, besides the hard work and professional dedication, there would be boyfriends. That’s where the gorgeous men with serious incomes came in. Savanna was going to have tons of boyfriends and they were all going to be disgustingly attractive and wealthy. I wasn’t really into money. I was more of a realist; having more to be realistic about, all I wanted was one guy who was breathing, nice, smart, had a good sense of humour and loved lizards.

“No takeouts,” I said. “We’re going to be poor working girls on a budget, remember?”

“Only to begin with.” Savanna said this with her usual certainty. Self-doubt wasn’t in her make-up. Which was yet another thing I loved about her. Self-doubt was practically my middle name: Gracie Self-doubt Mooney. “Then we’re going to be fantastically successful and we’ll move from our tiny little cramped but cosy apartment to a penthouse with a roof garden and a cleaning lady who comes in twice a week.”

She edged between two carts coming from the other direction, knocking a box of cookies and a roll of paper towels to the floor.

I couldn’t follow her until the women pushing the carts picked up the cookies and the paper towels.

By the time I caught up with Savanna, some guy with a baby hanging off his back was handing her a box from the top shelf of aisle four, grinning as if she was the one who was doing him the favour.

“Thankyouthankyouthankyou,” she gushed. There were curls and flashes all over the place. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.”

She would’ve got it herself. Mrs Pontiac pretty much begged her to join the girls’ basketball team.

“You see, that’s where you leave the road when it comes to men,” Savanna informed me as we watched her saviour and his baby disappear around a corner. “You’re way too self-sufficient, Gracie. You think men are the same as us, but they aren’t.”

“You mean, because they have penises and facial hair?”

“No, Gray.” Savanna started down the aisle. “Because they come from, like, a totally different planet. They’re really put off by independent women. They want to feel needed and in control.”

She stepped over a small child who was lying on the floor crying. I carefully pushed the cart around him.

“I thought this was the emancipated, non-sexist twenty-first century,” I called after her.

“And that’s another thing.” She looked at me over her shoulder. With concern. “Did you know that lots of women who are lawyers and professors and stuff like that have to pretend to be waitresses and cab drivers to get a boyfriend? Men don’t like women who are too smart.”

“Why not? They’re afraid of getting a crick in their necks looking up to them?”

“Gracie…” sighed Savanna. “I get the equal pay and any fool can put up a shelf thing, but the point is that you have to face facts. Men have very delicate egos. They have to be protected.”

“Who told you a stupid thing like that?”

“It’s not stupid. It’s a genetic fact. Everybody knows it.” Savanna turned right. “Except
you
.”

“You’re making it up.”

She was always making things up. Like when she was trying to convince me to buy that sundress in the summer and she told me that orange makes you look taller. Or when she wanted me to take a day off from planting butterflies to go to the pool with her and she told me scientists had proved that swimming makes your breasts bigger. I couldn’t decide if it was a gift or a syndrome.

Savanna was shaking her head. “No, Gracie, I am not making it up. And if you read a women’s magazine for a change instead of always having your nose stuck in some depressing book about how the planet’s dying, you’d know that.” She came to a stop in front of the shelves of pasta. “Oh, God, another earth-shaking decision. What do you think? Spaghetti? Fusilli? Shells?”

“It’s a three-for. Get one of each.”

“What would I do without you?” Savanna beamed. “You’re a genius.”

A genius who’d never been kissed. And didn’t look like she would be any time soon. I figured that at the rate I was going the only way I’d ever have a boyfriend was if I started writing to prisoners.

“So,” I said. “You think that’s the reason no one’s ever asked me out? Because I can get the cereal off the shelf by myself and know what a partial differential equation is?”

She tossed the boxes into the cart. “Well, what do
you
think it is?”

My height, or lack of it. My body, or lack of it. My lack of flowing, tossable hair. The extra head.

“Oh, please, Gracie. I mean, sure, some guys get turned off by the second head, but it really is
not
your looks. If there’s anybody should be worried about her looks, it’s not
you
. I mean, like, ohmigod… If looks were money, Marilouise would be begging on the street with a used paper cup.”

“That’s not true, and you know it.” Marilouise was cute, in a low-key kind of way.

“She has as much sex appeal as a potato,” said Savanna.

“OK, but—”

“She’s fat,” filled in Savanna.

That wasn’t what I was going to say.

“No, she isn’t. I think she has a good figure.” Marilouise had obvious breasts.

“OK, she’s not fat, she’s chubby. But she has those little eyes, like bird poo.”

“They’re nothing like bird poo. They’re the most amazing shade of blue.”

“Blue poo.” Savanna laughed.

I laughed, too. “They’re fantastic, and you know it.”