Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner

some are there.”
    The thing was, Val didn’t seem to know that she was weird-looking…or if she knew, she didn’t care. Each year, she’d try out for Select Choir, even though she couldn’t real y sing in tune (although she was, in her defense, both enthusiastic and loud). In June she would audi-tion for the leads in the summer music theater. She’d rehearse her song and her monologue for weeks, and stil end up being cast as a glorified extra—a non-singing urchin in Annie, a nun with no lines in The Sound of Music, a tree in Peter Pan—after the kids who could sing got roles as pirates and Indians and Lost Boys. None of the rejections and refusals dented her confidence. She’d use Elmer’s glue to attach felt leaves to her green leotard, or pose in front of the mirror in her wimple as if she was the star of the show, as if everyone was there to see her.
    “Did Jon do something?” she asked, and flipped open the social studies book (Exploring Our World) that she had in her lap. “Did he do something to you?” Before I could answer, she said, “Did you finish the worksheet?”
    I handed it over. Val was smart—at least that’s what the results on the standardized tests we’d taken in fifth grade had indicated
    —but she had an attitude toward homework, and studying for quizzes and tests, that could best be described as haphazard. “He told my mom not to come to his crosscountry meets. He’s…” This part was hard to say. “He’s ashamed of her.”
    Val pursed her lips, absorbing this.
    “Maybe she could go on a diet.”
    “I don’t know,” I mumbled.
    “My mom does a good one,” Val said. Her eyes were stil on the worksheet as she copied my answers. “You eat a hard-boiled egg for breakfast, then an egg and half a grapefruit for lunch, and then you have salad for dinner, with a can of tuna fish and lemon juice instead of salad dressing. That’s what my mom does every New Year’s. She does it for, like, a week.”
    She wrinkled her nose. “It makes her real y gassy. But it works.”
    “I’m not sure,” I muttered. Even though I knew by then that the world disagreed, I stil clung to the idea that my mother was beautiful, a cloud come to life, and that everyone else had it wrong.
    “Or how about Deal-A-Meal?” Val asked as the school bus came groaning around the corner. “You know, with the Sweatin’ to the Oldies guy? I saw an infomercial for it. You get a videotape and cards to tel you what to eat for lunch or dinner.”
    “Maybe.” The bus ground to a stop in front of us. Val handed me my homework and bent down for her backpack. We climbed aboard and took our regular seats, three rows back on the left-hand side, and that was the end of the conversation until that afternoon, when I came home from Girl Scouts and found Val sitting before our front door.
    “I bet Jon’s having wet dreams,” she announced
    as
    we
    walked
    to
    the
    convenience
    store.
    Val
    didn’t
    have
    a
    brother,
    but she seemed somehow to know a lot more about boys than I did. Most of what I knew came from a book my mother had given me when I’d turned twelve. It was cal ed What’s Happening to Me?, and it had provided me and Valerie with hours of amusement. There were cartoon drawings of a girl with breasts and a curly thatch of pubic hair, and an index in the back where you could look up “penis” and “ejaculate”
    and
    “masturbation”
    and
    “nocturnal
    emission,” as Val had done the instant the book was in her hands.
    “Gross.” Ever since I’d learned about wet dreams, I’d felt a mixture of queasiness and pity whenever I’d thought of them in conjunction with my brother. How awful it must be to have everything on the outside, hanging there so obvious, to have body parts getting bigger or harder or squirting stuff on your sheets without your having any say over them.
    “Does he have a girlfriend?” asked Val. She put two cans of Diet Coke and a bag of potato chips on the counter, and I