Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner Page A

dug three dol ars out of my pocket, shaking my head, even though I wasn’t real y sure. At fifteen, Jon already had a life that was al his own, and I could only guess as to what that life included.
    “I’l bet he’s got a girlfriend,” Val mused, cracking open her can.
    “Do you think…” I said. Then I stopped. I knew what I wanted to ask— do you think my family’s weird? —but I couldn’t figure out how to ask it.
    “We
    should
    be
    cheerleaders
    for
    Hal oween,” she said. “We can wear white sweaters and get skirts at JCPenney and buy pom-poms.” For a minute we walked along in silence, past the Sheas’ house at the corner, the Buccis and the Hattons, as I tried to figure out a way to ask Val what I real y needed to know: What’s wrong with
    us? What’s wrong with me?
    “Or we could be Barbies,” Val said. “Or witches. Whatever you want.”
    We ended up going as witches, because we couldn’t find pom-poms at the costume shop, but they had an abundance of pointy black hats, along with green face paint and black-andwhite striped tights that we wore under our black choir robes. “I’m melt-ing!”
    Val screeched as I pretended to throw a bucket of water on her and my mother snapped pictures. “Oh, what a world!”
    Jon wasn’t trick-or-treating. “It’s for kids,”
    he’d said, coming downstairs in his jeans and team sweatshirt. A station wagon zoomed down our street, swung into our driveway, and slammed to a halt with its front bumper inches from the garage door. My mother frowned. She’d put her own witch hat on her head and wore bright-red lipstick and high-heeled red shoes.
    “Gotta go,” said Jon. He was going to a party at one of his teammates’ houses. He’d promised my mother that there would be parents there, and no drinking. He’d even given her the phone number, muttering under his breath that she had to stop treating him like a baby.
    But then, on his way out the door, he surprised me by digging in his pockets and coming out with two Hershey’s Kisses. “Here,” he said, dropping one in my pil owcase and one in Val’s.
    “To get you started.”
    “Be home by midnight!” my mother cal ed.
    “I wil ,” Jon said. He hurried out the door and into the waiting car, which revved its motor and zoomed down the driveway.
    Val and I went out into the chil y darkness. We spent an hour trick-or-treating, moving through the neighborhood with throngs of little kids dressed as princesses and pirates and ghosts, shivering under our choir robes, because, in spite of my mother’s urging, we’d both refused to wear our winter coats.
    “Maybe we are too old for this,” Val said, swinging her sack of candy over her shoulder and pul ing off her witch hat.
    “Maybe. Probably,” I said. More than one of the grown-ups who’d answered our knock had made that point. “This is the last year I’l be giving you two treats,” Mrs. Bass had announced before winking and dropping a handful of miniature candy bars into our bags. I was shivering, and my fingers were numb, and I thought that if I never went trickor-treating again it would be okay. Val grinned at me, her crooked teeth glowing against her green skin.
    “Poltergeist is on tonight. Remember that part where the meat was, like, crawling along the counter?”
    “Ew,” I said, recal ing the scene. Val hated blood in real life, but she loved scary movies, especial y the ones where, she swore, she could catch a glimpse of her father getting shot or stabbed or jumping out of a window on fire.
    “Ask if you can sleep over, okay?”
    I found my parents sitting in the darkened living room. My mom had a plastic salad bowl of candy in her lap, and my father was watching a rerun of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In on TV, with a mug of tea in his hand. “Can I sleep at Valerie’s?”
    “As long as you two don’t stay up too late,” said my mother. For a minute, I thought about not going. I could change out of my costume and sit with my