Best Friends (Until Someone Better Comes Along) by Erin Downing Page A

air and wiggled her toes. “I do have very nice feet.”
    â€œYou do,” I agreed, then reached out and tickled the bottom of her foot. She was so ticklish that she actually fell over, and soon we were all in the middle of a huge tickle fight in thepile of blankets. Of course, that’s when Madeline and Ava’s dad came back from their canoe ride.
    We all tried to stop laughing, but for some reason it was impossible. As Madeline and her dad snuck past, staring at us like we were crazy people, we dissolved into a fit of giggles again.

Chapter Twelve
    A n hour later, we were still playing Liar and Spy. While we talked, I gave Ava and Bailey manicures and pedicures. When I finished their nails (and also Madeline’s, who promised Ava she’d leave us alone if we let her hang out for a little while), Ava did my toes and Bailey painted my hands. “You’re the worst nail painter ever,” I told Bailey. “I think my fingers have more polish on them than my fingernails do.”
    â€œI just do things differently,” she said, laughing as she slapped the brush against my fingers. The way she painted nails almost reminded me of the way a modern artist would flick a brush at a canvas. She held my hands out in front of her and studied her work. “I think it looks beautiful,” she said.
    â€œUm . . .,” I said. “It’s definitely creative. Maybe not something I’d pay for, but . . .” I giggled. Each of my nails was a different color, and the polish was messy and glopped on. But at least they were my real nails, grown in and healthy-looking. Since I’d started hanging out with Bailey and Ava, I’d stopped picking at my nails. I guess I was just more relaxed or something, but I didn’t seem to have much nervous energy at the lake. So even though they didn’t look perfect—or even pretty—they looked sort of healthy and fun. And they reminded me of an awesome night.
    Most of the time that night, we were laughing hilariously about someone’s seriously funny or seriously stupid secrets—but sometimes the truth someone shared was also sort of sad.
    I’d discovered that, when she was seven, Bailey had thrown up in the pool at swimming lessons (yuck!). In keeping with the pool theme, she also told us that when he was eight, her brother pooped at the bottom of the pool during swim team practice, thinking it would be funny (super-yuck!).
    Then Ava told us about how her stepfather kept a snake in his bedroom that only ate live mice (um, cool?). We also found out that one time she made and ate an entire tube of Halloween slice-and-bake cookies in one night and felt so sick afterward that she hadn’t eaten them since.
    I admitted that I once stole a poster of a cute puppy sitting on a dictionary that was hanging up in the school library (pitiful). And neither of them believed me when I told them that my dad had once toilet-papered his own house, just so people would think he was popular (I guess TP-ing was a sign of coolness or something in the town where he grew up).
    After Madeline went to bed—with Coco trotting along happily behind her—I reluctantly confessed that I’d once let Jake Theisen read a note that Heidi had given me where she talked about how hot he was. “Why?” Ava asked, without any judgment. “Why would you do that to a friend?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said, realizing that I really didn’t know. I guess it had just seemed funny at the time, but Heidi was crushed when she found out. “I wish I hadn’t.”
    I also admitted that I’d been lying to everyone about dance tryouts. “Soccer doesn’t really get in the way at all—practice is on different days, which everyone will eventually figure out. I just don’t want to humiliate myself in front of the whole school by trying out. Sometimes,” I confessed, “I worry about