First Comes Love by Emily Giffin

girl–bad girl shtick, I sigh, but decide to use it as an opening. “So I guess that means I’ll have the perfect child!” I chirp.
    She doesn’t react to this, nor does she even bother to ask what
I
did today, which is just common fucking courtesy. Instead she informs me that she ran into our old friend Shawna at the shoe store. She was buying her son his first pair of sneakers—little blue Keds.
    “How’d she look?” I ask.
    “Very good,” she says.
    “Did she lose her baby weight?”
    “Yes. She looked thinner than I’ve ever seen her.”
    “Too thin?”
    “No. Not too thin.”
    “Did she seem happy?” I ask.
    “As happy as you can be with a toddler,” Meredith replies.
    “Did she ask about me?” I say against my better judgment. Meredith always accuses me of making things all about myself.
    “No…but she did tell me y’all haven’t talked in months?” I detect a note of satisfaction in her voice, and feel another wave of irritation along with a stab of sibling rivalry at the mention of Shawna, our only shared friend growing up.
    “I wouldn’t say
months
…but it’s been a while.”
    “She wants to get drinks….”
    “The three of us?” I ask.
    “She mentioned me and Nolan. A double-date thing,” Meredith says. “But I’m sure she’d love to hear from you, too.”
    “Right,” I say, thinking this is what I get for wanting to confide in my sister. “Okay, Mere. I’ll let you go.”
    “If you want to go, say you want to go. Don’t tell me you’ll
let
me go,” she says, now just being a straight-up bitch.
    “Okay, then,” I say, careful to keep my voice light. “
I
want to go.”
    —
    I HANG UP, pissed off at Meredith and pissed off at Shawna for giving Meredith that kind of ammunition, even unwittingly. She, of all people, knows our complicated history, the three of us going back to 1989, when the Ebersoles moved in across the street from us. Shawna was between us in age, but was precocious and had skipped a grade. Her mother, a Coke executive, had transferred the family from Hong Kong, enrolling Shawna at the Atlanta International School so that she could continue to use her Chinese. It was one of the many things that fascinated Meredith and me, along with her wealth of stories and breadth of travel (in stark contrast to the mainstay destinations of most Buckhead families, which included, give or take, Lake Burton, Sea Island, and Kiawah). The three of us went on long bike rides, built forts along the creek behind Shawna’s house, and played Capture the Flag with the other neighborhood kids. One summer, we planted a vegetable garden, then went door-to-door peddling basil and tomatoes from Daniel’s old red wagon. I remember Shawna coming up with most of the ideas, doing most of the talking, and generally entertaining Meredith and me. Looking back, I think Mere would agree that it was the only truly harmonious era of our sisterhood.
    In middle school, Shawna morphed from our playmate into our fearless, experimental pioneer. The first adult penis Meredith and I ever saw was compliments of Shawna, straight from her parents’ very own porn-magazine collection, which they casually stowed in their nightstand along with a tube of K-Y jelly (the purpose of which Shawna clinically described). I still remember how my sister and I vacillated between horror and fascination at the sight of that large slab of bratwurst-like flesh, slung over the muscular thigh of a burly Nordic man named Big John. We gagged and covered our eyes, then peeked, then gawked, then analyzed, parsing out the anatomy, where his hairless scrotum attached to the long shaft ending with that one-eyed pink head. Shortly after that, Shawna taught us about masturbation, the myriad ways she pleasured herself, even demonstrating the swirling of her two fingers through the silk fabric of her pajama bottoms. There was no such thing as a taboo topic with Shawna—and she was just as likely to research a provocative issue