Friends Forever Read Online Free Page A

spent a huge amount of time with them, and went to Scottsdale for spring training for his clients who played for the Giants. Some of them were now his closest friends, and some of them had a wild side that Larry loved sharing. He rarely included Marilyn in those evenings, and she was just as happy to stay home with her boys. She had gotten back in shape after Brian, and she was looking great at thirty-three, but the girls most of Larry’s clients went out with were twenty and twenty-one, and she had nothing to say to them. It was a racier crowd than she wanted to hang out with. She preferred to be with her kids. She almost always went to school functions alone, and when Larry did come, he always had just a little too much to drink, of the wine they served at school. Not so much that the other parents would notice, but Marilyn always knew he had had too much wine, or a couple of extra beers or even a bourbon on the rocks before they left home. It seemed to be the onlyway he could get through evenings he thought were boring. He wasn’t interested in his boy’s school, except for sporting events, which he always attended. And more than once he had commented that Judy Thomas, Gabby’s mother, was quite a babe. Larry had an eye for pretty women.
    Judy and Marilyn were good friends, and Marilyn ignored the comments Larry made about Judy. She knew that however flashy Judy looked, she was crazy about Adam, her husband, and was well behaved. Judy had just turned thirty, and had already had a lot of work done, liposuction, a tummy tuck, breast implants, and regular Botox shots, and although her friends told her she was foolish to do it, she looked great. She had never gotten over her youthful beauty pageant mentality. She had admitted to Marilyn and Connie once that she had entered Gabby in baby beauty pageants at four and five, and Gabby had won hands down, but Adam had had a fit and made her promise never to do it again, and she respected his wishes. Adam adored both his girls, although Gabby was undeniably the star of the show. She had more personality and more spark to her than her much quieter younger sister, Michelle. It was Gabby who Judy was certain would make a mark on the world. She had a dazzling personality. In contrast, Michelle lived in her sister’s shadow, but she was only six, so it wasn’t fair to compare them.
    In third grade, Gabby was taking piano and voice lessons, and seemed to have real talent at an early age. Judy was trying to convince the school’s drama department to do a full musical production of
Annie
and put Gabby in the lead role. For the moment, they had decided it was more than they wanted to undertake, and notmany of the students were as well prepared as Gabby for a Broadway musical on their stage. Gabby already knew she wanted to be an actress when she grew up, and Judy was seeing to it that she had all the skills she needed. She had been going to ballet lessons since she was three. Michelle loved ballet too, but her abilities weren’t as obvious as Gabby’s. Gabby was a star. Michelle was just a little girl.
    The couple who did the most for Atwood were Adam and Judy, who made big donations to the school, and had both girls there. Michelle was a better student than Gabby and got straight A’s, but it was Gabby’s many talents that caught everyone’s attention. Michelle was just as pretty, but Gabby was more extroverted and infinitely more noticeable.
    And Adam was happy to do whatever he could for the school. He had donated a Range Rover from his car dealership for the school auction. The evening had made the school a fortune, and Adam was the hero of the hour. They were flashy and certainly not subtle, but they were nice people and well liked by all, except for a few more reserved parents who thought they were just too showy and could never understand how they had gotten their daughters into a school like Atwood. But they were clearly there to stay, whether their critics liked it or