Friends Like Us Read Online Free

you change. There’s something seductive and magnetic about it, the feeling of being understood like that. I suppose it goes both ways.
    Ben stomps his feet and blows on his hands. “Where’s your coat?”
    “You know me,” I say, my nonchalant shrug turning into a shiver. “I live on the edge.” My eyes are watering, my face slowly growing immobile. It’s starting to snow, mean icy clumps hurling down like snowballs from God.
    “Willa.” Ben says my name with a sudden, sharp irritation that reminds me of the last summer of our friendship. “Come on.” He grabs my hand and pulls me to his car, and we wait in the front seat while it warms up. It feels like we were just here five minutes ago.
    The wind rattles the windows. I could ask him where he’s been for the past seven years, why he ended our friendship and broke my heart. Or I could tell him he’s an ass and slam the car door after myself. But here he is, next to me, rearranged, and I am, too, although maybe not as noticeably. The snow is starting to stick to the asphalt and to the other cars, turning the dark parking lot into the moon.
    “So,” I say, when I can feel my face again. Heat blasts out of the vents, and the windows are fogging. I watch him as he fiddles with the car radio, which is not on. Like we always did in high school, we’ve created our own little universe without even trying. I’m catapulted back into a world of grateful love for my best friend. Still, I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until his bones clatter. Is there an explanation in there somewhere?
    “Awesome party,” Ben says, finally. He smiles without showing his teeth, moves his hands to the steering wheel, and plants them at ten o’clock and two o’clock, as if we’re going somewhere.
    “Who did you like ?” I say.
    The last time we saw each other was at the end of summer vacation before our sophomore year of college. Things had been strained between us for three months; I had been plagued by the constant, uncomfortable feeling that Ben was angry at me. He undercut our usual ease with inexplicable silences and frequent sighs; he snapped at me when I teased him and often tuned out of our conversations entirely. Still, through stubbornness or habit, we hung out most nights, meeting for coffee or ice cream or for beers at the High Road, the dive bar we knew that didn’t card—which was especially fortunate, since Ben still looked about thirteen. That night we were marking the end of the summer. We arranged to have dinner together at the Cottage, a downtown bistro with an outdoor patio. Ben had a flight the next morning.
    He met me at the door, muttering a greeting, seeming more nervous than usual. His hair was unusually neat, and he looked like he’d picked his clothes out of the closet, as opposed to grabbing whatever wrinkled T-shirt and shorts were closest to his bed when he woke up in the morning. He was fidgety, alternately tightening and loosening his watch band and tracing the design on the tablecloth with his fingertips. I remember noticing the hair on his arms—I hardly ever thought of Ben as male, and then something, a shadow across his face, a change in the tone of his voice, would remind me, just briefly. He looked like he had something on his mind, but the summer had been long and tense, and I didn’t think I wanted to hear it. We were sitting outside and had just ordered our food when a guy I barely knew from school walked past our table. Without really thinking about it, I flagged him down and asked him to join us.
    I could tell that Ben was annoyed with me for inviting my new friend to crash our private party, but I didn’t care. I was relieved that the difficult, tiresome summer was ending; I felt as if I could finally breathe in the heat of the August night, like something important was shifting, and that Ben needed proof: if he was going to treat me shabbily, I would find someone else to be close to. So I turned my attention to