When We Were Friends Read Online Free Page B

universe’ll lay it on out for you. You don’t have to go out looking for your destiny, it’ll find you.”
    I’d heard this before from her, many times. It used to make me feel special.
    I lifted the scissors. “Let’s cut your hair, okay?” What I’d do was I’d chop it all off, and not a cute pixie cut either. Choppy, sprigged-out baldness.
    I thought again about Sydney’s smile, how it hadn’t touched her eyes. Maybe she did feel bad after all; maybe that’s what it meant. Or—less likely but still possible—maybe after I left she’d burst into sobs of shame that she hadn’t wanted to show me. We’d go out for drinks and she’d say,
Look
. She’d say,
Look, I never meant to hurt you, I was just a kid
. And I’d say,
Sure, it wasn’t so bad, you didn’t hurt me
. I’d say,
It’s over now, I hardly even remember
.
    But I couldn’t stop the scenes from replaying in my head, in the same agonizing slow-mo that they’d played out when I was there. Alone at the cafeteria table watching her whisper behind a cuppedhand, the group at her table laughing, staring, bent in whispers that I pretend aren’t about me. I am an artist with great talent who will be famous someday, whose work will be sold to rich people at auctions. In private I am funny and cool, have brilliant comebacks that regretfully surface hours too late for actual use, but that crack me up anyway. So I’m destined for greatness, I know it’s true. I’ve felt the heat of destiny ever since I first picked up a crayon, so the person they’re whispering about isn’t me, just the loser they imagine is under my skin.
    Blimp!
a boy calls, and I stand to throw away my lunch, pretending not to hear.
The
Hindenburg’s
rising!
Sydney shrieks and the girl beside her makes the sound of an explosion and I walk from the room amid a cloud of laughter. Laughter echoing in me for twenty-one years.

We were ten when we decided to found the Cutters Club, a secret society of which we were the only members. Our club activities typically included some or all of the following:
Signing to each other in class—using a secret sign language with elaborate hand gestures we’d devised for each letter—usually about how much we hated our moms, our teacher, and boys.
Completing Mad Libs with words relating to sex or bodily functions.
Writing poetry to go with each of my paintings, the combined brilliance of which we were sure would wow the art world.
    These were daring enough activities on their own, but making them club activities seemed to add a whole other dimension of audaciousness. And the day we came up with the club’s name, that was our bravest day of all.
    We were hanging out at Sydney’s apartment when she brought up the idea. Her apartment had a rooftop deck overlooking the town, where we lay on towels with Sprites and a kitchen timer to tell us when to flip. We had just about gotten to the unbearably sweaty stage of tanning when she said, “How come you picked Tricia for your gymnastics partner?”
    The truth was I’d chosen Tricia instead of Sydney because Tricia never teased me for being too scared to arch into a back bend. But I said, “I feel bad for her. She can’t even cartwheel right.”
    “But I
so
hate her, don’t you? I mean she’s not just dumb, she’s partly retarded. You know she still moves her lips when she reads to herself?”
    “Don’t use the word ‘retarded.’ ”
    “Whatever, I’m just saying you want to be careful. You spend too much time with her, you’ll get stuck in her retardo world.” She leaned up on her elbows. “Hey, you want to try something? It’s called blood sisters.”
    Blood sisters
. It gave me a shiver, both in a bad way and a good way, like picking a scab or touching a snake. “What’s that?”
    “It means we share blood.” She gave me a slim smile, daring me. “We both cut ourselves, and then touch the cuts together so we get each other’s blood mixed in our body.”
    “Eeew,”
I said,