Free What My Best Friend Did by Lucy Dawson Page B

feature unless you’ve married Brad Pitt or won an Oscar or something, and I really need to raise my profile.”
    “Oh,” I said. And felt really crap. All of a sudden she didn’t remind me of Vic at all.
    “Sorry.” She was a little shamefaced. “It was a bit underhanded of me. Oh, don’t look like that!” She grabbed my arm. “I know what you must be thinking, but I’ve genuinely really had fun. I really have!” She sounded almost surprised. “And we did have a blast in LA. I’ve got another confession too: these shoes are about half a size too big for me. What size are you? Do you want them?” She held them out to me.
    “Don’t be stupid!” I said. “Put them on eBay or something.I don’t think you’re going to recoup the five grand you spent on them though, you loony.”
    She looked at me intently. “I haven’t pissed you off, have I? Still friends?”
    I hesitated. She waited anxiously, hands clasping the Louboutins, framed by the black cab window. She’d merely wanted a leg-up on the glossy magazine ladder, in her pointless, ludicrous shoes … but then she had been big enough to be honest with me and come clean. She must genuinely mean what she was saying. Otherwise, why bother? I’d enjoyed her company. It was rare to meet someone interesting and funny but good at listening too. Sparkly new friends like her didn’t exactly drop into my lap every day of the week, and you could have different friends for different reasons, couldn’t you? Not everyone could know me inside out, like Vic did, and be there for every problem. Gretchen’d make a great coffee and cocktail partner in crime.
    “Still friends,” I said.

EIGHT
     
    I think it’s the smell—the smell of hospitals that I can’t handle.I close my eyes and try to breathe deeply through my mouth.Tom cannot sit still next to me; he’s twitching and stop-starting with panic, fear and powerlessness. I can feel his every movement run down my arm because we are gripping hands as if our lives depend on it. We are waiting in the mercifully empty relatives’ room, the walls of which are a washy, spearmint green and I think it must be cold, despite the big old-fashioned iron radiators, because I am shaking. Helpful leaflets are stuck all over the place, some resting on top of a drinks machine. There are seven chairs and a small table, tucked tight against the wall, which I am next to. Tom is to my left.
    We are both so frightened that, for the first time ever, we have nothing that we can say to each other. My teeth start to chatter and when I try to stop them, they won’t. Neither of us can bear to think about what might be happening down the corridor in that room. All I can see is that red, flat line on the monitor slicing through the center of the screen; continuous, unarguable and definite. I’m trying to think of something, anything else—for some bizarre reason I imagine me, Fran and Phil as children playing on a roundabout, Phil is using his foot to push us faster and faster—but then the red line appears at the edge and crashes right through the middle of the picture, cutting us all in half.
    The door opens at that point and a very real nurse comes in. The line vanishes immediately and I scan her face desperately, looking for clues—is she smiling? Is her brow creased with empathy, ready to help us through the shock of hearing, “I’m so sorry, we did everything that we could but …”?
    She walks straight over to us and sits down. Then it’s actually happening before I have time to imagine the rest.
    “Gretchen has had a problem with her heart,” she says. “She’s had a cardiac arrest.”
    Everything slows right down around me again, this time like I’ve been plunged into an ice bath. Her words feel unreal; I’m staring at her face but it sounds like she’s speaking under water. I begin to squeeze Tom’s hand so fiercely it must hurt him.
    “It’s beating normally again,” she continues, her voice becoming clearer