Free Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner

sip, closed her eyes, and sighed happily as the shel fish constable watched her. “You know what this tastes like? Summer. Doesn’t it taste just like summer to you?”
    Val didn’t answer. Chris Jeffries spooned cocktail sauce and horseradish onto the oysters. He had thick features and close-set brown eyes and was tanned the color of leather.
    I wasn’t very good at guessing grown-ups’ ages, but I thought he was younger than Mrs.
    Adler, maybe just out of col ege. Maybe even stil in col ege and doing this as a summer job, which made me wonder how he’d had the money to pay for our dinner. “I never thought of it like that,”
    he said.
    Valerie tucked her head down like a turtle, tore open one of the bags of steamers, and started nimbly plucking clams from their shel s, dunking them in a dish of water to clean the grit off, then dipping them in butter and popping them into her mouth. “Want one?” she asked.
    “They’re good.” She speared a clam on a red plastic fork, dipped it, and handed it to me. “Just eat the bel y, not the foot,” she said, indicating the part of the clam that looked like a thick, wormy tail. I slipped the grayish clam gingerly into my mouth, bracing for the fishy taste and the slimy feel I was sure were coming. The only seafood I’d ever had was frozen fish sticks that my mother heated in the toaster oven. I closed my eyes and chewed, wincing at first at the slimy texture, then opening my eyes as the sweet, briny, buttery taste exploded over my tongue. “These are so good!”
    Mrs. Adler laughed, and the shel fish constable actual y clapped. “Enjoy,” he said. I ate a whole bagful of steamers and an ear of corn drizzled with butter and sprinkled with grainy sea salt. I squeezed lemon onto a raw oyster and then, fol owing Mrs. Adler’s example, tipped the rough edge of the shel to my lips and slurped out the liquor and the meat. After my first few clumsy tries, I got the hang of the metal nutcrackers and the tiny three-tined fork, prying chunks of pink-andwhite flesh out of the lobster claws and dousing them with butter, too, amazed at the taste of the meat, light and rich and sweet. The shel fish constable told us how he and his brother had taken his brother’s girlfriend, visiting from Minnesota, on a whale watch in Provincetown. The seas had gotten rough, the passengers had gotten sick, and the whale-watch workers had spent the whole trip running up and down the length of the boat, handing out Dramamine and then plastic bags. “I’d never seen so much vomit,” he said, and Val and I laughed at the way he said the word
    — vahhhw-mit. “It was awesome.”
    “Awesome,” I repeated. My fingertips and face were shiny with butter and clam juice. I wiped them until the napkin turned translucent, then added it to the pile that was growing in the center of the table, as Mrs. Adler and Chris Jeffries talked about their favorite beaches and the best places in Provincetown to watch the sunset. Valerie and I had sodas, and the grown-ups drank beer from green glass bottles, setting the empties down next to the trays littered with clam shel s, straw wrappers, shreds of cole slaw, and puddles of lobster juice. Final y, Mrs. Adler turned sideways on the bench. She pul ed up her skirt, crossed her long, tanned legs, and slipped a cigarette between her lips. Chris the shel fish constable hurried to pul out a book of matches and light it.
    “I’m stuffed,” she pronounced. The breeze was picking up, raising goose bumps on my bare arms and legs, bringing fal to mind. I thought of how it would feel to hurry home from school in October, with the sky getting dark and the wind at my back and Val at my side, talking about the Thanksgiving feast the sixth-graders prepared, and what we wanted for Christmas…what it would be like, for the first time in my life, to move through the school year and the concerts and the holidays with a friend at my side.
    “Anyone for coffee?” the constable