Free Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner Page B

ow-and-white gingham curtains blew in the breeze. In the bed beside mine, Val was stil in her clothes, lying stiffly on top of the covers, as if she was stil sulking in her sleep. At the foot of the beds was a dol house, and in a bookcase against the wal was an entire set of faded Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew books. Mrs. Adler fol owed my gaze. “Help yourself,” she said, and pointed at a door.
    “The bathroom’s in there. Remember: no flushing. We need to be quiet.”
    The bathroom floor was hexagonal blackand-white tiles, some of them cracked, and the toilet was an old-fashioned kind with a pul cord dangling from the ceiling. A tarnishfogged mirror hung over the sink. I splashed cold water on my face and had just pul ed my toothpaste out of my backpack when Valerie knocked on the door, then breezed inside.
    “I can’t believe we’re here!” Her shorts and shirt were rumpled, her face pil owcreased, but she was smiling, closer to being the Valerie I knew.
    “This is a real y nice house.” I suspected that this wasn’t real y a house: that it was instead a mansion, a thing I’d only ever read about. Through the half-moon-shaped bathroom window, I could see the bright green rectangle of a tennis court and, beyond that, grayish-gold sand and the foaming edge of the ocean. When we got back into the bedroom, Mrs. Adler, in flipflops and the same faded pink tank top and her blue cotton running shorts, was making our beds, plumping the pil ows, running her hands over the coverlets to smooth them. She looked at us, then down at the beds, and whispered, “Be as quiet as you can.”
    Val grabbed three of the old books from the bookcase. We picked up our backpacks and crept down the stairs. The clock hanging over the giant table said that it was five in the morning, and the sky was streaked with amazing shades of pink and gold. “Don’t slam the doors,”
    said Mrs. Adler. At the door, she murmured something to Val, who ran down the steps, reached underneath the porch, and pul ed out two big mesh buckets and a short-handled rake. I crawled into the backseat of the Bug. Val sat in front, holding the buckets in one hand and the door open with the other. Mrs. Adler got behind the wheel, put the car in neutral, and steered one-handed as we coasted down the road. I watched the house receding in the rearview mirror and saw a light go on through one of the second-floor windows. A minute later, a white-haired man in pajama bottoms and no shirt flung the front door open and stood on the porch, shouting words I couldn’t hear. Mrs. Adler popped the clutch and the motor roared into life.
    “Who was that?” I asked as Val and her mother closed their doors. Mrs. Adler turned on the radio, then pul ed a cigarette out of the crushed pack she’d tucked into the visor. Val stuck her thumb in her mouth and started chewing, with her face set in tense lines, gazing straight ahead. “Poppy,” Mrs. Adler said.
    I sat back, not knowing what to make of this, and watched the road slip by. Twenty minutes later we pul ed into the parking lot of a smal supermarket. Mrs. Adler got out. Val sat as stil as if she’d been carved, staring straight ahead with her jaw clenched, looking furious.
    “Hey, Val?” I whispered.
    She didn’t turn around. “She wouldn’t even let me say hi to him,” she said in a furious whisper. “My own grandfather, and I couldn’t even say…” She snapped her mouth shut and crossed her arms over her chest as Mrs. Adler came out of the market with two brown paper bags. I wondered how she’d paid for breakfast as she pul ed out doughnuts and bananas and a giant cup of coffee. Had she taken Val’s grandfather’s money? I ate two bananas and a doughnut as Mrs. Adler drove down Route 6, then turned onto a narrow, sandy lane that ended in an unpaved parking lot with wooden racks of wide-bel ied metal and wooden canoes along one end. The sun was shining, the air warming up. Half a dozen rowboats and motor-boats