Free Friends Like Us by Lauren Fox

Violet, who overheard her mom, mid-divorce, say to a friend, “Hell, if I hadn’t had kids with Tom, I would have had them with someone else.” On another night the victor might be the one whose parents had caused the most spectacular damage, had burned the broadest swath through their son or daughter’s childhood, like Ari, whose parents woke him up one night when he was six, stood together in the dark at the edge of his bed and said, “Choose!” I had my share of victories: the way my parents told Seth and me they were splitting up during Christmas Eve mu shu at our favorite Chinese restaurant; how I overheard them screaming at each other in their bedroom one night and then suddenly grow eerily silent, and when, finally, overcome with concern, I went to investigate, I found them rolling around on their bed, pale globes of flesh in the dim light. I got a special tinfoil medal for that one.
    One lonely winter weekend my junior year I even drew a comic of it, twelve pages of Special Family Commemorative Moments: Evan’s mom with a glass of wine in her hand, weepily telling her eleven-year-old son that he looked just like his father but that she loved him anyway; Katie’s dad removing all of the light fixtures from their house when he moved out, insisting they belonged to him. I thought they would be funny, my black-and-white drawings, a joke to share with my friends at our next pot-and-poker night. But it turned out they were just depressing.
    All of this is why, when Jane invites me to come home with her for the weekend, I assume that it will be a piece of cake, that the trickiest thing I’ll have to navigate will be Jane’s mother’s overuse of the phrase “That’s real different !” Every happy family, I figure.
    “They’re not Ozzie and June, you know,” Jane says as we pull into her parents’ driveway, a smack of gravel against the car as it slows, then stops, the engine ticking to silence.
    “Ward and Harriet, you mean, and look! Over the front door! A banner that says WELCOME HOME, JINXY! ” There’s no banner, but Jane did admit to me as we were leaving Milwaukee three hours ago that her dad used to call her Jinxy, and I’ve been taking advantage of that information ever since. “Come, Jinxy,” I say, unbuckling my seat belt and patting my thigh. “Come!”
    “Hang on,” Jane says, reaching across me to rifle through the glove compartment; she pulls out a bright yellow scrunchie and tucks her hair into a ponytail.
    “Your glove compartment is a time machine to 1994!”
    “My mom says she likes it when she can see my face,” she says, unembarrassed. She glances in the rearview mirror and then slides out of the car. I watch as she walks around the front of the car to my side, her long loping strides, her head bent slightly against the wind, and not for the first time today, I see my friend as the object of someone’s affection. Will Ben notice the way she rests her hands on her stomach when she’s thinking? How her hair is slightly curlier on the left side than it is on the right? Jane and I spent the first hour of our journey analyzing every detail of last night’s date. He was nervous; he spilled a glass of water. They told each other stories about past loves. Not me, I hope, ha ha. They kissed. “Every first kiss doesn’t have to change your life,” she said, matter-of-fact, and then, “I like him,” before I could respond, which I would have, but then I didn’t. Her eyes were fixed on the road. I imagined their faces. It was the start of something. Any idiot could see that.
    “Come on,” she says, opening my car door. “Your list of ways to make fun of me is about to grow significantly longer.”
    Sure enough, Jane’s mother greets us at the door with a plate of cookies. “Hi, girls!” she says, cookies aloft, and I’m thinking, Give me a fucking break, and also, Maybe they’ll let me move into Jane’s old room, when her mother slaps Jane’s hand away. “Not for