Read Online Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner - Free Book Online Page A

narrow, and the parking lot was brighter than any bedroom I’d ever been in. Worse, the half-open windows had al owed the car to fil with whirr-ing, whining bugs. I slapped at a mosquito and shut my eyes…and when I opened them, the sun was up and I was stiff and dry-mouthed and in desperate need of a toilet. It was just after six in the morning. Mrs. Adler walked us back to the restrooms, moving with her usual lazy, rol ing sashay. When we were scrubbed and brushed and combed and back in the car, she drove to a convenience store off the highway, where she bought doughnuts and milk and coffee and cigarettes. By noon on Sunday, twentyfour hours after we’d left Pleasant Ridge, we were whizzing past a red-and-white painted poster of a beach scene, with an umbrel a stuck jauntily in the golden sand, and the words WELCOME TO CAPE COD written in red underneath it.
    We spent the afternoon in a town cal ed Eastham, on First Encounter Beach, where a river of salt water flowed through a marsh out to the bay. Mrs. Adler produced a bedsheet from the back of the Bug and snapped it open, bangles clinking as she spread it on the sand.
    She rubbed baby oil on her arms and legs and the bel y her bikini left bare, then borrowed sunscreen from the plump, red-cheeked mother underneath the next umbrel a and smeared it on our cheeks and underneath our swimsuit straps on our backs, where we couldn’t reach.
    “Have fun, girls,” she said, and stretched out on the sheet for a nap. Valerie showed me how to walk along the sand and lie on my back in the water so that the current could carry us around the bend of the beach out toward the open water. When the sun was high in the sky and other families were digging into their coolers, I shyly offered the bag of sandwiches I’d made back in Il inois. Peanut butter and raspberry jam on soft white bread tasted even more delicious if you ate it with salt-watery fingers and polished it off with warm Tab.
    By five o’clock the other mothers were folding their umbrel as, shaking sand from their towels, and cal ing their kids out of the water. Mrs. Adler pul ed on her faded pink tank top and a long white cotton skirt that fel almost to her ankles, and piled her hair into a loose knot on top of her head. She packed us back into the car and drove to a place Val identified as a
    “clam shack,” a single-story gray-shingled square building with a yel ow-and-white striped awning and the mouthwatering smel of deep-fried foods hanging over it like a fog. A line of vacationers snaked out the door and down toward the parking lot.
    “Who wants lobster?” Mrs. Adler asked. Her nose and cheeks were pink from the sun, her blue eyes and blond hair vivid against them. She took her wal et out of her purse, reached inside, and frowned as she studied what she’d found in there: three crumpled dol ar bil s and a receipt from the gas we’d bought that morning.
    “Oh, jeez,” Val muttered, and kicked at the clamshel s that made up the parking lot.
    “Don’t worry. Wait over here.” Mrs. Adler tossed her wal et back into her purse and pointed to a bench across from the counter, where a row of sunburned men in basebal caps and
    shorts
    with
    tiny
    whales
    embroidered on them were sitting, waiting to pick up their food. Valerie groaned softly but sat, legs jiggling up and down, fingers scratching at a bug bite on her forearm. As I slid onto the bench beside Val, Mrs. Adler smoothed her hair, checked her reflection in the mirror, and joined the line. There were three workers behind the counter, two teenage girls and a teenage boy, al of them in white T-shirts with lobsters on the front. It took twenty minutes for Mrs. Adler to reach the front of the line, but when one of the girls cal ed “Who’s next?” Mrs. Adler waved a family in front of her, and waited until the boy was free. When he beckoned her to his register, I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I saw how her lips curved, how she bent close to him so