Read Online Falling Into You by Lauren Abrams - Free Book Online Page B

squealed over when we had seen them in the mall.
    Fan-fucking- tastic . Stripper boots and a broken ankle or flip flops and frozen toes?
    Stripper boots it would be.
    Stumbling a bit over my own feet, I emerge from the bedroom to find a perfectly clean apartment. Sophia ’s sitting on one of the stools at the counter, picking at a plate of fruit.
    I look around in total puzzlement. I know she hadn’t spent the whole night cleaning, so what magical fairy had erased all traces of last night?
    “Rosaria,” Sophia says , laughing at me. “And her team of minions. I never wake up to a dirty house.”
    Of course. I think back to the only party I had ever thrown, where I had spent no less than eight hours picking up every last piece of trash (or so I thought). My mom had found some girl’s bra in the nook between her bed and the headboard and had grounded me for life (it had lasted exactly seven weeks, which to a seventeen -year-old, was life).
    I grab a banana. “What’s our agenda for the day?”
    “We are going to take on New York,” she practically sings , throwing her arm over my shoulder. “Did you have fun last night?” she asks casually.
    “Yep,” I respond , forcing a smile onto my face. “Your friends were nice.”
    She lau ghs. “Come on, Hallie .” She grabs her coffee and pulls me to the couch. “Of all the things that my friends are, nice is not one of them. I can think of about a thousand adjecti ves that would suit them, but most of them involve some combination of dirty words, and I don’t think your delicate Ohio ears want to hear about that. ”
    I look at her. Sophia had been telling me all about her friends for months. She may have neglected to mention that nearly 100% of t hem seemed to be pretentious idiots, but that was beside the point .
    When she was trying to sell the trip to me, I spent hours listening to her go on and on about all the parties that we were going to, all of the thing s that she loved about New York. She had even danced around me in glee after I told her that I would come with her after Thanksgiving and the Susan incident . What was she saying now ?
    “I think I am going to have to spell it out for you.” The wistful look in her eyes makes her appear more like the Sophia that I had come to know and love than the Sophia -like creature prancing around her apartment the night before.
    “Are they my friends? I guess so. When we were kids, we were friends. We had sleepovers and talked about what we wanted to be when we grew up — usually some version of what our parents did. Instead of firefighters and ballerinas, we wanted to become investment bankers and corporate lawyers. But we grew up at the age of 13 and sometimes sooner , because everyone grow up quickly here. E verything became a competition. Whose parents had the best house for a huge party? Who had the best view of the city or the best spot on the beach in the Hamptons? Whose parents currently had an in with the mayor or a senator or a big-time director? Who would get into the best school ? I envy you sometimes, you know, when you talk about your friends and all of your little adventures. Even camping. The thought of crawling around on the ground holds little appeal, but at least you don’t have to constantly wonder about whether you’re going to become nothing more than a cast off who doesn’t even have a summer share .”
    She sounds nothing like herself. Her voice is low and serious and for a second, I think she’s about to cry. I throw my arms around her.
    “Those don’t sound like friends to me.”
    Sophia was hardly ever serious. I knew that despite her flippancy, her devil-may-care clothes and hair and attitude, she was always watching, paying attention. She was calculating, yes. She always got what she wanted. But sometimes she seemed more like a lost little girl than a grown-up seductress who wrapped everyone around her little finger. And this was one of those times.
    “It’s the world that I live