“I can literally taste the nutmeg silt from the bottom of a pumpkin spice latte on my tongue when her husband (CON) comes over with a towering plate of food for her (PRO) and coaxes her away from my table. I start to say “hey, do you like tweeting?” or some other useless shit, but she’s got that goddamn baby and this Jedi Knight is looming anxiously over us balancing a precarious platter of nachos, so I stammer out a “Nice talking to ya!” in my most nasal midwestern twang and go back to fucking around on my phone.”
“I stared hard at Suzanne, at her perfect heart-shaped face and reddish-brown skin, feeling comforted somehow by the youthful smoothness of her cheeks and the girlish curve in her lips. She seemed oddly undiminished by the illness. Her dark hair was still lustrous and long; someone had put in two ropy braids that reached almost to her waist. Her track runner s legs lay hidden beneath the blankets. She looked young, like a sweet, beautiful, twenty-six-year-old who was maybe in the middle of a nap. I regretted not coming earlier. I regretted the many times, over the course of our seesawing friendship, that I d insisted she was making a wrong move, when possibly she d been doing it right. I was suddenly glad for all the times she d ignored my advice. I was glad that she hadn t overworked herself to get some fancy business school degree. That she d gone off for a lost weekend with a semi-famous pop star, just for fun. I was happy that she d made it to the Taj Mahal to watch the sunrise with her mom. Suzanne had lived in ways that I had not.”
“For me and Suzanne, it was supposed to go like this: We d be the maids of honor at each other s weddings. Our husbands would be really different, of course, but they d like each other a lot anyway. We d have babies at the same time, take family beach trips to Jamaica, remain mildly critical of each other s parenting techniques, and be favorite fun aunties to each other s kids as they grew. I d get her kids books for their birthdays; she d get mine pogo sticks. We d laugh and share secrets and roll our eyes at what we perceived as the other person s ridiculous idiosyncrasies, until one day we d realize we were two old ladies who d been best friends forever, flummoxed suddenly by where the time had gone. That, for me, was the world as it should be.”
“Friends might elude you in your hour of need, but nature goes nowhere. It’s always there, waiting with a wild and pure love.”
“A friend is someone seeing you And hearing you Without you having to say Everything Every time”
“Alex scowled, but Mercy just jabbed her shoulder with her finger. You rescue me. I rescue you. That s how this works.”
“We can see now that low-drama was a cover for our tendency to avoid conflict, a way we both tried to minimize problems that actually needed to be addressed.”
“You know why people pair up into couples? Because being a human is fucking terrifying. But it s a hell of a lot easier if you re not doing it by yourself.”
“Rooney dropped to her knees. ‘Georgia, I am never going to stop being your friend. And I don’t mean that in the boring average meaning of ‘friend’ where we stop talking regularly when we’re twenty-five because we’ve both met nice young men and gone off to have babies, and only get to meet up twice a year. I mean I’m going to pester you to buy a house next door to me when we’re forty-five and have finally saved up enough for our deposits. I mean I’m going to be crashing round yours every night for dinner because you know I can’t fucking cook to save my life, and if I’ve got kids and a spouse, they’ll probably come round with me, because otherwise they’ll be living on chicken nuggets and chips. I mean I’m going to be the one bringing you soup when you text me that you’re sick and can’t get out of bed and ferrying you to the doctor’s even when you don’t want to go because you feel guilty about using the NHS when you just have a stomach bug. I mean we’re gonna knock down the fence between our gardens so we have one big garden, and we can both get a dog and take turns looking after it. I mean I’m going to be here, annoying you, until we’re old ladies, sitting in the same care home, talking about putting on a Shakespeare because we’re all old and bored as shit.”
“i miss the days my friends knew every mundane detail about my life and i knew every ordinary detail about theirs adulthood has starved me of that consistency that us the walks around the block the long conversations when we were too lost in the moment to care what time it was when we won and celebrated when we failed and celebrated harder when we were just kids now we have our very important jobs that fill up our very busy schedules we compare calendars just to plan coffee dates that one of us eventually cancels cause adulthood is being too exhausted to leave our apartment most days i miss knowing i once belonged to a group of people bigger than myself that belonging made life easier to live - friendship nostalgia”
“But you can t give up on people. It s one of the three keys of friendship. You gotta listen, you gotta care, and most importantly, you gotta keep trying.”
“Nothing will ever please me, no matter how excellent or beneficial, if I must retain the knowledge of it to myself. And if wisdom were given me under the express condition that it must be kept hidden and not uttered, I should refuse it. No good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it.”
“By living on our own terms. By being rats, not mice, work together and beat the system. I will not give up my friends for this system. In fact, my friendships will beat the system.”
“Do not fear the loss of a friendship. Anyone who is willing to end a relationship because of a reasoned difference of opinion is not worthy of your friendship.”
“You can’t cultivate that sort of friendship, it only grows in the wild.”
“I imagined it would be like some kind of sci-fi battle where Lily s eyes shot a red death ray at Big, and Big s smile shot out a shining yellow happiness ray at Lily, and they d meet in the middle with an orange explosion, and it d become a force of will to see whose power would win.”
“What does that mean? What does what mean? Big asked. Brah, I said. Brah? You know, it s short for brother. Oh, I said and sat there between the two of them, feeling like a piece of me I hadn t known was missing had been put into place.”