Something Borrowed - Emily Giffin [9]
Okay. So maybe I am a bad person. There is no other plausible explanation for my lack of guilt. Do I have it in for Darcy? Was I driven by jealousy last night? Do I resent her perfect life—how easily things come to her? Or maybe, subconsciously, in my drunken state, I was getting even for past wrongs. Darcy hasn't always been a perfect friend. Far from it. I start to make my case to the jury, remembering Ethan back in elementary school. I am on to something… Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, consider the story of Ethan Ainsley…
Darcy Rhone and I were best friends growing up, bonded by geography, a force greater than all else when you are in elementary school. We moved to the same cul-de-sac in Naperville, Indiana, in the summer of 1976, just in time to attend the town's bicentennial parade together. We marched side by side, beating matching red, white, and blue drums that Darcy's father bought for us at Kmart. I remember Darcy leaning in to me and saying, "Let's pretend we're sisters." The suggestion gave me goose bumps—a sister! And in no time at all, that is what she became to me. We slept over at each other's houses every Friday and Saturday during the school year and most nights of the week during the summer. We absorbed the nuances of each other's family life, the sort of details you only learn when you live next door to a friend. I knew, for example, that Darcy's mother folded towels in neat thirds as she watched The Young and the Restless, that Darcy's father subscribed to Playboy, that junk food was allowed for breakfast, and the words "shit" and "damn" were no big deal. I'm sure she observed much about my home too, although it is hard to say what makes your own life unique. We shared everything—clothes, toys, yards, even our love of Andy Gibb and unicorns.
In the fifth grade we discovered boys. Which brings me to Ethan, my first real crush. Darcy, along with every other girl in our class, loved Doug Jackson. I understood Doug's appeal. I appreciated his blond hair that reminded us of Bo Duke. And the way his Wranglers fit his butt, his black comb tucked neatly inside the back left pocket. And his dominance in tetherball—how he casually and effortlessly socked the ball out of everyone's reach at a sharp upward angle.
But I loved Ethan. I loved his unruly hair and the way his cheeks turned pink during recess and made him look like he belonged in a Renoir painting. I loved the way he rotated his number-two pencil between his full lips, making symmetrical little bite marks near the eraser whenever he was concentrating really hard. I loved how hyper and happy he was when he played four square with the girls (he was the only boy who would ever join us—the other boys stuck to tetherball and football). And I loved that he was always kind to the most unpopular boy in our class, Johnnie Redmond, who had a terrible stutter and an unfortunate bowl cut.
Darcy was puzzled, if not irritated, by my dissent, as was our good friend Annalise Giles, who moved to our cul-de-sac two years after we did (this delay and the fact that she already had a sister meant she could never quite catch up and reach full best-friend status). Darcy and Annalise liked Ethan, but not like that, and they would insist that Doug was so much cuter and cooler—the two attributes that will get you in trouble when you choose a boy or a man, a sense that I had even at age ten.
We all assumed that Darcy would land the grand