Something Borrowed - Emily Giffin [95]
She says okay, but gives me a look of warning to say it's not yet time for sleep.
I turn off my bedside lamp, and as soon as we are in the dark, she brings up Dex and his note. She had been fairly dismissive of it when I gave it to her at the start of her party, but now she calls him thoughtful.
"Hmm-mmm," I say.
A long silence follows. Then she says, "Things have been sort of weird with us lately."
My pulse quickens. "Really?"
"We haven't had sex in a long time."
"How long?" I ask, crossing my fingers under the sheets.
She tells me the answer I want. Since before the Fourth.
"Really?" My palms are sweaty.
"Yeah. Is that a bad sign?"
"I don't know… How often did you have sex before?" I ask, grateful for the dark.
"Before what?"
Before he told me that he loves me. "Before the Fourth."
"It comes and goes. But when things are going well we have sex every day. Sometimes twice a day."
I force the sickening images out of my head, struggling to find something to say. "Maybe it's the pressure of the wedding?"
"Yeah…" she says.
And maybe it's because he's having an affair with me. I have a pang of guilt, which increases tenfold when she switches topics again and asks out of the blue, "Can you believe how long we've been friends?"
"I know it's been a long time."
"Think of all the sleepovers we've had. How many sleepovers would you say we've had? I'm not good at estimating things. Would you say a thousand?"
"That's probably close," I say.
"It's been a while since we've had one," she says.
My eyes have adjusted to the dark, so I can vaguely see her now. With her face freshly scrubbed and her hair pulled back into a ponytail, she looks like a teenager. We could be in her bed back in high school, giggling and whispering, with Annalise snoring softly beside the bed in her Garfield sleeping bag. Darcy always let Annalise fall asleep. I think she almost hoped she would. I know I sometimes did.
"You wanna play twenty questions?" I ask. It was one of our favorite games growing up.
"Yeah. Yeah. You go first."
"Okay. I got one."
"Same rules?"
"Same rules."
Our rules were simple: you must choose a person (instated after Annalise tried to do neighborhood pets), someone we knew personally (no celebrities, dead or living), and you must ask yes-no questions.
"From high school?" she asks.
"Yes."
"Male?"
"No."
"Our graduating class?"
"No."
"Class above us or below us?"
"That's two questions."
"No, it's a compound," she says. "If the answer's yes, I still have to break it down and use another question. Remember?"
"Okay, you're right," I say, remembering that nuance. "The answer is no."
Student?
"No. That's five questions. Fifteen to go."
Darcy says she knows she's on five, she's counting. "Teacher we both had?"
"No," I say, six fingers hiding under the covers. Darcy has been known to "miscount" during this game.
"Teacher you had?"
"No."
"Teacher I had?"
"No."
"Guidance counselor?"
"No."
"A dean?"
"That's ten. No."
"Other staff?"
"Yes."
"Janitor?"
"No."
"The nark?"
"No." I smile, thinking about the time the nark busted Darcy leaving school to go to Subway with Blaine at lunch. Darcy told him to get a real job as he escorted them to the dean's office. "What are you, thirty? Isn't it time you left high school?" The comment earned her an extra pair of demerits.
"Ohh! I think I got it!" She starts giggling uncontrollably. "Is she a lunch lady?"
I laugh. "Uh-huh."
"It's June!"
"Yep! You got it."
June was a high school icon. She was about eighty years old, four feet tall, and massively wrinkled from years of heavy smoking. And her main claim to fame was that she once lost a fake nail in Tommy Baxter's lasagna. Tommy ceremoniously marched back to the lunch line and returned the nail to June. "I believe this belongs to you, June?" June grinned, wiped the sauce and cheese off the nail, and stuck it back on her finger. Everybody cheered and clapped and chanted, "Go, June! Go, June!" Other than reapplying her nail, I'm not sure what she did to earn the