I'd met Emily at the last calendar shoot. She was a year younger than me and had just moved to town.
She didn't know anyone, and while everyone was waiting around, she'd come and sat down next to me.
We started talking, and just like that, we were friends.
Emily was, in a word, sweet. She had short red hair and a heart-shaped face, and when I'd invited her out with me and Sophie that night after the shoot, she'd been thrilled. When I pulled up to her house, she was already outside waiting, her cheeks pink from the cool air, as if she'd been there awhile.
Sophie was less enthusiastic. Plainly put, she had issues when it came to other girls, especially pretty ones, even though she herself was gorgeous. Whenever I had Lakeview Model stuff, or landed a big job, she always got a little moody. There was stuff about her that bothered me, too. Like how she sometimes snapped at me and acted like I was stupid, and often wasn't nice to other people unless she had a reason to be—and sometimes, not even then. The truth was, my friendship with Sophie was complicated, and at times I wondered why she was my best friend, when more often than not I was either tiptoeing around her or having to ignore one barbed comment or another. But then I'd remember how much things had changed for me since we'd started hanging out—from that night with Chris Pennington on, so much had happened that I never would have experienced otherwise. And really, when you came down to it, I didn't have anyone else. Sophie made sure of that, too.
The night I met Emily, we were going to a party at the A-Frame, a house just outside of town that was rented by a few guys who'd gone to Perkins Day, the local private school, a couple of years earlier. They had a band called Day After, and after graduation they'd stuck around, playing club dates and trying to get a record deal. In the meantime, they had parties almost every weekend that attracted a mix of high-school students and various locals.
From the moment the three of us walked into the party that night, I could feel people looking at Emily.
She was a beautiful girl, but being with us—especially Sophie, who was well known not only at our school but at Perkins Day, as well— made her suddenly that much more noteworthy. We weren't even halfway to the keg when Greg Nichols, an obnoxious junior, made a beeline for us.
"Hey, guys," he said, "what's up?"
"Go away, Greg," Sophie told him over her shoulder. "We're not interested."
"Speak for yourself," he said, completely undeterred. "Who's your friend?"
Sophie sighed, shaking her head.
I said, "Um, this is Emily."
"Hi," Emily said, flushing.
"Hel-lo," Greg replied. "Let me get you a beer."
"Okay," she said. As he walked off, glancing back at her, she turned to me, her eyes wide. "Oh my God," she said. "He's really cute!"
"No," Sophie told her. "He's not. And he's only talking to you because he's already hit on everyone else here."
Emily's face fell. "Oh," she said.
"Sophie," I said. "Honestly."
"What?" she said as she picked some lint off her sweater, scanning the crowd. "It's true."
It probably was. But that didn't mean she had to say it. This was typical Sophie, though. She believed everyone had a place, and it was her job to make sure you knew yours. She'd done it with Clarke. She did it with me. And now, it was Emily's turn. But while I'd just stood by all those years earlier, this time I felt I had to do something, if only because I was the reason Emily was even there in the first place.
"Come on," I said to her. "Let's go get a beer. Sophie, you want one?"
"No," she said curtly, and turned away from me.
By the time I got a drink and went to look for her, she'd disappeared. So she's pissed , I thought. That's nothing new, I'll smooth it over in a second . But then Greg Nichols had reappeared, and I didn't want to leave Emily alone with him. It took us twenty minutes to extricate ourselves, at which point I left Emily with some girls she knew and finally went looking for Sophie. I found her on the back porch, smoking, alone.
"Hi," I said, but she ignored me. I took a sip of my beer, looking out over the swimming pool below the deck. It was empty and covered in leaves, a lawn chair parked at the bottom.
"Where's your friend?" she asked me.
"Sophie," I said. "Come on."
"What? It's just a question."
"She's inside," I said. "And she's your friend, too."
"No," she said, snorting. "She's not."
"Why don't you like her?"
"She's a freshman, Annabel. And she's—" She stopped, taking another drag of her cigarette. "Look, if you want to hang out with her, go ahead. I don't."
"Why not?"
"I just don't." She turned, looking at me. "What? We don't have to be joined at the hip, you know. You don't have to do everything I do."
"I know that," I said.
"Do you?" She exhaled, a stream of smoke billowing out between us. "Because, really, you've never done anything without me. From the day we met, I'm the one who's gotten all the guys, found out about all the parties. Before you met me, you were just sitting around passing tissues to Ca-larke Rebbolds."
I took another sip from my cup. I hated when Sophie was like this—nasty, all sharp edges. I hated it even more when I thought it was my fault, which clearly this was. "Look," I told her, "I just invited Emily along because she doesn't know anyone."
"She knows you," she said. "And now Greg Nichols."
"Funny."
"I'm not being funny," she told me. "I'm just telling it like it is. I don't like her. If you want to hang out with her, go ahead. I'm not interested." Then she dropped her cigarette on the deck, grinding it out with her boot, turned around, and went inside.