Everything I Do With My Best Friend
“Everything I do with my best friend,” Abby told me, “I have to be able to do with my husband.”
She was not my only friend in Oregon, but she was my easiest. We were the only two people who showed up to book club at the high school library, which ended up being an hour to wander around the shelves and talk about books; there were no gaps in the conversation, ones that I struggled to fill with my other friends. She was quick to laugh and had a beautiful singing voice. We hung out as often as schedules allowed; the Mormon temple took up much of her time. These hangouts became easier after I graduated high school, two or three years before her, and acquired my license two months before seventeen.
“A commendable bar to set,” I said, and I meant it. Often, I found girls settled, or had poor standards to begin with. It was nice to know someone with measurable standards that were not impossible to achieve.
It became this thing she would say. During summer break, I would hop in my great uncle’s shitty pickup that was as old as I was and not worth the gas I put in it, and I would pick her up, and we would drive to the Dutch Bros and order impossible lemonade combinations with a shot of luster dust, edible glitter that made the drink shimmer, and we would crash at the library and a peruse the YA section, dragging home more books than we could reasonably read. “You’re making things really hard for my future husband.”
Again, when I showed up after my shift at the public library with Chinese takeout. We ate general chicken and pot stickers with forks in her little siblings’ treehouse. She sighed and said, “You’re making things really hard for my future husband.”
And again, in late August, with the Oregon sun as warm and strong as it would be all year, we would sit in the orchard out front of my house and eat plum after plum from where they hung full and heavy on the trees, sticky juice soaking our fingers and our lips, spitting the pits as far as we could, and laughing like time would stop right there. “You’re making things really hard for my future husband.”
Every time, a pang. A twist in my chest, a funny twinge in the back of my throat. Unpleasant, a little sad, and utterly confusing. I could not understand it, and so I left it untouched, refusing to acknowledge its presence.