It was an emergency, the text said. An SOS emergency. Pip knew immediately that that could only mean one thing.
She grabbed her car keys, yelled goodbye to her mom and Josh, and rushed out the front door.
She stopped by the store on her way to buy a king-size chocolate bar to help mend Lauren’s king-size broken heart.
When she pulled up outside the Gibsons’ house, she saw that Cara had had the exact same idea. Except Cara’s post-breakup first-aid kit was more extensive than Pip’s; she had also brought a box of tissues, chips and dip, and a rainbow array of face mask packets.
“Ready for this?” Pip asked Cara, hip-bumping her in greeting.
“Yep, well prepared for the tears.” She held up the tissues, the corner of the box catching the ends of her curly ash-brown hair.
Pip pressed the doorbell, and both of them winced at the mechanical song.
Lauren’s mom answered the door.
“Oh, the cavalry is here.” She smiled. “She’s upstairs in her room.”
They found Lauren fully submerged in a duvet fort on the bed, the only sign of her existence a splay of ginger hair poking out from the bottom. It took a full minute of coaxing and chocolate bait to get her to surface.
“First,” Cara said, prying Lauren’s phone from her fingers, nails bitten to the quick, “you’re banned from looking at this for the next twenty-four hours.”
“He did it by text!” Lauren wailed, blowing her nose and shooting an entire swamp into the tissue.
“Boys are dicks,” Cara said, putting her arm around Lauren and resting her sharp chin on her shoulder. “You could do so much better than him.”
“Yeah.” Pip broke Lauren off another line of chocolate. “Besides, Tom always said ‘pacifically’ when he meant ‘specifically.’ ”
Cara pointed eagerly at Pip in agreement. “Massive red flag.”
“I pacifically think you’re better off without him,” said Pip.
“I atlantically think so too,” added Cara.
Lauren gave a wet snort of laughter, and Cara winked at Pip; an unspoken victory.
“Thanks for coming, guys,” Lauren said tearfully, her pale eyes swollen and puffy. “I didn’t know if you would. I’ve probably neglected you for half a year to hang out with Tom. And now I’ll be third-wheeling two best friends.”
“That’s crap,” Cara said. “We’re all best friends.”
“Yeah.” Pip nodded. “Us, and those three mediocre boys we allow to bask in our delightful company.”
Cara and Lauren laughed. The boys—Ant, Zach, and Connor—were all currently away during the summer break.
But of her friends, Pip had known Cara the longest, and yes, they were closest. An unsaid thing. They’d been inseparable ever since six-year-old Cara had hugged a tiny, friendless Pip and asked, “Do you like bunnies too?”
They were each other’s crutch to lean on when life got too much to carry alone. Pip, though only ten at the time, had helped Cara through her mom’s diagnosis and death. And Pip had been her constant two years ago when Cara came out, ready with a steady smile and phone calls into the early hours. Cara’s wasn’t the face of a best friend; it was the face of a sister.
By extension, Cara’s family was Pip’s second. Mr. Ward, in addition to being her history teacher, was her tertiary father figure, behind her stepdad and the ghost of her first father. Pip was at the Ward house so often she had her own mug with her name on it and pair of slippers to match Cara’s and her older sister, Naomi’s.
“OK.” Cara lunged for the TV remote. “Rom-coms or films where boys get violently murdered?”
It took roughly one and a half terrible films from the Netflix backlog for Lauren to wade through denial and extend a cautionary toe toward acceptance.
“I should get a haircut,” she said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“I’ve always said you’d look good with short hair,” said Cara.
“And do you think I should get my nose pierced?”
“Ooh, yeah.” Cara nodded.
“I don’t see the logic in putting a nose hole in your nose hole,” said Pip.
“Another Pip quote for the books.” Cara feigned writing it down in midair. “What was the one that got me the other day?”
“The sausage one.” Pip sighed.
“Oh yeah,” Cara snorted. “So, Laur, I was asking Pip which pajamas she wanted to wear, and she just casually says, ‘It’s sausage to me.’ And didn’t realize why that was a weird response.”
“It’s not that weird,” said Pip. “My grandparents from my first dad are German. ‘It’s sausage to me’ is a German saying; just means ‘I don’t care.’ ”
“Or you’ve got a sausage fixation.” Lauren laughed.
“Says the daughter of a porn star,” Pip quipped.
“Oh my god, how many times? He only did one nude photoshoot in the eighties, that’s it.”
“So, on to boys from this decade,” Cara said, prodding Pip on the shoulder. “Did you go see Ravi Singh yet?”
“Questionable segue. But yes, and I’m going back to interview him tomorrow.”
“I can’t believe you’ve already started your capstone project,” Lauren said with a dying-swan dive back onto the bed. “I want to change mine already; famines are depressing.”
“I imagine you want to interview Naomi sometime soon.” Cara looked pointedly at Pip.
“Yeah….Can you warn her I might be stopping by next week?”
“Sure,” Cara said, then hesitated. “She’ll agree to it and everything, but can you go easy on her? She still gets really upset about it sometimes. I mean, he was one of her best friends. Actually, probably her best friend.”
“Yeah, of course,” Pip said. “What do you think I’m going to do? Pin her down and beat responses out of her?”
“Is that your tactic for Ravi tomorrow?”
“Ha.”
Lauren sat up then, with a snot-sucking sniff so loud it made Cara visibly flinch.
“Are you going to his house, then?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“But…what are people going to think if they see you going into Ravi Singh’s house?”
“It’s sausage to me.”
