What Best Friends Do: a short story by Kody Boye
In which a girl commits to avenging her friend after a terrible act
Please be aware that this story takes place in the aftermath of a sexual assault
It was the summer of 1999, and Emily Freeman was thinking of something unimaginable.
This would’ve been unusual—or, better yet, completely and utterly insane—on any other day. But after what she’d told me? After what she’d described?
“So,” Emily said, lowering her cigarette and blowing smoke out of her mouth. “What do you think, Morgan? Should I do it?”
“Should you?” I asked, adjusting my skirt across my legs.
Emily shook her head and took another drag off her cigarette as she turned her head to stare into the distance. With her eyes dilated from the bright Texas sunlight and her lips pursed into a frown, she appeared to be considering the world and how it had wronged her. Worst yet: she was waiting for me to give her an answer.
In the moments of silence that followed, I tried my hardest to concentrate on my best friend—to think of what to say to a seventeen-year-old girl who’d had her sense of self ripped from her. Grackles cawed in the trees. Cars rolled down the nearby street. Leaves blew at my feet, and for a quick second, I wished I could be one of them, a girl magically escaping in the breeze.
Then, I realized something.
I couldn’t leave Emily alone. Not with her thoughts. Not with this.
Emily exhaled. Took a moment to consider the distance. Sniffled. She reached up to pad her eye with a finger, careful not to smudge her mascara. Then she asked the question that I knew, but was afraid, she would ask: “Will you help me, Morgan?”
The reality set before us was far from grim, the potential consequences even more so. But the truth, as cruel as it happened to be, was that he’d taken something Emily could never get back, and there was only one thing to do.
Scott Powers had to pay.
So, I said the only thing a best friend could.
I said: “Yes. I’ll help you.”
The only question was: how would we pull this off? “How,” I asked, “will we get the gun?”
“Simple,” Emily said. “We steal it.”
“From who?”
She turned her head to consider me, all blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and though I tried my hardest not to tremble, I did just that. “Your dad, silly.”
The word was so innocent, so powerful, that at first, I wondered if Emily knew what she was doing. But then, I realized: of course Emily knew. She was like sunshine. Like rain. Like a train running on a warm summer’s day. Bound for my heart, she could shower me with her words, her desires, her affections; and I, the adoring friend, would accept them for what they were. The truth was: I would do anything for Emily. But this?
I frowned as she I considered her features, windswept on this simple day in April. I asked, “What do you mean steal it from my dad?”
“He has a gun, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah. He has it in his nightstand drawer.”
“So… what’s the problem?”
“I can’t just go into their room and take his gun. They’d commit me in a heartbeat.”
“Not if you have these,” Emily said, before drawing, from the handbag sitting at her side, a translucent orange pill bottle.
“Emily—” I started.
“Relax, Morgie. Mom bummed ‘em off someone in psych.”
“Your mother is stealing prescriptions from the psych ward?”
“Shh shh!” Emily said, twisting her neck about like an owl to survey the area. She then smiled and said, “Someone might hear.”
“No one’s here, Em.”
Emily extended the bottle of pills to me. “Two should do it. One in your mom’s, another in your dad’s.”
“Are you sure it’s not—”
“It won’t hurt ‘em,” she said, and hopped off the wooden table she’d been seated upon. She smoothed her short skirt over her lean white legs and lifted her eyes to face me. “We have to do this, Morgie. We have to get him.”
“I know,” I said.
I tightened the bottle of pills in my hand.
“Tonight,” Emily said. “After the dance.”
“After the dance,” I replied.
Then we nodded, and turned to go our separate ways.
Mom and Dad were fighting again. It wasn’t unusual, all things considering. But hearing them argue was getting old. However, this gave me the chance to do what Emily had asked.
One in each, she’d said. One for Mom, and one for Dad.
I popped the pills in their drinks, then turned toward my bedroom.
All I had to do was wait.
And wait I did—until they were both passed out on the couch: mouths agape, drool trailing from their lips. Their sluggishness, then eventual departure to the world of drug-induced dream, had concerned me at first. However, given that they were still breathing, I decided not to think too much on it, and instead, stole into my parents’ bedroom.
It took mere seconds to stride over the ugly brown carpet and to my father’s nightstand, a few choice moments for me to adequately prepare myself for what I was about to do.
Remember, a part of me whispered, what he did.
With a long, uneasy breath in, I pulled the nightstand drawer open—
And revealed the gun within.
I took only one look at it before dragging it from the drawer, checking to ensure that its safety was on, then shoving it in my bag.
Then, I turned and made my way out the front door.
Emily was waiting for me in her off-white Camaro when I stole away from the porch. My backpack in hand, my sequined blue dress on, I slid into the passenger seat and watched Emily Freeman apply her signature baby-pink lipstick.
“So,” Emily said, smacking her lips to finish applying her lipstick. “You have it?”
“I do,” I replied, stiffening beneath her gaze. I inhaled a long, deep breath, then exhaled it before finally saying, “Maybe we shouldn’t do this.”
“Why not?”
“Because I—you—”
“We what, Morgan?”
I lifted my head to look at her—and though a part of me wanted to refuse her gaze, another knew that I could not shy away from it. For that reason, I said, “We’ll get caught.”
“No we won’t.”
“How do you—”
“I just do. Okay?” She slapped the sunshield against the roof of the vehicle and reached down to push the car into park. “Morgan…”
“Yes?” I asked, unsure how to respond to the explicit pause that followed.
“Do you remember that day in gym class? When you lagged behind because you said you were in the bathroom?”
“I—”
“I saw the scars, Morgie. I saw what you’ve been doing to yourself.”
Her words were a truth I had been so desperate to hide. Glacial in respect, they crossed my body, chilling first my flesh, then my bones. I instinctively lowered my hands to push my already-long skirt further down my legs.
“Do this for me,” Emily says, “and no one has to know.”
“You wouldn’t tell,” I say. “You… you can’t.”
“Your mom will have you in a psych ward faster than I can say chicken,” she replied.
I stared at Emily; and as she navigated the roads, careful to avoid the traffic on a night when the streets were filling with teenagers, she glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, and asked, “Well?”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it.”
All she could do was smile.
Crescent Falls High always put on the best dances. The student-led committee lauded themselves for their creativity, their ingenuity, their resourcefulness. Oftentimes, old decorations were repurposed to be new. This year was no exception.
At exactly six o’clock PM, the doors were opened; and we, the students of Crescent Falls High, rushed in to find that the world was much like an underwater jungle. Blue and white streamers dangled from the gymnasium ceiling, dancing in the air being pushed from the floor fans toward the ceiling. Music blared from speakers, masking the sound of joy, of laughter.
Of revenge.
Emily no longer appeared content. Now consumed by rage, she turned her head to look at me, then nodded as she turned to scour the crowd for Scott Powers.
The plan was simple: she would find Scott. She would lure him out the back door. She would then guide him deep into the woods, where I would be waiting with the gun.
With that in mind, I did the only thing a best friend could:
I made my way to the back of the gym and slipped out.
In the cool evening of this unfortunate April night, the wind whipped about, whispering through stray trash that had accumulated along the building’s exterior and causing the tops of trees to sway to the tune of some unsung drum. It was so dark that at first, it was almost impossible to see. Slowly, however, the moon and starlight overhead began to make everything clearer.
I took my first steps toward the woodlands beyond with the knowledge that I was about to do something unimaginable.
You’re doing it for her, a part of me said, and every woman like her.
But was I really, though? Was I really doing it just for Emily? Or did a sick, twisted part of me want to do it for myself?
I shook my head as I made my way across the parking lot—as into the dark woods I slipped. Beneath the canopy that smelled of fresh leaves and wet mulch, I marched deeper into the wilderness, until, finally, I came to a place where I could wait for Scott and Emily in silence.
For several long, indeterminable moments, I considered the reality of what I was about to do.
Drugging my parents. Stealing their gun. Luring a boy into the woods, only to draw a weapon and point it at and then—
The sound of crunching leaves and twigs broke me from my thoughts.
“So,” Scott Powers said in that usual cocky voice of his. “You just couldn’t get enough of me, could you, Freeman?”
I drew the gun and watched as Emily took several careful steps back.
“Something like that,” Emily then said.
Scott stepped forward. A smile on his face. A grin on his lips.
The moment he stepped into view, I lifted the pistol and centered it on his face.
For a brief second, I saw true fear in his gaze—a flash of remorse, doubt, guilt, of ridicule and maybe, possibly, even anger.
But I didn’t give him a chance to speak.
It took less than one second to pull the trigger.
The sound, as it barked through the night, caused every hair on my neck to stand.
Then, just like that, it was over.
Emily looked at Scott. At me. At the gun in my grasp.
“I thought—” Emily started.
“That we would just scare him?” I asked, and waited for her to nod before saying, “No. I couldn’t let him. Not anymore. Not to anyone else.”
“Thank you, Morgie,” she said, and sniffled.
“So?” I asked as I lowered the gun in my grasp. “What do we do now?”
She looked from him. To me. Then to the gun. Then, she said just three words:
“Now, we run.”
And so we stole from the woods and into the parking lot of Crescent Falls High. Slipped into Emily’s white Camaro and then out of the parking space. At this hour of the evening, people were still coming, but we—we were going, though where I couldn’t be for sure. I knew we couldn’t go home. I knew we couldn’t ever go back to the way things used to be, to our last year of high school and all that entailed. Not after what we’d done, what I’d done.
“Emily,” I said, lifting my eyes to face her. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
“What do you mean, Morgie?”
“I’ll take the blame.”
“You’d do that for me?”
I nodded. “The truth is… I’d do anything for you, Emily.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s what best friends do.”
Emily reached down. Pressed her hand atop mine. Slid our fingers together. Squeezed.
“Love you, Morgie,” Emily said.
“Yeah,” I replied, and closed my eyes. “Love you, too.”
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