Frenemies Read online

  Copyright © 2007 by Megan Crane

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  5 Spot

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  The 5 Spot name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: June 2007

  ISBN: 978-0-446-19648-2

  Contents

  copyright

  acknowledgments

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter twenty-two

  chapter twenty-three

  chapter twenty-four

  about the author

  RAVES FOR MEGAN CRANE’S NOVELS

  frenemies

  “A fresh, upbeat read . . . With tart, snappy dialogue, a keen eye for detail, and mordant wit, Megan Crane explores what it’s like to finally have it out with that friend we love to hate, and how scary it is to face the world outside our own small scope.”

  —Martha O’Connor, author of The Bitch Posse

  “FRENEMIES starts out frothy and fun as all get out, but ends with its main character gaining a wise and insightful perspective. An illuminating and extremely entertaining portrait of a woman who makes the leap from drama queen to mature adult.”

  —Karin Gillespie, author of Bet Your Bottom Dollar

  “Megan Crane’s smooth, skillfully crafted tale will make you feel like a member of this tight, realistic, and hilarious circle of friends . . . FRENEMIES is the ultimate girlfriend book!”

  —Berta Platas, author of Cinderella Lopez

  “A witty and engaging tale . . . FRENEMIES proves that a coming-of-age story can be deeply relevant to the adult experience, and heroine Gus will have you laughing out loud . . . You’ll want Gus and her friends to be your friends.”

  —Stacey Ballis, author of Room for Improvement and Inappropriate Men

  “A fun and frothy look at friendship, love, and growing up. Insightful and often hilarious, FRENEMIES is the perfect book club read for twentysomethings.”

  —Jen Coburn, author of The Queen Gene and The Wife of Reilly

  “Megan Crane uses wit, style, and pizzazz to chronicle the often heartbreaking hilarity of turning friends into enemies, enemies into lovers, and lovers into friends.”

  —Heather Swain, author of Luscious Lemon

  “Megan Crane captures the emotional angst of love and betrayal between friends in this heartfelt story about how your worst enemy might just be yourself.”

  —Stephanie Lehmann, author of You Could Do Better

  “Funny, sharp, and poignant, like eavesdropping on a wonderfully intimate conversation between girlfriends at happy hour . . . Megan Crane expertly navigates the tangled path of college friendship in a grown-up world.”

  —Melanie Lynne Hauser, author of Confessions of Super Mom

  “Perfectly captures the poignancy of a broken heart and betrayal, while simultaneously making the reader laugh out loud with dead-on observations and wit. I rooted for this heroine and was completely swept away by her too-real tale.”

  —Erica Orloff, author of Mafia Chic

  “I’ve been a fan of Megan Crane’s since day one! FRENEMIES touches on so many themes—friends who stab you in the back, loving the wrong guy, anxiety over turning 30 . . . I related on so many levels.”

  —Johanna Edwards, bestselling author of The Next Big Thing

  “A warm and witty coming-of-age story. Before you open the cover, make sure you’ve got a good bit of time blocked out for nonstop reading, apologize in advance to your neighbors for the hysterical laughter, have a couple of tissues on stand-by, and go ahead and schedule a get-together with your best friends. This may be one of my favorite chick-lit novels, ever.”

  —Shanna Swendson, author of Once Upon Stilettos and Enchanted, Inc.

  “This is a book you won’t be able to put down until you get to the last page. Megan Crane spins a compelling story about the hazards of life, love, and friendship.”

  —Cara Lockwood, national bestselling author of I Do, But I Don’t

  “With FRENEMIES, especially the trials and tribulations of its wonderful protagonist Gus, Megan Crane has scored a winner!”

  —Julie Kenner, author of California Demon

  “Adorable! Megan Crane perfectly captures an underlying truth about the complexities of female friendships.”

  —Diana Peterfreund, author of Secret Society Girl

  “A laugh-out-loud look at female friendships and the men who come between them.”

  —Lynda Curnyn, author of Bombshell and Confessions of an Ex-Girlfriend

  “With heart, humor, and rare honesty, Megan Crane creates a story that every woman should share with her BFF.”

  —Jennifer O’Connell, author of Bachelorette #1

  “Megan Crane is a delicious writer, and FRENEMIES is another treat to savor.”

  —Laura Caldwell, author of The Rome Affair and The Night I Got Lucky

  everyone else’s girl

  “Megan Crane rules!”

  —Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries

  “Megan Crane is a gifted author who creates brilliant characters that stay with you long after the last page is turned.”

  —Rendezvous

  “Amusing, heartfelt, and emotionally sophisticated chick-lit.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  english as a second language

  “What are ex-boyfriends for, if not to propel you on a life-changing journey? I enjoyed every step of the way in Crane’s very funny, from-the-heart debut.”

  —Melissa Senate, author of The Solomon Sisters Wise Up

  “A rollicking good time with enough pints, pubs, and hilarious personalities to keep you turning the pages . . . Cheers to Megan Crane.”

  —Jennifer O’Connell, author of Bachelorette #1

  “Breezy . . . an accurate take on twentysomethings who thought adult life began after college.”

  —Booklist

  ALSO BY MEGAN CRANE

  English as a Second Language

  Everyone Else’s Girl

  Because I knew you

  I have been changed

  for good.

  —Wicked

  I am lucky enough to have been given the gift of very good friends, whom I hope someday to deserve. I am who I am thanks in large part to the phenomenal women and men who share, support, and enhance my life every day in their own peculiar and often marvelous ways.

  This book is for you.

  acknowledgments

  A million thanks to Julie Barer for finding A-plots, explaining everything, talking me off ledges, being so effortlessly wonderful, and being the best teammate anyone could wish for. All while also being the greatest agent in the world!

  If I hadn’t already adored my fabulous editor, Karen Kosztolnyik, for her keen insights and ability to shape my stories so beautifully, I would certainly worship her for bein
g a Veronica Mars fan and for comparing Henry to the delicious Logan Echolls. High praise, indeed!

  Thanks to everyone at Warner Books (past and present) who help me in so many ways, especially Michele Bidelspach, Elly Weisenberg, Brigid Pearson, Mari Okuda, and Keri Friedman. Thanks also to Kim Dower and Allison Hunter at Kim-from-LA for so much help out on this coast!

  Thanks to Michelle Kennedy Lower for answering so many Boston questions, and Charley Lower for chauffeuring me around on the hottest, most miserably humid day possible while Michelle gave me the insider’s tour. Any egregious Boston mistakes are entirely my fault and the less egregious mistakes are, let’s hope, creative license at work.

  Thanks to Anna Marsh Schroeder for living in that apartment all those years ago. (I just added a room!)

  Thanks to Ani Matosian of the Getty Research Institute for answering my questions about librarians, libraries, and library degrees—all mistakes or exaggerations are mine!

  To all of you who send me e-mail or comment on my blog: thank you. You make my day.

  I love (and owe a huge debt to) everyone who read this novel in one of its (many!) drafts. Especially Kim McCreight, who has read it almost as many times as I have by this point. You deserve a medal!

  To the marvelous Liza Palmer. And all the other astonishingly talented authors I’ve been lucky enough to get to know.

  But most of all, thanks to and for Jeff Johnson.

  chapter one

  I blame it on Janis Joplin.

  Because until that song came on, I was fine. Fine.

  So what if I hadn’t seen Nate since the memorable night I’d walked in on him kissing someone else two and a half weeks ago, which was seventeen total days, not that I was counting?

  So what if he was supposed to be my boyfriend?

  And so what if the girl he was kissing was none other than Helen Fairchild, my freshman-year roommate way back when?

  Who, until that night, I’d thought valued our shared history and mutual exasperation enough to consider me a close friend—the sort of close friend who would find my boyfriend to be off-limits?

  Seriously, I was fine.

  I took a deep breath, and told myself that I didn’t care in the slightest that Nate and Helen had just swept inside the bar together, looking flushed and giddy and bringing with them a swirl of cold weather from the fall night beyond. I didn’t care that every single one of our mutual friends, all of whom were gathered together to celebrate a birthday, looked from the two of them to me to gauge my reaction. I didn’t care that my heart—which I would have told you had broken into pieces too small to be seen with the naked eye and thus couldn’t possibly break any further—thumped painfully in my chest, clearly whole enough to keep hurting.

  If I burst into tears, I would never forgive myself.

  I was so busy trying to look as if I didn’t care and wasn’t close to tears, in fact, that Amy Lee had to kick me under the table to get me to notice that she and her husband had returned from the bar, bearing armfuls of drinks.

  “Stop staring at them,” Amy Lee ordered.

  “It’s fine,” I told her, which was surprisingly hard to do through a clenched jaw. “After all, who cares that we were together for almost four months after knowing each other since college? Who cares about history? I’m perfectly fine with this.”

  Amy Lee sighed and exchanged what I could only describe as a significant look with Oscar. Then, she and Oscar settled themselves on either side of me on the plush banquette. In support.

  Or, possibly, to restrain me.

  The two of them were a perfect example of the whole opposites attract thing, I thought, looking at them through the big mirror on the far wall. Amy Lee looked crisp and pulled together at all times, while Oscar always looked as if he’d just stepped off a skateboard. They’d met in dental school and fallen in love, apparently over molars. It was to their credit that I found that story romantic despite my long-held dental phobia.

  Amy Lee slid a beer in front of me.

  “Listen up, Augusta,” she ordered me. Her use of my full, legal name—which I hated and therefore generally responded to only in places like the DMV—earned her a baleful glare.

  But I listened.

  “I get why you want him,” she said. “Everyone adores Nate. He’s practically made a career out of being adorable.”

  “I don’t think he’s adorable,” Oscar said from my other side. “Not that he’s not adorable, of course. I just don’t think about it.”

  “I think even I had a crush on him for like fifteen seconds in college,” Amy Lee continued, ignoring her husband. “How could you not? He was like the college version of the captain of the football team. All puppy-dog eyes and that bashful smile.”

  “Yeah, that’s really adorable,” Oscar retorted. “Let’s talk more about his rugged good looks, so maybe I can have a crush on him, too.”

  Amy Lee had all the delicacy of a steamroller. I assumed this served her well in dentistry, but tonight it made me want to upend a drink over her head.

  “?‘Puppy-dog eyes and that bashful smile’?” I echoed. I glared at her. “Why do you want to hurt me?”

  “But here’s the thing,” Amy Lee said as if I hadn’t spoken. “You’ve known the guy since we were all eighteen and only hooked up with him this summer. That’s hardly raging-hot chemistry, now is it?”

  “He hasn’t been girlfriend-free since college!” I protested. “He was with that horrible Lisa for years!”

  “I’m just saying it took you an awfully long time to get together with him,” Amy Lee said. “Okay, sure, you liked him more than the weirdos you usually date, but still.” She took a sip of her drink, which, unaccountably, appeared to be a Coke. I scowled at it, and she muttered something about designated driving.

  As that was normally Oscar’s job, I looked at him.

  “I plan to drink a lot tonight,” Oscar told me, his eyes across the bar on the Happy Couple. “I might toast Nate’s bashful smile a few times, too.”

  Since he was staring at Nate, I gave myself permission to do the same. I watched as Nate peeled off his winter coat and exchanged manly handshakes with his buddies. I watched as Helen floated merrily on the end of his arm like a particularly well-tweezed balloon.

  Seventeen days had not dimmed the pain even a little bit, it turned out, despite several bold proclamations to the contrary I’d made in the shower earlier that evening. If Gretchen, the birthday girl, hadn’t called me personally and begged me to come, there was no way I would have attended this party. It had been bad enough to stand there that night two and a half weeks ago, face-to-face with the evidence that he and Helen were on kissing terms. Sitting in a crowded bar with half of Boston looking on as I was humiliated with every snuggle and simper was, it turned out, worse.

  Much worse.

  Nate and I first met years ago when we both attended Boston University. We became members of a wider group of friends who fell into two rough and interwoven groups themselves: those who had originally gone to BU together and others who had met thanks to summers spent on Cape Cod. We all became one big group of people who were loosely connected and spread out across the greater Boston metropolitan area, leading to a rollicking social life with competing parties almost every weekend.

  And in this big group, Nate was the favorite. Everyone loved Nate. He was so good-looking and sweet-faced at eighteen that some women (who will remain nameless) had been known to lurk around the bushes to take pictures of him on the sly. He was also nice, which was so surprising it often stopped people in their tracks. He was sweet to everyone, universally considered cute, and, unfortunately, taken. Girls mooned over him and treasured the intimate conversations they had with him every now and again over beers when his girlfriend was somewhere else. Guys pounded him about the shoulders when they met him and thereafter, inevitably, called him “solid.” Everyone loved Nate from afar until he’d finally broken up with Longtime Lisa (as she was known) for the last time in April.
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br />   The month of May was like the first season of Desperate Housewives, with all the girls playing Edie and Susan to Nate’s Mike the Plumber, in a pitched battle to soothe his broken heart. Amy Lee and our other best friend, Georgia, took bets and predicted—accurately—that it would all end in rebound tears.

  By the time Nate and I hooked up at a Fourth of July party, I figured we were out of his rebound woods. I’d been waiting for Nate for a long time. Amy Lee had a point about the kind of guys I’d dated throughout my twenties—commitment-allergic “musicians” and banker boys had been my specialties, and I was over them. More than that, Nate and I were a good match. Even an obvious match. I might not have the kind of irritating (to other women) bland attractiveness that girls like Longtime Lisa had, but I felt I was cute enough. More to the point, we had all the same friends. We liked the same things. We’d even lived in the same freshman dorm. I liked the story we could tell about how, once upon a time back in college before he’d fully committed to Longtime Lisa, he and I had almost kissed outside Sicilia’s Pizza at 3:30 a.m.

  Getting together with Nate made sense. It was the third part of my three-part plan for my twenty-ninth year, the one I’d come up with shortly after turning twenty-nine the previous January. The key to being a well-adjusted adult, I’d decided, involved three things: good friends, a good job, and a good boyfriend. I already knew that Amy Lee and Georgia were the best friends anyone could want—we’d been friends for over ten years and were practically family, and yet we had a much wider, active social group too, so no one had to feel claustrophobic. I was a librarian in a small museum near Boston Common, and I loved it. So what could be better than a boyfriend so perfect that other women plotted ways to impress him? A boyfriend who I’d actually been friends with for years? With Nate, finally, everything was as it should be. I could see our future stretch before us, one perfect fantasy after the next. I had nothing to fear from thirty. I was a complete adult, life was going along as planned, and there would be no need for the stereotypical I’m-about-to-turn-thirty breakdown.