Forever Friends

Chapter 1

Pre-game Friday night and Sara Wolfe could think of hundreds of things she would rather be doing than what she was doing right now.

"You parked a block away, B!" Sara's high pitched, highly offended voice spilled the space of the small car and instantly sent the feeling of knives into Annabelle Maxwell's brain.

"Can you just keep it down, Sara?"

"No!" Sara flopped back against the seat, dramatically crossing her arms over her chest and letting out a huff of air from her lips. "Park closer, Annie, I'm not walking a city block back to the car."

"I'm trying to keep everyone from seeing you go in there." Annie's voice was patient, she sounded too much like a mother right now for Sara to like it very much. Annie had this really bad habit of making Sara feel like she was acting like a child, which a lot of times was really true, but Sara didn't much care to admit that herself. Annie put the shifter of her Honda into park and looked over the center console at her best friend. Sara wasn't looking at her; she was staring straight ahead at the glove compartment and had her brunette hair hanging over her face. Sara played with the pleats on the cheerleading outfit skirt, rolling it up, letting it go, smoothing it back down and then starting again.

Annie let out a sigh and flopped back against the seat, reaching up and pulling her fingers through the edgy blonde bob on her head. They were best friends and complete opposites. Sara was effervescent, lighting up a room and commanding all the attention. There was a reason she was head of the cheerleaders, the most popular girl in school. It was because Sara didn't know how to be anything but the best at everything she put her hands into.

Annie, on the other hand, was different. She was more of a background piece. She was the smart one, and she and Sara often jokingly talked about how Annie was the moral compass in the friendship. It was a joke, but not always a far cry from the truth. Annie wasn't Sara's only "best friend" and the male influence in her life wasn't exactly on top of being responsible. Annie figured that a lot of them would grow out of it eventually and soon they would all be better for it.

If only, Annie realized, she could say the same for herself. But here she was, sitting a block down from Haggard's Drugstore and trying to convince her best friend to walk a block and take a social bullet for her. Well, she didn't really have to convince Sara of anything but walking the block there and the block back. Sara had volunteered.

"Annie," She'd said, "You know how this town talks. If either of us were going to be, you know, that, it would be me."

Now they sat here, Sara in silence and Annie in between being grateful and being annoyed.

"Everyone's going to know." Sara finally broke the silence. She wondered if maybe this wasn't the right thing to do, if she wasn't putting herself on the line here for no reason what so ever. "Someone will see and it will spread like wildfire."

"I know, you don't have to-"

"It's going to spread like mad but I'm going to do it anyway." How often did Sara ever partake in something that didn't have a completely selfish motivation wrapped with it? To do something like this for someone that she cared about as much as Annie, well, that had to make her a good person, right? Not this self-centered girl who cared about superficial things like boys. Annie would believe that she was the former, rather than the latter even if everyone else didn't.

"No, Sara, come on, let's go. I'll just figure it out on my own."

"No." Sara's entire attitude changed, which it tended to be like hot and cold. She had no warm. She was either all the way on or all the way off. Turning her body, she was blissfully unaware of the fact that her rear was flashing the blue cloth underwear that covered it.

"Sara you're flashing the whole damn town."

"Then their dreams are fulfilled huh—oh, my God, B, do you have a dead body back here somewhere?" Sara was pawing around in the backseat of the car, which Annie apparently never used unless she needed somewhere to throw an empty can. "Gross..." Sara finally found what she was looking for. She pulled on the sleeve of the dark blue sweater and pulled it out of the backseat. "Note to B, clean out the ass end of your Civic."

"Done and done, anything you want Sara."

Sara worked the sweater onto her shoulders, turning her chin and sniffing, "Jesus it smells like a dead ferret covered in rotten Chinese food."

"Which is not far from a possibility."

Sara perked her brow and went for the glove compartment, raked her hand through more mess and came back with a bottle of cucumber melon body spray. Annie fanned a hand in her face and then cranked the window down a couple of inches to let the left over mist waft out.

"That was really necessary?"

Sara gave Annie a long look and Annie let out a breath of air, leaning her forehead forward to the steering wheel, shielding her face with her upper arms. Sara felt bad instantly and reached over putting a hand on Annie's back and rubbing it a little.

"Hey," Sara's voice was softer now, kinder, and truly concerned. Annie loved her. "Hey, Annie it's going to be okay." She said, "Somehow," Sara pressed her forehead into the back of Annie's neck and rubbed her fingers through her friend's boyish pixie cut. "It's going to be okay." Sara didn't think she was much of a person to lean on. Annie was leaning on her now, though, and Sara knew there was a reason for that. There was a reason that Annie had confided this in her before anyone else, she just didn't know what that reason was yet.

Either that or she was too self-centered to figure it out.

"Okay," Sara didn't do well with emotions, so she always went for humor. "How do I look?" She tucked her hair into the hooded sweater and then flipped it up to her head. She waited in the seat until Annie finally c****d her eyes to look at her, and burst out laughing.

"You look very incognito in your cheerleading uniform and big eyes."

Sara gave herself a look in the side mirror. "In and out, like a band-aid." She squared her shoulders,

"Funny, in and out is how I got into this." Annie added.

Sara's nose crinkled up as she digested what Annie said, "Ew. Have the engine revving outside of the store when I come out. Hopefully I can dive into the car without smothering myself in trash."

"Unlikely, but we'll give it a shot." As Sara reached for the door handle, Annie reached out and put a hand over Sara's to stop her, "In case I forget to say it later, thank you."

"In case you forget to say it later, you're welcome." They shared a quick hug and Sara ambled her way out of the car.

She could still think of a million other places she would rather be pre-game on a Friday night, but she was here, because Annie mattered.

She pulled open the door of the drug store so that the bells didn't ding when she slipped into the store. From here, it was all about planning, execution. Get in and get out like no one noticed her. So far so good and the best thing here would be to get a whole bunch of stuff so that they didn't even notice the item she had come in here for. She spotted a couple of people down the cosmetic isle and pressed her back up against the spinning sunglasses rack. She grabbed a pair of white, large framed sunglasses and slid them over her eyes, keeping her eyes on the patrons down the aisle as she reached out and grabbed the first thing her folders closed around.

Sara tucked the bottle of lotion under her arm and kept walking, secretly playing the Mission Impossible theme in her head. She wanted to get in here and get out, but she had to be covert. She couldn't just walk up to isle 5 and then up to the counter. She wrapped her arms around a package of adult diapers and poked her dainty nose around the corner. It was all clear, so she continued around the isle and grabbed a brightly colored bottle of mustard, the jumbo size, pretty good deal, to continue to hide her purposeful purchase.

Sara was arbitrarily grabbing things off the shelves and piling them into her arms; a box of super jumbo tampons, some Motrin IB, as she walked down aisle five. The pregnancy tests loomed in front of her and Sara suddenly realized that she and Annie should have discussed more of a game plan on what exactly she was getting. Her head darted up and down the aisle like she was watching a tennis match as she began to weigh her options. Did Annie want to get two lines or one, a plus or minus, or a digital read out? First Response or Clear Blue Easy? Oh God in Heaven, what was she going to do? Okay, Sara encouraged herself, think. She would get the easiest most accurate test there was. Scanning the boxes, she saw the one that said just that and snagged it.

Twelve f*****g dollars? Annie owed her big, that was her money for her new shoes. She grabbed the test, looking down to the left and finding the aisle clear, then to the right in time to hear the voice behind her,

"Hot date tonight?"