Megan Crane - Frenemies

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 being 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.

ALSO BY MEGAN CRANE

English as a Second Language

Everyone Else's Girl

Reasons to Suspect Your Friends
Have Turned Into Grown-Ups

(or Maybe Just Turned on You):

1 Your best friend gives you a very long lecture concerning china settings, table placement, and the importance of "couple friends," but what it boils down to is that you're single and thus not invited to her dinner party.

2 Nights out now require consultations with date planners/significant others, and extensive plans involving concrete destinations. "Let's go out" is no longer sufficient.

3 Speaking of which, when your friends discuss drinking, they're actually talking about proper hydration for maximum health benefits. Not last night's shenanigans.

4 When she plans to stay with him forever, buy a house, have kids, celebrate anniversaries, etc., it turns out that she's unwilling to have those historically graphic conversations about his sexual prowess. It also means you should stop asking.

5 It's not that she's screening her calls. It's that her secretarial staff has strict instructions to do so on her behalf.

M EGAN CRANE: Frenemies came about because of the movie Mean Girls. Seriously. I went to see it with my boyfriend, who squirmed through the entire thing and couldn't believe how nasty all the girls were to one another.

Oh please, I thought. They toned it down for nationwide distribution. The reality was much worse.

Which got me thinking. I love my women friends. I literally wouldn't have a clue who I was today if it weren't for the friendship, guidance, and support of the women I know. My mother, my sister, my grandmothers, my aunts, my cousins, my friends, my coworkers. They've all helped me create this creature I like to call me. (They also make me laugh so hard it makes my stomach hurt, which I believe to be a key ingredient in lifetime friendships.) But as Mean Girls made me consider, the women I love are only half of the story.

What about the other women? The ones that we don't get, who seem to inhabit some other universe with alien social rules. The ones we think are really amazing and we're so close to them and then they stab us in the back without blinking an eye?...?or whatever, that could be my issues talking.

As women, we're attuned to the undercurrents of interactions. I've been as angry and hurt by a rolled eye as men I know have been from a fist to the face. Everyone knows that girl. Everyone's had a best-friend breakup with her.

I wanted to write a book about all that crazy girl stuff.

Let me know what you think.

You can find me at and tell me all about that girl in your life!

Thanks for reading!

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."