Friendship by Emily Gould

thoroughly, hopelessly incapable of lying or even being less than honest: she was the person who, when you asked if your new haircut was bad, would tell you it was, whereas everyone else would allow you to delude yourself. When Amy had told Bev that she thought Bev was a good writer and should see how far she could take her talents, Bev had known that she’d meant it. She had been the first and so far the only person to see Bev’s potential.
    Amy came out of the bathroom smiling; she tossed the keys back to the cashier with a big, cheesy wink, then half skipped toward Bev and grabbed her hand, pulling her to the car. “I can’t wait for our fun weekend getaway to start! We’re going to drink a lot and eat so much food and go to bed early!” she trilled, swinging Bev’s arm as they walked out to the car. A surge of love for Amy welled up in Bev. Of course she loved Amy; they were allies in a world full of idiots and enemies. She couldn’t afford to harbor resentment toward her even for a second. And besides, she had something that Amy, despite her stable and basically okay-seeming life, would never get to have again: the potential to make a good first impression on the world. When the time was right, Bev knew, she’d will herself un-invisible. She just had to figure out exactly how to do it.

 
    8
    When Bev first started making friendship advances toward Amy, she was so dogged that Amy thought Bev might want to sleep with her.
    Bev wanted something , that much was clear. She had been hired at the office where Amy worked a year after Amy started there. Amy had the best prospects for advancement in the editorial department, and all the other assistants knew it. She was the protégée of an editor who was on a hot streak; his books were bestsellers, and his anointed former assistants had all gone on to great things—i.e., they had become full editors before their thirtieth birthdays, which in book publishing was the greatest thing anyone could realistically hope for.
    Bev was meek and put-upon; her office clothes were poly-blend jackets and skirts from the part of H&M where you went when, broke, you still had to try to dress for the job you wanted. Amy wore Marc by Marc Jacobs blouses (so coveted, in the early aughts) with short sleeves that showed her tattoos. She’d been Bev exactly one year earlier, and for this reason she avoided her as much as possible.
    Bev either didn’t notice or did notice and still blithely persisted in her attempts to cultivate Amy’s friendship. “Hey,” she said one day while waiting outside Amy’s boss’s office for his signature on a form attached to a clipboard—Amy’s boss was, as usual, on the phone—“You seem like you might like Sleater-Kinney. I have an extra ticket to the show at Roseland on Thursday. Do you want to go?”
    “Um, I have to check,” said Amy, thinking fast. “My boyfriend and I might be doing something that night.” This was unlikely; Amy’s boyfriend at the time was a pot-dealing sometimes musician, and the things they did together didn’t tend to require advance planning, because they mostly involved sitting on the couch, smoking joints, and watching pirated DVDs.
    “Relax, Amy, I’m not gay,” Bev said, and Amy looked up from her screen, where she’d been pretending to check her Outlook calendar. She was shocked by Bev’s perceptiveness. “I just like Sleater-Kinney. It’s possible to like them and be heterosexual. It’s not like I invited you to go see Tegan and Sara.”
    In spite of herself, in spite of her overwhelming desire to maintain her place in the office hierarchy, Amy laughed. “Okay. Well, but I hope we can still go to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival together,” she said, and Bev cracked up. They kept making jokes, eventually devolving into one of those punchy overcaffeinated office gigglefests, until the marketing director, who was gay, came out of her office and shot them a dirty look that was kind of a joke but was