Just My Luck by Adele Parks (best interesting books to read TXT) 📕

helps.” She presses Record on her phone. I don’t know how far back to go. Our friendship group stretches way back, and my belief in the magic of Saturday night goes further back still. And Jake? Well, Jake has been forever, really. We met at university, where I was doing a degree in sociology and social policy and he was studying industrial economics. I was eighteen, he was nineteen. He and I have been an us all my adult life. I love Saturday nights. Always have. Since I was a teenager. To me, they represent untold opportunities, freedom. Not that I had a wild youth, far from it. Throughout school and college, I was consistently bookish and conscientious. I studied during the week and then babysat on Friday evenings. On Sundays I visited my grandparents. That is precisely why I lived for the outlet, the release from conformity, which Saturdays offered. What could be better than house parties where I snogged boys and drank cider and blackcurrent until I was ill or stupid? Where I danced to Take That and Mariah Carey and dreamed of a future which I was sure would be happy, meaningful, important?

Even when I was in my twenties, I rarely took advantage of weeknight happy hour deals. Jake and I preferred to go to bed early while our friends dashed around the city looking for people to get off with. We had each other and no interest in scouring pubs and bars to meet sexy strangers. Not that we were boring—we were young. In those days early nights did not mean sleep. Enough said.

We both savored Saturdays, though, when we got dressed up, went out with a gang and danced at various low-rent nightclubs until my feet hurt. We’d drink enough to make singing in the street on the walk home seem like a good idea. Everything changes once you have children. It’s not worse, it’s just different. For the past fifteen years, weekday evenings have been swallowed in a never-ending round of cooking, bathing, storytelling and then, as the kids got older, in homework supervision, ferrying them to and from their friends’ houses, household admin. Basically, adulting. But Saturdays have remained fun. Largely because of our friendships with the Heathcotes and Pearsons. Our best friends. Where do I begin explaining all of this?

“Saturdays is when our gang—the gang—get together. We have dinner, a few drinks.”

We tell one another hilarious stories about our bosses, our families, the other school parents. Actually, we tell each other pretty run-of-the-mill stories, but because we usually put away a week’s worth of units in three hours the stories became hilarious. The incidents recounted may have originally been frustrating, saddening or aggravating, but they became amusing anecdotes. It is then that my shoulders loosen, I stop worrying about Jake’s inability to find a job that he is truly inspired by, or whether I’ve missed the optimal time for Emily to get braces, or whether Logan will be picked for the school football team and I just...relax. And laugh. Out loud. Sometimes until my sides ache.

“Who exactly is in this gang?” The way Double Barrel 1 says “gang” makes it sound like I head up the Mafia.

“Carla and Patrick Pearson, Jennifer and Fred Heathcote, Jake and me. We are good for each other. My frimily,” I add.

“Frimily?” He raises an eyebrow.

“That’s what I call us. I think I coined the phrase. We’ve often said we were more like family than friends. We met at childbirth classes when we were all preparing for the birth of our firstborns, over fifteen years ago now.”

“Wow,” says my lawyer.

I nod. I’m used to people being impressed by the longevity of our friendship. In a world where things are fleeting and unstable, where news is received in 280 characters and national treasures only expect to be flavor of the month for a week, longevity is coveted. A fifteen-year friendship means something.

Or, at least, it is supposed to.

“Time flies when you are having fun,” comments Gillian.

I agree. “Gone in a blink of an eye, and yet none of us can even remember a time when we haven’t known one another. You know? Sometimes it seems odd that we weren’t together at college, let alone at each other’s weddings.”

“So, it’s safe to say you are close?” asks Double Barrel 2, his posh ink pen poised to make a note.

“Yes, we’re close. Or at least we were up until—” I break off. We’ve helped one another through childbirths, miscarriages, promotions, redundancies, house moves, new puppies and even losing parents. Every triumph and heartbreak. Even though the sitcom show Friends played out its final episode a year before we even met, the influence of the show was still profound. We would never say it aloud as it sounds daft but, on some level, I think the six of us have always seen ourselves as older, British versions of the twentysomethings who bounced around Manhattan. Frimily. All the eyes in the room are trained on me as I fight tears.

What’s happened is so sad. Money is glorious. Money corrupts. Ruins things. I need to go further back. The past is safe.

“When we met, we all lived in London. Clapham. The six of us formed the lottery syndicate when our first babies were very young and we were housebound because finding reliable babysitters in Clapham on a Saturday night was about as likely as finding the elixir to eternal youth.” I look up hopefully, but no one responds to my small joke. I make jokes when I’m stressed. It’s a much-misunderstood habit. I push on. “It was then that we started taking turns to host suppers. The evenings were often frantic juggling acts involving crying babies and badly prepared food, but we didn’t care—we called it a social life. Then Jennifer and Fred announced their intention to move back to Buckinghamshire, just before Ridley’s first birthday.”

They had persuasively cited the many advantages of doing so. We all lived in one-or two-bedroom apartments in