I'll Be There For You. Kelsey Miller

Copyright

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

      First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

      Copyright © Kelsey Miller 2018

      Kelsey Miller asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9781474086158

Dedication

      For my friends

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: The Sweet Spot

PART 1

1 The One That Almost Wasn’t

       2 The One with Six Kids and a Fountain

       PART 2

       3 The One with Marcel and George Clooney

       4 The One Where Two Women Got Married

       5 The One Where We All Got the Haircut

       6 The One After “The One After the Super Bowl”

       7 The One Where They All Go to London (and Everywhere Else in the World)

       PART 3

       8 The One Where Everything Changed

       9 The One Where Nobody Died

       10 The One Where It Ended, Twice

       11 The Comeback

       Acknowledgments

       Source Notes

       Interviews

      About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

       The Sweet Spot

      A few months ago, I walked into the gym, hopped on my usual machine, and thumbed the worn-out little button on the monitor up to channel 46. It was very early evening—a kind of magic hour at the gym. The place was packed, but oddly quiet, save for the whirring of stationary bike wheels and rhythmic thumping of sneakers on the treadmill. Gyms in New York City have a reputation for being scene-y and intimidating, full of athletic wunderkinds and sweat-free medical marvels eyeing each other as they deadlift a thousand pounds and do pirouettes in the mirror. On the whole, this reputation is shockingly true. But not at 5:30 p.m. At that hour of the day, all is calm and no one is judging. And every TV seems to be tuned in to a basic cable channel, as New Yorkers unwind with some cardio and reruns. That day, I walked in and saw the usual array of familiar faces lined up above high-tech machines: some folks watched Grey’s Anatomy, others preferred Law & Order. Some even tuned in to Family Guy, right out in the open. Really, there’s no judgment at 5:30. Personally, I always went right to channel 46, where every afternoon TBS ran Friends.

      I’d started this routine a few years prior, around the same time I started working out regularly. I was in my late twenties, and up until that point, exercise had been the kind of thing I did either obsessively or not at all. Like most young women (at least the ones I knew), I’d thought of working out as something you did to try to look better, or to “cancel out” the dollar-slice pizza you ate on the street with your friends after five glasses of revolting wine. Now, I’d entered a new phase of adulthood. I ordered the good pizza and ate it at home with my long-term boyfriend—and not too close to bedtime, or we’d both need a Zantac. I exercised for actual health reasons, like a grown-up. It was boring and consistent, and I actually liked it. There were other things I didn’t like about getting older (like always having to keep Zantac in the house), but the gym wasn’t one of them. Because there, every evening, I could turn on Friends and hop back in time for a moment.

      Channel 46 became the nostalgic escape hatch at the end of my grown-up workday. I would pedal away on the Arc Trainer, watching the episode where Monica accidentally dated a teenager, or the one where Chandler got stuck in an ATM vestibule with Jill Goodacre. I didn’t even know who Jill Goodacre was, really. I just knew she was a Victoria’s Secret model in the ’90s, and rewatching the episode was like returning to an era when both she and Victoria’s Secret were hot pop-culture references.

      I’d never counted myself among the die-hard Friends fans, though of course I’d watched it. I was ten years old when it debuted in 1994, and in college when it ended. During those years it was one of the biggest shows on television—one of the biggest cultural events, period—and its enormous impact was baked into my DNA like radiation. I’d gotten The Rachel in middle school, I’d watched the finale with a group of weepy girlfriends, and if pressed, I could probably remember all the words to “Smelly Cat.” But that was base-level Friends knowledge, which was, frankly, hard to avoid having. The show was always there, one way or another. I’d find it on hotel-room televisions in the middle of the night, or hear the theme song in a grocery store and get it stuck in my head for days. Friends became an easy reference point in conversations. (“You know, Adam Goldberg. Dazed and Confused? He was Chandler’s creepy roommate with the goldfish? Yeah, that guy.”) I’d never owned the DVDs, but they always seemed to be around, either left by old roommates or brought in by new ones. When the show came to Netflix, on New Year’s Day 2015 (after months of hype), I tuned in for a hungover rewatch. So had all of my colleagues, I found out at work the next day. The true devotees hadn’t even waited until morning. They’d started shortly after midnight and watched until sunrise. I enjoyed revisiting the episodes occasionally, but I assumed I was a Friends fan the way everyone kind of was.

      At first, the gym reruns were just an entertaining little addition to my cardio. Part of the fun, though, was watching it the old way—on actual