I stand up, walk over to my bookcase, and find the Altoids tin. I have one final hope. If I get double sixes, maybe he will change his mind, come back to me. As if to cast a magic spell, I blow on the dice just as Dex did. Then I shake them once in my right hand and carefully, carefully roll them. Just as it happened with our first roll, one die lands before its mate. On a six! I hold my breath. For a brief second, I see a mess of dots, and think I have boxcars again. I kneel, staring at the second die.
It is only a five.
I have rolled an eleven. It is as if someone is mocking me, saying, Close, but no dice.
Twenty-One
I am somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean when I decide that I will not tell Ethan all of the gory, pathetic details. I will not dwell and wallow once the plane lands on British soil. It will be the first step in getting over Dex, moving on. But I will give myself the duration of the flight to think about him and my situation. How I put myself on the line and lost. How it’s not worth it to take risks. How it’s better to be a glass-half-empty person. How I would have been so much better off if I had never gone down this road, setting myself up for rejection and disappointment and giving Darcy the chance to beat me again.
I rest my forehead against the window as a little girl behind me kicks my seat once, twice, three times. I hear her mother say in a sugary voice, “Now Ashley, don’t kick the nice lady’s seat.” Ashley keeps kicking. “Ashley! That is against the rules. No kicking on the plane,” the mother repeats with exaggerated calm as if to demonstrate to everyone around her what a competent parent she is. I close my eyes as we fly into the night, don’t open them until the flight attendant comes by to offer us headphones.
“No, thanks,” I say.
No movie for me. I will be too busy cramming all of the misery I can into the next few hours.
I told Ethan not to come to Heathrow—that I would take a taxi to his flat. But I am hoping that he comes anyway. Even though I live in Manhattan, I am intimidated by other big cities, particularly foreign ones. Except for the time I went to Rome with my parents for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, I have never left the country. Other than Niagara Falls on the Canadian side, which hardly counts. So I am relieved to see Ethan waiting for me just outside of customs, grinning and boyish and happy as ever. He is wearing new horn-rimmed glasses, like Buddy Holly’s, only brown. He rushes toward me and hugs me hard around the neck. We both laugh.
“It’s so good to see you! Here. Give me your bag,” he says.
“You too.” I grin back at him. “I like your glasses.”
“Do they make me look smarter?” He pushes the frames on his nose and strikes a scholarly pose, stroking a nonexistent beard.
“Much.” I giggle.
“I’m so glad you’re here!”
“I’m so glad to be here.”
A summer full of bad decisions, but at last I made a good one. Just seeing Ethan soothes me.
“It’s about time you visited,” he says, maneuvering my roller bag through the crowd. We make our way outside, into the cab line.
“I can’t believe I’m in England. This is so exciting.” I take my first breath of British air. The weather is exactly what I imagined—gray, drizzling, and slightly chilly. “You weren’t kidding about the weather here. This feels like November, not August.”
“I told you…We actually had a few hot days this month. But it’s back to normal now. It’s relentless. But you get used to it. You just have to dress for it.”
Within minutes we are in the back of a black cab, my bags at our feet. The taxi is dignified and spacious compared to New York’s yellow cabs.
Ethan asks me how I feel, and for a second I think he is asking about Dex, but then I realize it’s the standard postflight questioning.
“Oh, fine,” I say. “I’m really psyched to be here.”
“Jet-lagged?”
“A little.”
“A pint will fix that,” he says. “No napping. We have a lot to do in a week.”
I laugh. “Like what?”
“Sightseeing. Boozing. Reminiscing. Time-consuming, intense stuff…God, it’s nice to see you.”
We arrive at Ethan’s basement flat in Kensington, and he gives me the brief tour of his bedroom, living room, and kitchen. His furniture is sleek and modern, and his walls are covered with abstract paintings and posters of jazz musicians. It is a bachelor pad, but without the I’m-trying-at-every-turn-to-get-laid feel.
“You probably want to shower?”
I tell him yes, that I feel pretty grimy. He hands me a towel in the hallway outside of his bathroom and tells me to be quick, that he wants to talk.
As soon as I am showered and changed, Ethan asks, “So how’s the Dex situation? I take it they’re still engaged?”
It’s not as if I have stopped thinking about him for an instant. Everything vaguely reminds me of him. A sign for Newcastle. Drinking Newcastles with him on my birthday. Driving on the left side of the street. Dex is left-handed. The rain. Alanis Morissette singing, “It’s like rain on your wedding day.”
But Ethan’s question about Dex still causes a sharp pain in my chest. My throat tightens as I struggle not to cry.
“Oh God. I knew it,” Ethan says. He reaches up and grabs my hand, pulling me down on his black leather couch.
“Knew what?” I say, still fighting back tears.
“That your stiff-upper-lip, ‘I don’t care’ thing was just a lot of bluster.” He puts his arm around me. “What happened?”
I finally cry as I tell him everything, no editing. Even the dice. So much for my vow over the Atlantic. My pain feels raw, naked.
When I am finished, Ethan says, “I’m glad I RSVPed no. I don’t think I could stomach it.”
I blow my nose, wipe my face. “Those are the exact words Hillary used. She’s not going either.”
“You shouldn’t go, Rachel. Boycott. It will be too hard. Spare yourself.”
“I have to go.”
“Why?”
“What would I tell her?”
“Tell her that you have to have surgery—you have to have an extraneous organ removed…”
“Like what kind of organ?”
“Like your spleen. People can get by without their spleen, right?”
“What’s the reason for removing your spleen?”
“I dunno. A spleen stone? A problem…an accident, a disease. Who cares? Make something up. I’ll do the research for you—we’ll come up with something plausible. Just don’t go.”
“I have to be there,” I say. I am back to rule-following.
We sit in silence for a minute, and then Ethan gets up, switches off two lamps, and grabs his wallet from a small table in the hall. “C’mon.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going to my local pub. Getting you good and loaded. Trust me, it will help.”
“It’s eleven in the morning!” I laugh at his exuberance.
“So? You got a better idea?” He crosses his arms across his narrow chest. “You want to sightsee? Think Big Ben’s going to do you any good right now?”
“No,” I say. Big Ben would only remind me of the minutes ticking down to what will be the most horrible day of my life.
“So c’mon then,” he says.
I follow Ethan over to a pub called the Brittania. It is exactly how I expect an English pub to be—musty and full of old men smoking and reading the paper. The walls and carpet are dark red, and bad oil paintings of foxes and deer and Victorian women cover the walls. It could be 1955. One man wearing a little cap and smoking a pipe even resembles Winston Churchill.
“What’s your pleasure?” Ethan asks me.
Dex, I think, but tell him a beer would be great. I am beginning to think that the boozing idea is a pretty good one.
“What kind? Guinness? Kronenbourg? Carling?”
“Whatever,” I say. “Anything but Newcastle.”
Ethan orders two beers, his several shades darker
than mine. We sit down at a corner table. I trace the grain in the wood of the table and ask him how long it took for him to get over Brandi.
“Not long,” he says. “Once I knew what she did, I realized that she wasn’t what I thought. There was nothing to miss. That’s what you have to think. He wasn’t right for you. Let Darcy have him…”
“Why does she always win?” I sound like a five-year-old, but it helps to hear my misery simplified: Darcy beat me. Again.
Ethan laughs, flashing his dimple. “Win what?”
“Well, Dex for one.” Self-pity envelops me as I picture him with Darcy. It is morning in New York. They are likely still in bed together.
“Okay. What else?”
“Everything.” I gulp my beer as quickly as I can. I feel it hit my empty stomach.
“Like?”
How do I explain to a guy what I mean? It sounds so shallow: she’s prettier, her clothes are better, she’s thinner. But that is the least of it. She is happier too. She gets what she wants, whatever that happens to be. I try to articulate this with real examples. “Well, she has that great job making tons of money, when all she has to do is plan parties and look pretty.”
“That schmoozing job of hers? Please.”
“It’s better than mine.”
“Better than being a lawyer? I don’t think so.”
“More fun.”
“You’d hate it.”
“That’s not the point. She loves her job.” I know I am not doing a good job of showing how Darcy is always victorious.
“Then find one you love. Although that’s another issue altogether. One that we will address later…But, okay, what else does she win?”
“Well…she got into Notre Dame,” I say, knowing that I sound ridiculous.
“Oh, she did not!”
“Yes she did.”
“No. She said she got into Notre Dame. Who picks IU over Notre Dame?”
“Plenty of people. Why do you always dump on IU?”
“Okay. Look. I hate Notre Dame more. I’m just saying if you apply to those two schools and get into both, presumably you want to go to both. So you’d pick Notre Dame. It’s a better school, right?”
I nod. “I guess.”
“But she didn’t get in there. Nor did she get a, what did she say, thirteen hundred five and a half or something on her SATs? Remember that shit?”
“Yeah. She lied about her score.”
“And she lied about Notre Dame too. Trust me…Did you ever see the acceptance letter?”
“No. But…well, maybe she didn’t.”
“God, you’re so naïve,” he says, mispronouncing it “nave” on purpose. “I assumed we were on the same page there.”
“It was a sensitive topic. Remember?”
“Oh yeah. I remember. You were so sad,” he says. “You should have been celebrating your escape from the Midwest. Of course, then you pick the second most obnoxious school in the country, and go to Duke…You know my theory about Duke and Notre Dame, right?”
I smile and tell Ethan that I have trouble keeping all of his theories straight. “What is it again?”
“Well, aside from you, and a few other exceptions, those two schools are filled to the brim with obnoxious people. Perhaps only obnoxious people apply there or perhaps the schools attract obnoxious people. Probably a combination, a mutually reinforcing issue. You’re not offended, are you?”
“’Course not. Go on,” I say. In part, I agree with him. A lot of people at Duke—including my own boyfriend—were hard to take.
“Okay. So why do they have a higher ratio of assholes per capita? What do those two schools have in common, you ask?”
“I give.”
“Simple. Dominance in a Division-One, revenue-generating sport. Football at Notre Dame and basketball at Duke. Coupled with the stellar academic reputation. And the result is an intolerably smug student body. Can you name another school that has that combination of characteristics?”
“Michigan,” I say, thinking of Luke Grimley from our high school who was insufferable in his chatter about Michigan football. And he still talks about Rumeal Robinson’s clutch free throws in the NCAA finals.
“Aha! Michigan! Good one, nice try. But it’s not an expensive private school. The public aspect saves Michigan, makes Michigan alums slightly less obnoxious.”
“Wait a minute! What about your own school? Stanford. You had Tiger Woods. Great swimmers. Debbie Thomas, that skater, didn’t she win a silver medal? Tennis players galore. Plus great academics—and it’s private and expensive. So why aren’t you Stanford grads as irritating?”
“Simple. We’re not dominant in football or basketball. Yeah, we’re good some years, but not like Duke in basketball or football at Notre Dame. You can’t get as jazzed over nonrevenue sports. It saves us.”
I smile and nod. His theory is interesting, but I am more intrigued with the realization that Darcy got rejected by Notre Dame.
“Mind if I smoke?” Ethan asks as he removes a carton from his back pocket. He shakes a cigarette free, rolling it between his fingers.
“I thought you quit.”
“For a minute,” he says.
“You should quit.”
“I know.”
“Okay. So back to Darcy.”
“Right.”
“So maybe she didn’t get into Notre Dame. But she did get Dex.”
He strikes a match and raises it to his lips. “Who cares? Let her keep him. He’s spineless. Sincerely, you’re better off.”
“He’s not spineless,” I say, hoping that Ethan will convince me otherwise. I want to latch onto a fatal flaw, believe that Dex is not the person I thought he was. Which would be a lot less painful than believing that I am not the woman he wanted.
“Okay, maybe ‘spineless’ is too strong. But, Rach, I’m positive he’d rather be with you. He just doesn’t know how to dump her.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. But I actually think he just decided that he’d rather be with Darcy. He picked her over me. Everybody picks her.” I gulp my beer more quickly.
“Everybody. Who besides spineless Dex?”
“Okay.” I smile. “You picked her.”
He gives me a puzzled look. “Did not.”
I snort. “Ha.”
“Is that what she told you?”
After all these years, I have never aired my feelings about their two-week elementary-school romance. “She didn’t need to tell me. Everybody knew it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The reunion?” he asks.
“Our ten-year?” I ask, knowing of no other reunion. I remember the disappointment I felt when Les insisted that I had to work. Those were the days before I knew to lie. He had scoffed at me when I said I couldn’t work, that I had to go to my ten-year reunion.
“Yeah. She didn’t tell you what happened?” He takes a long drag, then turns his head, exhaling away from me.
“No. What happened?” I say, thinking that I am going to fall apart and die if Ethan slept with her. “Please tell me you didn’t hook up with her.”
“Hell, no,” he says. “But she tried.”
As I finish the rest of my pint and steal a few sips of Ethan’s, I listen to him tell the story of our reunion. How Darcy came on to him at Horace Carlisle’s backyard afterparty. Said she thought they should have one night together. What would it hurt?
“You’re kidding me!”
“No,” he says. “And I was like, Darce, hell, no. You have a boyfriend. What the fuck?”
“Was that why?”
“Why I didn’t hook up with her?”
I nod.
“No, that’s not why.”
“Why then?” For a second, I wonder if he’s going to come out of the closet. Maybe Darcy is right after all.
“Why do you think? It’s Darcy. I don’t see her that way.”
“You don’t think she’s??
?beautiful?”
“Frankly, no. I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“I need reasons?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” He exhales, looks up at the ceiling. “’Cause she wears too much makeup. ’Cause she’s too, I don’t know, severe.”
“Sharp featured?” I offer.
“Yeah. Sharp and…and overplucked.”
I picture Darcy’s skinny, high-arched brows. “Overplucked. That’s funny.”
“Yeah. And those hipbones jutting out at you. She’s way too skinny. I don’t like it. But that’s not the point. The point is—is that it is Darcy.” He shudders and then takes his beer back from me. “Hold on. Let me get another round.” He crushes out his cigarette and strolls over to the bar, returning with two more beers. “There you are.”
“Thanks,” I say, and then set about chugging mine.
He laughs. “Man! I can’t let you outdrink me.”
I wipe the foam from my lips with the back of my hand and ask why he didn’t tell me about Darcy and the reunion before now.
“Oh. I dunno. ’Cause it was no big deal. She was wasted.” He shrugs. “Probably didn’t even know what she was doing.”
“Yeah, right. She always knows what she’s doing.”
“I guess so. Maybe. But it really wasn’t significant.”
That explains why she thought Ethan was gay. Turning her down—it must be the only explanation. “Guess her fifth-grade charms wore thin on you.”
He laughs. “Yeah. We did go out once upon a time.” He makes little quotes in the air as he says “go out.”
“See. You picked her over me too.”
He flashes his dimple. “What the hell are you talking about now?”
“On the note. The check-the-box note.”
“What?”
I sigh. “The note that she sent you. The ‘Do you want to go out with me or Rachel?’ note.”