Everyone Else's Girl

  “People don’t like it when you change, but they don’t like it when you stay the same, either,” Jeannie said after a moment. “Lately I keep running into people we went to high school with. All of them make this big deal about saying hello and seeing what I’m doing and I know perfectly well they all hate my guts. I would have so much more respect for someone if they actually said so.”

  I looked around at her, skeptical. “Really? I think I would just burst into tears.”

  Although, I hadn’t burst into tears when Scott had said something a lot like that. This was an exorcism. Asshole.

  “No one would say anything like that to you, anyway,” Jeannie said, and grinned. She leaned back on her hands. “You were so nice in high school.” There was laughter in her voice.

  “How come everyone says that like I should be ashamed of it?” I demanded.

  “You worked so hard at it,” she said. “I think you actually plotted ways to be more nice, didn’t you?”

  “Someone had to be nice.” I tried not to sound grumpy, with minimal success.

  Jeannie suddenly laughed out loud, and put a hand on my shoulder. She gave me a quick squeeze.

  “You weren’t always so nice,” she reminded me. “Remember? You know what I’m talking about. Two words: Party Girl.”

  “Oh my God,” I groaned.

  “You were so determined to show the entire school that you were a badass—”

  “Because Christian told everyone at that stupid party that I was the most boring girl he knew, which was horrifying!”

  “So, obviously, you choose to do this by going shot for shot with those idiots.” Jeannie laughed. “My God, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk before or since!”

  “That was really more than enough,” I said dryly. “I can’t believe I did that.”

  “I can’t believe you went nuts on Christian in the middle of the party,” Jeannie agreed. “That might be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “He really didn’t know what to do.” I smiled, remembering. “I don’t even remember what I said.”

  Jeannie giggled. “I think it was all pretty much a variation of ‘go to hell, big brother.’”

  “I wanted to be cool and maybe a little dangerous,” I said. I wrinkled up my nose. “Sadly, I was just drunk.”

  We both smiled, and subsided into the quiet of the moment.

  “Sometimes I miss high school,” Jeannie admitted after a while. She considered. “Not the school part, or the living at home part. Or even the teenager part, actually.”

  “What other parts were there?”

  “I had fun.” Jeannie shrugged. “Not everyone can say that.”

  “That’s because most people hated high school.” Most normal people, I thought. “There’s an entire teen movie genre dedicated to how much most people hated high school.”

  “High school was like an extended four-year test,” Jeannie said. “We just happened to test well, that’s all.”

  “An extended four-year test that leaves permanent scars.” I shook my head. “Or requires years of therapy.”

  “I think that’s because most people didn’t know who they were in high school, and had to go through some huge drama later on, figuring it out,” Jeannie said. “But I’m not really like that. I knew who I was then, and I know now too. So, no scars.” She smiled at me. “You and I were always the same that way.”

  Dad settled into his recliner and we all took seats around the den to continue having Family Time. Family Time without Hope, that was, who was still sleeping.

  “So,” Dad said, beaming at Jeannie. “How’s my favorite wedding coming along?”

  Jeannie launched into a description of the latest wedding nightmare, and I zoned out. There was only so much discussion of peonies versus lilies that anyone could be expected to take and remain fully conscious, especially since Jeannie refused to listen to anyone else’s advice concerning floral arrangements. I’d actually had to plan floral arrangements many times for alumnae events at the Morrow School, but did Jeannie want my help? Of course not.

  Christian met my eyes from across the room and rolled them ever so slightly, the way he’d done when we were younger and trapped in endless family functions. I hid my grin behind my hand.

  It felt good, I thought.

  It felt good to feel in harmony with everyone. It felt good to hear my father laugh again, and to share moments like that with Christian. It even felt good to reminisce with Jeannie, despite how wrong she was about me and how little she knew me.

  It was so easy to slip back into place. To smile and let everything swirl around me and be okay with it.

  Except it wasn’t okay.

  Was this how it happened? Was this how you went about deceiving and betraying the people closest to you? Atlanta felt far away—like something I’d dreamed up. An escape plan instead of my real life.

  And Travis was just a voice on the phone, not my boyfriend. Not someone real I was betraying.

  This felt real—sitting in the den with the family I’d worked so hard to distance myself from. I was different from them, I’d told myself. I was someone else, someone they couldn’t understand, someone better.

  I suddenly felt cold.

  The longer I sat there, slipping back into old intimacies, the dizzier I felt. How much further from myself was I going to get?

  I couldn’t take another minute of it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, surging to my feet and heading for the door. “I just have to go.”

  And even though part of me had always wanted to get up and just walk out of the house, I discovered that doing it didn’t feel good at all. It felt like running away.

  Again.

  I walked outside and called from my cell phone. I was surprised that I had the number committed to memory, even though I hadn’t dialed it in years.

  “I dialed your phone number from memory,” I announced. “What do you think that means?”

  “That you have to do some spring cleaning in your head,” Rachel replied. “What are you doing? Come over right now.”

  She met me on her parents’ front porch and rushed me all the way upstairs to the attic, yelling something vague toward the back of the house.

  “Best not to engage,” she assured me, shooing me up the stairs toward the third floor.

  I was embarrassingly out of breath when we made it to the final landing, and took note of the many stacked boxes and clothes in long-term storage crates. There was an ancient sewing machine, an appliance graveyard, and beyond all that, in the smallest room, Rachel’s new bedroom. The old one, I remembered, had been all pink and white and canopied, with a dollhouse to die for and a window seat stretched across the second-floor bay window.

  How times changed when you returned to the nest.

  “My humble abode,” Rachel drawled, with a wave of her hand. “Please note the Night Ranger decals attached to the windows. That would be evidence of the eighties rock and roll lifestyle of my brother Timmy.”

  “This is a very serious attic,” I acknowledged as I looked around. The ceilings sloped toward the roof at a dizzying angle and there was that pervasive musty smell—old paint and years of dust. Possibly centuries of dust, come to that.

  “Oh yeah,” Rachel agreed. “I’m almost thirty years old, I bartend in town, I live in the attic like a serial killer. What’s better than this?”

  “You could be in the basement,” I pointed out, flopping into a beanbag. “The basement has a whole different connotation. The attic is kind of starving artist, right? The basement is where the serial killer thing comes in.”

  “Maybe so,” Rachel mused, lounging across her bed, which appeared to be just a box spring and mattress piled on the floor. “But I think that no matter your geographic location inside the house, if you’re actually in the house at all, you’re a big fat loser.”

  “Boomerang,” I corrected. “I believe the term is ‘boomerang.’”

  “Loser,” Rachel repea
ted, drawing the word out into several syllables, and all manner of definitions.

  We grinned at each other, as if there had never been space or group dynamics between us. Or anything worse.

  “So . . .” She waggled her brows at me. “Want to listen to my Duran Duran records?”

  I slunk back to the house when it was nearing 8 p.m. and Rachel was headed off to another night of bartending. I felt about seventeen years old—the kind of wild, reckless seventeen neither she nor I had ever been. I’d spent the entire day giggling and allowing myself to lust over inappropriately young boy musicians on MTV. Now I roared into the driveway with my music blaring out of Mom’s speakers, and enjoyed the feeling entirely too much.

  How sad that it took so little to make me feel so good. So very little, and yet I’d never done it before. I was twenty-eight years old and a mystery to myself. How incredibly pathetic was that?

  I knew that I would have to do a lot of thinking, about the things I was doing and what that made me—but for one moment, with the radio jacked up too loud and the sound of squealing tires just fading away, I thought of none of it and just grinned.

  I swung out of the car, and saw Scott’s car parked in his mother’s driveway. The grin, and the feelings that had occasioned it, disappeared immediately. I felt unsteady. Were my knees weak or was I just physically repulsed by myself? There was no sign of Scott himself, for which, I told myself sternly, I was grateful. I hurried toward the door.

  “Dumb and Dumber left around two,” Hope said, with a yogalike stretch of her arms.

  She hadn’t bothered to get dressed at all, all day. It was a close call as to which one of us was scruffier, and me with half of the dinner I’d cooked across my shirt.

  It was nearing nine-thirty, and we were cleaning up the kitchen together. Upstairs, Dad was still making some settling-down noises. I hoped his improved energy level meant he was on the mend, and wasn’t one of those scary flukes I’d read about, where the sick person gets suddenly better and seems to be improving and then bam! Dead.

  Not that I was morbid.

  “Were they pissed that I had to leave?”

  It was a silly question, I knew. They’d all just stared at me when I’d bolted for the door.

  “How would I be able to tell?” Hope murmured dryly. “Their normal level of rudeness around me is hard to penetrate. Jeannie said to tell you she would call you, though.”

  “Won’t that be fun.”

  Hope wandered off into the family room, and I joined her to watch some summer reruns. She was engrossed in the show, but I couldn’t concentrate at all. It was as if there was something beneath my skin, trying to claw its way out. I couldn’t sit still.

  “Stop fidgeting!” Hope ordered, not looking away from the screen. “I take my television seriously.”

  “I’m going to bed,” I informed her, and headed upstairs.

  Once in my bedroom, though, I was at a loss. I thought maybe I should take a bath, except that promised far too much time for quiet contemplation. Or maybe I should go for a nice long run. Except there was absolutely nothing nice about running, and even if I could force myself to do it, it raised the same issue—time alone in my head.

  I brushed my hair, trying for the hundred strokes I’d read about throughout my youth. It didn’t make my hair shine and glow as promised, but it was something to do—and Lord knew my hair needed as much attention as I could give it. But too soon, even that was finished. I heard a car race by on the street outside and smirked at myself.

  Of course I was going to look, although I imagined Scott had left long before, while I was carefully ensconced in the back of the house, deliberately uninterested in his comings and goings.

  Liar, I scolded myself.

  I leaned over and stared out the window.

  And stopped breathing.

  Scott’s car was still parked in his mother’s driveway.

  And Scott himself was leaning against the trunk, arms folded across his chest, head tilted up, staring directly into my window.

  I didn’t have to be able to see his eyes to feel that stare right down to my toes.

  I could pretend that there was no thought involved. That’s how it was in all the books I read. The heroines would do stupid things “without thought,” but in real life there was too much thought and no getting away from it.

  I could pretend that I was so overwhelmed by the fact of him standing there, waiting for me, that it drove me right out of the house before I knew what I was doing. And it was almost true. I wanted it to be true.

  Except I knew what I was doing.

  I wasn’t necessarily thinking rationally. On some level, I knew that this was different from what had gone before, things that I had hated myself for but that I could convince myself were accidental. His fault. His idea, his move, his mouth. But even I couldn’t persuade myself that he was doing anything more than standing outside the house. Everything else would be entirely my responsibility.

  A brief, searing image of Travis flashed across my mind, but I dismissed it. I ignored it.

  There was no accident in each step I took, each stair I descended. There was no alcohol involved in the excited pounding of the blood through my body. There was no mistake. I walked down the stairs myself. Scott wasn’t there to grab my arm or lean in with his clever mouth. There were no taunts, no jibes.

  I just stepped out the front door, closed it quietly behind me, and walked to him.

  Chapter 9

  Guilt made me stupid.

  I pestered Travis at his office.

  “How come you never call me?” I demanded when he picked up his phone.

  “Because you call me.” He sounded lazy and amused, the way he always did. He is solid and real, I thought: I am the one losing my grip. “You doing all right, hon? You sound pretty uptight.”

  “Everything’s fine.” I gripped the phone so hard it made my hand ache. “Except my boyfriend doesn’t care enough to keep in touch with me. Should I be wondering what else is going on that’s so much more important?”

  Guilt made me project.

  “Just work,” Travis said, in a tone I recognized immediately. His I-know-you’re-trying-to-pick-a-fight-with-me, but-I’m-not-rising-to-the-bait tone.

  “I’m sorry.” I couldn’t seem to stop being snotty. “Am I bothering you?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Travis drawled. “I’m going to hang up now, but I’ll call you later this afternoon. This is not because I don’t want to talk to you, but because I definitely don’t feel like being in trouble when we’re not even in the same state, okay?”

  I didn’t like how funny he found it. Patronizing jackass.

  But that only made me feel worse. Projecting.

  I hung up the phone and sighed heavily.

  “And how is the boyfriend?” Hope asked from her position at the table. She was idly flipping through a magazine while she shoveled in some cereal.

  “Great,” I muttered.

  “Is he coming up north?” Hope asked innocently. Too innocently.

  “He’s very busy. It’s his father’s consulting firm, you know. Someday Travis is going to have to take over the whole business.”

  I slammed the phone back into its cradle.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Hope sounded entirely too amused.

  Making a face at the top of Hope’s head, I picked up the sponge from the sink, aimed it, and winged it at her. Score.

  “You,” Hope said with malice, wiping the splattered soap and water from her face, “are so dead.”

  “Yeah?” All OK Corral.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, and lunged.

  I squealed, and bolted.

  “How are they?” Dad asked when I came into the den.

  He was in his usual position: leg propped up before him, pillows at his back. The agitated tone in his voice and the undue look of concern were new.

  “The fish seem fine,” I said, handing him the clipboard.

  I wasn’t aware that fish of
fered a particularly broad range of emotion to choose from. In my experience—limited, it’s true—they were either fine or they were dead.

  Dad took the clipboard almost too eagerly, flipping through the pages and frowning at the flowchart and graph. I watched him do this, aware that I was frowning myself.

  It was disconcerting, to say the least, to watch a parent be so invested in something you were pretty sure you could trot out as evidence against them at a commitment hearing.

  “So,” I said, perching on the edge of the couch. “You really do have a lot of fish, Dad.”

  Would that ever stop—that overly formal way of talking to him? As if I wasn’t sure we could just talk, and so had to work harder at the usual words?

  “Some of the fellows at the conventions have a great deal more than me,” he said with a dismissive chuckle. “I’m strictly a hobbyist.”

  Wow. That was a sentence with a whole lot of information packed into it.

  Conventions? Was he kidding?

  “Conventions?” I echoed, in a far less accusatory tone than the one I’d used in my head. Let’s hope.

  “Sure,” he said, still focused on the clipboard pages. “I go a few times a year. I like to see what’s out there.”

  I pressed my fingers to my temples, visions of commitment hearings flooding my brain.

  “Huh,” I said, trying desperately not to sound the way I felt. This required clearing my throat. “Why do you like fish so much?” I asked him.

  He raised his head and focused on me. “What do you mean?”

  “You know,” I said, and smiled. “You spend so much time with them, and you go to conventions—”

  It cost me to pronounce the word with no particular inflection.

  “—and I guess I didn’t really know it was such a huge part of your life.” There. That sounded diplomatic, right?

  “So,” I continued, gathering steam, “since I’m spending so much time down there while I’m home, feeding them and everything, it would be great if I knew why you’re so excited about them.”