Everyone Else's Girl

  “You’re moving out?” I stared at him as if I’d never seen him before. Which, I thought dimly, was sort of true. “This conversation is just . . . a courtesy call? To inform me of your decision?”

  Travis sighed, and stared at his hands. “I thought . . . When you came back, I thought things might work out. I really did. I wanted it to.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I whispered. “Was I on probation?”

  I felt a kind of buzzing in my ears, and could almost feel words forming on my tongue . . . Guess what? I could say. I cheated on you. Repeatedly. All summer.

  I wanted to hurt him, I realized with some amazement.

  “When we almost broke up that time,” Travis said in a very low voice. “You remember, that first summer. You cried for days. I thought you might break in two. But look at us now, Meredith.” He looked up and caught my gaze, surprising me. “You’re barely reacting.”

  “Is this a test?” I asked, my voice a little rough. I coughed. “If I cry, you stay?”

  Travis ran his hands through his hair, and then looked at me, his face twisting with emotion.

  “I don’t want to drag this out—I don’t—” He shook his head. “I don’t want to hate you.”

  And to my horror, his eyes welled up. The sight of his tears took the air right out of my lungs, and the poison I’d been carrying around in my gut suddenly seemed to ease away.

  “Don’t cry,” I said. Soothing him. Finally.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” Travis told me.

  I moved across the room to him, and we held each other, even though the holding couldn’t help. He nestled his head into my neck and I felt a tremendous sadness wash through me.

  I knew two things then: it was over—had been over for longer than I wanted to admit—and I would never tell him what I’d done.

  For the first few days after the breakup, people called. I hadn’t told anyone in the city of Atlanta about what had happened, and could therefore track Travis’s movements through the condolence calls I received from the girlfriends and wives, and the odd male friend. I let the answering machine pick up most of them, and thought I could figure out Travis’s future by the innuendo I detected in some of the messages. Travis was a catch, after all. By the weekend, though, the calls began to trickle away. The fact of the matter was, these were not my friends. I was Travis’s girlfriend, and as such, exchangeable. Even though I’d expected it, part of me had imagined it would be different for me.

  I was surprised at how much it hurt to discover otherwise.

  That weekend, I hibernated. I cried more than I imagined I should—because I didn’t deserve to be so upset over something I’d valued so little, did I? But that didn’t stop the tears.

  “Why stay there?” Hope asked with her usual briskness. “What’s in Atlanta now?”

  “So what? I’m just going to relocate every time I break up with someone?” I sniffed. “That seems kind of ridiculous.”

  “There are a lot of places to live in the world. Why choose the one where you might trip over your ex at the local supermarket?”

  “I don’t have any particular urge to go anywhere,” I admitted. “I mean, I would move to Paris tomorrow except I don’t speak French. And I wanted to live in Seattle when I saw Singles.”

  “Didn’t everyone?” Hope sounded delighted. “You should absolutely move to Seattle. I’m sure it’s still as cool. When did that movie come out?”

  I went to work every day and, for the first time, really thought about my job. I had succeeded at it because I alone of the women I worked with hadn’t had Life Stuff intervene. Yet.

  After all, the job was just a job, a convenient half-career to augment the family’s finances, or to mark time and keep a girl in lipstick and rent until Prince Charming proposed. Which wasn’t to say development wasn’t a career-oriented field, or that someone couldn’t make a terrific career in it. Just not at the Morrow School.

  Real development jobs with long-term possibilities were at universities, where the development offices were huge and the capital campaigns breathtaking in scope. The Morrow School was just playing house.

  And the fact was, I didn’t actually think the pampered little princesses who swanned about the place needed the money I helped raise. They didn’t even appreciate it; they took it for granted, and their parents insisted upon the facilities only that sort of financial support could provide. It was hardly changing anybody’s life. And when I was finally honest with myself, I knew I only did it because I was good at it. Not because I liked it.

  I’d known all this before, of course. But suddenly I was looking at my life as it was, instead of the way I’d wanted it to be. My entire life in Atlanta was carefully built on my own belief that I could be the shiny, happy, nice girl I’d decided to be. The one I’d been trying to be my whole life. Except it turned out that I didn’t like where that girl ended up. I didn’t want to be a happy robot anymore. I wanted to be me.

  Whoever the hell that was.

  My mother picked up the phone, and I launched into a defensive explanation. After all, she’d predicted this, hadn’t she? All her dire warnings about Travis as she kicked up her heels canalside in Venice. Not that I was thinking about that. It would make me bitter.

  “It would make so much sense for me right now,” I argued. “It will only be for a while. I just don’t think Atlanta is the place for me and I want to take a break and figure out where the place for me is—”

  “Just come home,” Mom said, surprising me into silence.

  “Um,” I said eloquently. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” she said. “That’s what it’s for.”

  Travis was stunned. I told him on the same day I gave notice—not even two weeks, I was sorry, I had to go. No one argued.

  That weekend Hope drove down to Atlanta, informing me from her cell phone that she was on her way. When she arrived it was late Friday night and Christian was behind the wheel.

  “I’m surprised you came,” I told Christian. “I mean, it was hard enough for you to make it to the house while I was there.”

  He blinked, possibly at all the passive-aggression in my voice, and then shook his head at me.

  “You’re my sister, Meredith!” He sounded offended.

  The three of us packed as much of my stuff as we could fit into two cars, which was a lot more than you might expect.

  “We don’t have any more room,” I said at one point, defeated by my inability to force another carton of books into the backseat.

  “I refuse to accept that,” Hope retorted, a wild gleam in her eye. “There is always room. Step aside.”

  “You definitely need to get the hell out of here,” Christian informed me during one of our breaks, sitting out on the stoop in the soupy southern air. “I still don’t know why you moved down here in the first place.”

  “I don’t know.” Every item I took from the apartment and packed away in the car made me doubt myself. “Maybe I need to stay here. Maybe what I really need to do is make my own life, somewhere far away from . . .” I remembered who I was talking to. “Somewhere that’s mine.”

  Christian gave me an intent look, then returned his attention to the street in front of us.

  “That sounds like a hell of a lot of unnecessary work, running all over the place and living in Deliverance country just because our family can be a little overwhelming.” His lips curved slightly. “I’m not saying I don’t understand the urge.”

  “I’m moving back home. With Mom and Dad. I’m twenty-eight years old.” I let the words lie there for a moment. And then winced. “There’s no prettying that up into a rousing chorus.”

  Hope staggered through the door then, knees buckling under the weight of the carton she carried. She teetered over and steadied herself against the wall. Panting, she eyed us.

  “When I’m the one who’s not slacking, there’s a problem,” she bit out.

  Christian let out a long-suffering sigh,
but I could see he was biting back a grin as he hauled himself to his feet.

  “I got it.” He wrenched the carton away from her.

  Hope winked at me and then headed back inside. I made to follow her, but stopped when Christian called my name.

  “I’m the first one to be hard on you,” he said when I turned to look at him. “But if it helps, I think you’re doing the right thing.”

  When everything was packed and Christian and Hope were sitting in their car, fighting over the music and ready to caravan north, Travis and I stood in silence at the curb. He’d come over to help, which had mostly meant he’d stayed out of Christian and Hope’s snarling way. They’d never liked him, they claimed loudly, and were prepared to prove it.

  “I didn’t think you’d leave Atlanta,” Travis said, with some difficulty. “I guess I didn’t think about what you would do.”

  We stared at each other. I imagined I could see his future, spilling out in front of us, my own figure growing smaller and smaller in his consciousness until I was forgotten entirely. It was better that way. I reached up and touched his cheek with the hand that would never wear his ring.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “About—” I tried to smile. “About everything. I wish . . .”

  “I do too,” he whispered.

  Neither of us said good-bye.

  Chapter 13

  I moved back into my childhood bedroom, the room I’d been more than delighted to leave just a few weeks earlier, and quickly discovered that my return to the house as resident was actually more depressing than any of my previous returns as a guest. Go figure.

  The first few days I was home, I woke up early and made lots of noises about rediscovering myself and my purpose in life.

  “I feel like this is a new direction!” I enthused over coffee. I was betting my parents would find this sort of presentation impressive.

  “Please pass the jam,” my mother responded, without looking up from the op-ed section of the New York Times.

  I spent the rest of my time skulking around the house with Hope, but this was short-lived. She took off for her long-anticipated trip to Costa Rica, and I promptly discovered that I didn’t feel like doing much besides sleeping. So I slept whenever I could, which meant my life back at home turned out to greatly mimic the kind of nocturnal hours I associated with being a college student. Except this time, without a dorm full of people in the same boat.

  When I was awake, I bundled myself in my comforter and took over Hope’s room and its entertainment center. I watched every Molly Ringwald film I could find in the video store. I watched the daily Buffy reruns on cable. I watched so many hours of MTV that it was possible whole days slipped by with me staring slack-jawed at Eminem, Justin Timberlake, and the many pretenders to their thrones. I flicked through the channels, one after the other, and watched whatever caught my fancy, whether it was one of those seductive Time-Life music infomercials or Spanish soap operas with all their black mascara and gesturing.

  I wore a daily uniform of sweats and a raggedy T-shirt that I’d stolen from Christian sometime in the eighties. I ate Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts directly from the box because I didn’t have the energy to toast them, and I ate fistfuls of Cheez-Its because they were alarmingly addictive and no one could eat just one. Sometimes, in the afternoons, when I was having my breakfast of a pot of coffee, I would watch strange reality programming with my father in the family room, where he was usually resting his leg.

  “I hate these shows,” Dad said one day, during a commercial.

  I focused on him, bleary-eyed.

  “I love them.” It was possible that I hadn’t spoken aloud in some time. Maybe whole days. “The best part is that real people actually act this way.”

  “Real people act just as foolishly every day,” Dad retorted. “You don’t need a camera to figure that out.”

  I felt my eyes narrow at him. Was he referring to my life? Did he actually know anything about my life? Not that I was feeling at all defensive, and what did he know, anyway? His real world took place in an aquarium under artificial light, hidden out of sight beneath the house.

  “I’m just going to close my eyes and see if I can get a nap in,” my father said, almost as if he could read my mind.

  “I’ll let you know what happens,” I muttered, settling deeper into the couch and shoving my hand into the box of Pop-Tarts. “Reality can be tricky.”

  Finally, after a week in which I did not leave the house even once and showered even less, my mother appeared in my bedroom at the outrageous, dawnlike hour of ten-thirty one morning and began tossing open curtains.

  “What are you doing?” I croaked from beneath a pile of bedclothes.

  “It’s time to get up,” she announced, in a voice I remembered all too well from childhood. Two parts steel, one part ice, and a big portion of ass-about-to-be-kicked. I hadn’t heard that particular voice in a long, long time.

  I struggled to a sitting position in the bed and scraped at my hair, which was embarrassingly greasy and lank.

  “That’s a tremendous start,” Mom said crisply. “You have fifteen minutes to take a shower and put on any article of clothing other than that revolting ensemble you’ve been shuffling around in.”

  “What happens in fifteen minutes?” I asked, doing a good impression of surly.

  “You and I have a conversation in the kitchen.” My mother could wilt surliness with a single arched brow. “I suggest you shake a leg. You won’t like it if I have to come back into this cave.”

  I made a huge production of rolling my eyes, and huffed and puffed my way into the shower, but I pulled on a pair of shorts and a clean shirt and managed to make it downstairs with five minutes to spare.

  Take that, I thought triumphantly. Never let it be said I couldn’t follow instructions well.

  My mother looked up from the New York Times and smiled calmly, as if she had never doubted for a moment that I would follow her instructions to the letter.

  In fact, I was quite certain she’d had no doubts at all.

  “It’s nice to see you,” she said. “You’ve become something of a zombie.”

  I was more familiar with that tone. Light, amused, and deadly.

  “Yeah,” I muttered.

  I poured a hot cup of coffee. I hadn’t fallen asleep until dawn had begun streaking the sky with blue, and my head throbbed. The first, delicious sip went right where it hurt. I sighed in pleasure.

  “Do you have a particular time frame in mind for your deterioration?” my mother continued. She might have been conducting an interview. “I only ask because we’re actually having a wedding here shortly.”

  I swiveled my eyes from my cup to my mother.

  “Very funny, Mom.”

  “And imagine my shock when I discovered the kitchen fairies came in the night and ate a week’s worth of dessert. By the pint.”

  “I’m a little depressed, I think,” I allowed after a moment, thinking about all of that ice cream and feeling significantly more depressed.

  “This is what’s going to happen,” Mom said, very crisply. “You will get up before ten every day and you will leave this house. Preferably to get a job. If you feel that you’re too depressed to get a job, you need to find yourself a decent therapist. But there will be no more wallowing. And if I were you, I would burn those clothes.”

  “But . . .” I wanted to argue, but I knew she was right. “But I don’t know what to do,” I admitted finally. “What if I never figure out what I want to do? What happens then?”

  “You keep looking,” she replied, with compassion. “But you’re not going to do yourself any favors if you keep on going like this.”

  I fiddled with my cup.

  “I’m surprised at you, Meredith,” Mom continued. “I never expected this sort of thing from you.”

  Something stilled inside me. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I thought you were the responsible one,” Mom said, laughing slightly. “But if th
is is how you behaved when you went back down to Atlanta . . . Well.”

  “‘Well’?” I echoed. I felt more alert than I had in days. Anger began to pool in my abdomen. This, finally, was it. The I told you so portion of the program. I’d been waiting for this since I moved home.

  “No man wants to live with a zombie,” Mom told me. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that Travis couldn’t handle it.”

  I blinked at my cup, because there was a sort of dim ringing in my ears and my eyes seemed blurry. The anger in my gut liquefied into fury and shot through my veins. But I couldn’t seem to form a single word.

  I thought about how hard I’d tried to do what she seemed to do so effortlessly—make a perfect home, have a perfect life, all the while being so nice, so approachable. When I looked back on it now, it seemed as if my whole life had been about me trying to do what she did. Hope had said it was an act, but I’d never thought so. I’d figured it was the way you were supposed to be. And maybe that was why my whole relationship with Travis had been doomed from the start, because the truth was, I wasn’t all that nice. Because if I was, I wouldn’t have the intense urge to fling my coffee mug at my mother’s head.

  “I think,” Mom continued in that infuriating, calm tone, “that you should start thinking about your future, Meredith.”

  “I think about it all the time!” I snapped at her. The anger was simmering in my blood like some kind of drug. I felt like someone else entirely, and my throat ached from all the things I didn’t know how to say. Like—If you hadn’t gone on your trip, I wouldn’t have had to stay here, and if I hadn’t stayed here, I wouldn’t have become this stranger to myself, and I would still be able to be happy in Atlanta with Travis.

  My head swam with the effort of not saying any of that. I ignored her look of surprise, lurched to my feet, and staggered from the room before I lost control completely and started shouting.