Everyone Else's Girl

  I called Rachel that afternoon.

  “I’m really embarrassed,” I said when she picked up the phone. “I was so insane and I meant to keep in touch because I really liked hanging out with you and now I’m back in town—”

  “I love this groveling!” Rachel laughed. “But the phone works both ways and I think you were the last one to e-mail. Come on over. I can’t bring myself to study anymore anyway.”

  We ended up in a local hamburger joint that did double duty as a watering hole, and a hole it was.

  “It looks like a dive, I know,” Rachel said as we walked toward the bar’s front door. “But it’s crawling with cops and lawyers.”

  “So it’s still a dive, it’s just a really safe dive?”

  “Exactly.” Rachel laughed. “And I insist on coming here once a month to get myself a cheeseburger fix.”

  Inside, we slid into a booth along the wall. Rachel raised an eyebrow at me as I looked around, feeling furtive.

  “I was just thinking that I’ve never actually had a single run-in with a cop in my whole life,” I admitted. “This is the closest I’ve been.”

  “These are cops from affluent suburbs,” Rachel said, with a negligent wave of her hand. “It’s a whole different thing.” She tilted her head to one side and smiled slightly. “You remember Kevin Bigelow, right?”

  And there it was, on the table between us.

  I had the sudden, giddy urge to lie and pretend—that I didn’t know who he was, or that I only vaguely remembered him but he had no significance. After all, I was getting good at lies to save my own ass, wasn’t I? I could turn over a whole new leaf and just be the sort of person who lied. To everyone. About everything.

  But: “Of course I remember him,” I said.

  This time my voice didn’t betray me, as it had with Travis. “I owe you an apology from about ten years back,” I told her.

  “You don’t,” she said. “Not really. Anyway, you already apologized the night I ran into you in the bar. Enough apologizing.”

  “I can blame Jeannie for a lot of that situation, and I do,” I said, “but at the end of the day I should have told you myself.”

  “You should have,” she agreed. “But it was just stupid girl stuff, Meredith. Didn’t you see Mean Girls?”

  Stupid was the word.

  It was difficult, looking back, to explain the undercurrents and dramas that played out in our group of friends that summer. We’d all had our freshman years at different colleges, and yet had banded back together with the unspoken assumption that nothing had changed. In some ways that was true. In other ways, we were total strangers.

  Jeannie still ruled, and Ashley was still her most devoted minion, even though I was nominally her best friend. Things were silly and histrionic that summer. Rachel was still the target of choice when we got bored, and the easiest thing to concentrate on was Rachel’s age-old crush on Kevin Bigelow.

  “Do you remember what he looked like in high school?” Rachel asked now, snickering.

  I had a brief flash of memory, all swagger and a cocky grin. And something far more horrifying:

  “Didn’t he have a mullet?”

  “He sure did,” Rachel said mournfully. “And how self-destructive was my crush on him? He only dated anorexic girls with Daddy issues.”

  “Sandy Marconi and Tara Silverberg,” I supplied automatically. “So very tiny, and so very lost.”

  “Exactly,” Rachel agreed.

  We ordered food from the waitress and then leaned back into the booth and lingered over our beers.

  “At the junior prom,” Rachel said, playing with her beer bottle, “Kevin Bigelow finally appeared before me and asked me to dance. Thinking I had died and gone to heaven, or woken up to find myself in a teen romance novel, I agreed.”

  “Why don’t I know this story?” I demanded. “Where was I?”

  “Jeannie knows this story,” Rachel said. Meaningfully.

  I winced. “This can’t possibly have a happy ending, then.”

  “After the dance, which I remember was to ‘The One I Love’ by R.E.M., just to twist the knife in, he whooped it up and ran back over to his boys to claim his bet money.”

  We both paused to consider that.

  I blew out a breath. “What a shit.”

  “Please.” Rachel shook her head. “That was par for the course.”

  The worst part was, she was right.

  Jeannie and Ashley spent hours setting Rachel up for humiliating interactions with Kevin. They told her he wanted to meet her places and then would drive there themselves, to laugh at her as she waited, so hopeful, for a boy who would never show. Meanwhile, I would be in the backseat, telling them they were horrible but not doing anything to stop it.

  And why not? First of all, because I didn’t go up against Jeannie. I never had. But that summer, that was just an excuse.

  The truth was, I liked Kevin Bigelow myself. I went out with him on a few dates, in fact, all secret, because Rachel’s crush was well-known. Obviously, I couldn’t tell her.I didn’t value Rachel enough to be honest with her about my feelings back then, but I didn’t want her to hate me.

  It only made sense if you were a teenage girl.

  “It’s actually worse than you know,” Rachel told me now. “I lost all that weight in college, I spent some quality time in therapy, and then, when I found myself living at home, what do you suppose I did when I discovered that Kevin Bigelow is one of our town’s finest?”

  “Justifiable homicide?”

  My memories of Kevin, happily, involved only very minor fooling around. But he was inextricably linked with all the fallout that came after that summer.

  “Much worse,” Rachel said, almost gloomily. “I dated him.” She waited for me to absorb that, and nodded. “I slept with a guy who once won a bet by dancing with me.” She frowned at her beer. “How did I get on this subject?”

  “I think that’s another girl thing,” I ventured. “You have to do really horrible things sexually just to, I don’t know, hate yourself enough to force yourself to change.”

  A chill snaked through me then, and I thought about Scott suddenly. Wasn’t that what I had done? Used him to feel just badly enough about myself that I couldn’t possibly work things out with Travis? Because just feeling vaguely dissatisfied wasn’t reason to end things with someone, but cheating on them was. Cheating, in fact, was pretty much the breakup trump card. I shook my head to clear it of that unpleasant realization. Had I really done that?

  “It was a really rough time,” Rachel was saying. “I had just completely failed my first-year law school exams because I didn’t really want to be a lawyer but I had somehow ended up in law school and I didn’t know how to get out of it. Except fail. Spectacularly.”

  “Ouch,” I murmured. I would save the speculation about Scott for another time. Maybe when I was feeling less fragile.

  “Seriously,” she said. “Kevin Bigelow seemed like a girl power move in the middle of all that.”

  “I can’t even remember why it was so important I keep it a secret,” I told her. “Jeannie and I had a huge fight, and we were never really close after that night she told you about Kevin and me. I guess that summer was just the last straw.”

  “Everyone did crazy shit in high school just to survive.” Her voice was quiet. “I don’t blame you for that. You were always nice to me.”

  “I wanted everyone to think I was the nice one,” I agreed. The word “nice” stuck in my throat a little bit. “It turns out I wasn’t nice at all. I’m not very nice now, either.”

  “Bad news, Meredith,” Rachel said with a grin. “You might have to be human and flawed like the rest of us.”

  We sat there for a moment, with Joe Cocker on the jukebox, rasping and wailing like some kind of classic rock absolution, and then we toasted each other and moved on.

  Chapter 14

  Temp jobs came in two distinct types: boring or humiliating.

  Applying to tempo
rary agencies was just the latter.

  I learned that I had wasted my time and my parents’ money on a college education, when a secretarial degree would have garnered me an immediate position with a starting salary larger than any I’d seen in my employment history. I learned that no one was interested in my academic record anyway, because I had attended a liberal arts college, and as such, my studies were too vague. At the same time, no one would be likely to care about my actual work experience, because it was too specific.

  The only thing I was good for—and there was unanimous agreement on this point between Pat, Debbie, and Sheila at the Temp-o-Rama—was scrub work. Filing. Answering phones, in the sense of literally picking up a phone and taking a message, because real “switchboarding” required years of training. And, last but never least, the ever popular data entry.

  And yet temping was the least of my humiliations.

  It wasn’t that my parents went out of their way to make life difficult, it was more that difficult was the way they liked things. Talk about being set in their ways—they could set records. I was reprimanded for using the laundry room when my mother wanted to and not cleaning up after myself in the kitchen fast enough. Every morning there was a silent pitched battle over the first section of the New York Times. My father demanded absolute silence over breakfast and my mother preferred nonstop chatter about the day ahead. If I avoided controversy and hid in my childhood bedroom with my boxes, I was chastised for treating the place “like a hotel.” If I joined in family dinners, I felt like I was a particularly unhappy seventeen all over again.

  This is why, I reminded myself daily, adult children were not meant to live at home.

  It was a Thursday night, and Rachel and I were considering another round of drinks. We had fallen into a pattern, which was: we went out as much as possible to pretend that we weren’t actually living in our parents’ houses. It was only moderately successful.

  I was just about to launch into another tale of parental oppression and humiliation—a daily occurrence, not unlike high school—when Rachel’s attention was caught by a group just coming in from outdoors. She waved.

  “My friend Jessica and some of her coworkers,” she told me, her eyes sparkling. “Jessica was my roommate in law school. They’re all really cool, actually, for a bunch of lawyers.”

  Since my back was to the door, I decided not to expend the energy it would require to turn around and watch the approaching group.

  “This is the most relaxed I’ve been in days,” I confessed. “For some reason, being forced to explain why I can’t type ninety words per minute is starting to get on my nerves a little bit. Especially when the person asking is an evil temp manager who really just wants me to—”

  “Meredith,” Scott said.

  My head snapped up.

  His eyes locked with mine and it was exactly the same as it had always been. That catch in my breath, that clutch in my gut.

  His hair was slightly longer, and he still looked edible in a suit. His eyes were still that gray and bright with his private amusement.

  “You guys remember each other, right?” Rachel asked in a tone I recognized as intrigued.

  “We grew up together,” I mumbled, and could feel myself flushing. “Of course we remember each other.”

  I couldn’t seem to drag my gaze away from Scott’s.

  He had no such difficulty. He smiled at Rachel.

  “We grew up on the same street,” he corrected, with that lazy undercurrent of laughter. “Not exactly the same thing.”

  Rachel looked at me. I just rolled my eyes.

  Scott swung into the booth next to me, and proceeded to ignore me as introductions were made around the table. The names went in one ear and out the other, and I wondered if everyone could see the turmoil going on beneath my skin. I felt as if it must be tattooed across my forehead, for all I was trying to be casual.

  I had convinced myself that when I saw him again, all of that heat and yearning would be gone. Scott was just a symptom of the breakdown with Travis, I’d decided. I’d needed Scott so that Travis was no longer an option for me. Scott himself had nothing to do with anything. It had all become perfectly clear to me after the Kevin Bigelow conversation with Rachel.

  I’d imagined that when I saw him again, I would feel embarrassed and then move on with my life. Isn’t that what people did? Granted, Scott represented one-third of the people I had slept with in my twenty-eight years, but that was neither here nor there. Until Scott, I hadn’t even known that sex could be a compulsion.

  One that was still with me. What the hell was wrong with me? It didn’t help that Scott was so close beside me, completely focused on the group, completely unaware that I could feel the warmth of his body and smell the soap he used. Irish Spring, I happened to know. Only the fact that I had to drive home kept me from diving headfirst into a pitcher of martinis.

  “Stop fidgeting,” Scott said, turning to look at me.

  “I can fidget if I feel like it.” Because I was so very mature.

  “You can,” Scott agreed. His eyes laughed at me. “What are you doing here?”

  “Here in New Jersey or here with Rachel or here in this bar?” I asked.

  “Pick one.”

  “I live here.”

  “In what sense?” Scott asked, with an exaggerated sigh.

  “In the sense that this is where I live.” I sniffed. “This may come as a big shock to you, but sometimes people change their geographic location without your express permission.”

  “I never thought you were incapable of change, Meredith. Just flailing around in an identity crisis.”

  I opened my mouth to fire something back at him but then considered. I grinned a little ruefully.

  “That’s not a bad way to put it.” I grabbed my beer bottle. “I think I’ve evolved to treading water now. No more flailing.”

  “Is the object to swim or to get out of the water?”

  “To decide what I want to do,” I said quietly. “And then do it.” Like most things in life (i.e., “grow up”), this sounded very simple but was, in practice, enormously complicated. But I wasn’t prepared to get into that with him.

  “Not a bad plan,” Scott said. He sat back, and then angled his body slightly, adroitly cutting me off from the rest of the table and Rachel’s obvious eavesdropping.

  “That was a nice move.”

  “You like that? I’m actually pretty slick.”

  “If you really believe that, you need to get out of New Jersey.”

  “Why are you back in New Jersey?” he asked. “Your dad? Is he okay?”

  I looked at my hands rather than at him.

  “Things fell apart in Atlanta. I didn’t see any reason to stay there.”

  “Are you really going to make me ask?”

  “Yes, we broke up.” I searched his face for some reaction. “Satisfied?”

  “Interested,” Scott amended. A beat. “Why did you break up with him?”

  “I didn’t.”

  He watched me as the color rose in my cheeks.

  “What?” I could hear the belligerence in my voice. “Do you want a play-by-play?”

  “I really don’t.”

  We sat in silence. The music and the conversation swelled around us. Our last interaction hung there, rainy and awful, between us. But there was that damned attraction as well, which just seemed to grow the longer we sat there. Whatever he might have been while Travis was in the picture, he felt like something else entirely now. I felt a lot of things, but embarrassed wasn’t one of them.

  “So,” Rachel broke in pointedly. “What are you two whispering about in the corner?”

  “I can’t believe you’re not going to tell me the whole story!” Rachel cried much later. She was outraged. “You two were sporting underlying sexual tension! You were whispering!”

  “It is almost three in the morning,” I pointed out. “Can we get some coffee if I’m going to be attacked?”

  “Do y
ou know how much of a legend Scott Sheridan is?” Rachel continued as if I hadn’t spoken. I gave up and concentrated on the road. “He is by far the hottest attorney in the prosecutor’s office. I know certain people who have claimed to risk arrest just to have a whole trial to gaze at him. My friend Jessica has had a crush on him for the past three years!”

  “She should date him,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “She’s married,” Rachel said dismissively. “It’s a nonproductive work crush. The point is, you’re holding out on me! After our post-Kevin Bigelow bonding! I’m wounded to the core!”

  “No, you are not.” I looked at her as we came to a stoplight. “You just want the gossip.”

  “Well.” Rachel grinned. “True.”

  I returned my attention to the road as the light turned green. “The hottest attorney in the prosecutor’s office, huh?”

  “Yup.” Rachel yawned, then made a face. “I mean, okay, that’s actually not a hard category to win, but even so. Talk about overcoming a rough beginning—do you remember how nasty everyone was to the poor guy?”

  “He cried in the third grade.”

  “Clearly you do. Except you and he definitely seem to have a history beyond any third-grade weeping—”

  “He’s really considered that eligible?” I was desperate to interrupt. “I think you’re making that up.”

  Rachel laughed. “You must be kidding,” she said. “Spill the dirt, sweetheart.”

  We had a stare-off, which I lost, but only because I was operating a motor vehicle.

  I made a sigh into a minor opera. Then:

  “Yes,” I said. “We were . . . seeing each other. This summer.”

  “This summer? But you—oh.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”

  “I can see how Scott could be pretty high on the irresistible scale,” Rachel said with a loyalty that fired up the shame in my gut. I wondered if it would always be there. “I’m just . . . You just seem so . . .” She shrugged and smiled. “Miss Prim and Proper. I’m surprised that you’re not.”