Everyone Else's Girl

  I sat up in bed, stunned.

  I wasn’t sure I could breathe.

  Jeannie was right: I’d been on the fast track to Bitchville for years.

  The only person who thought of me as good and nice was me.

  “It’s the single scariest thing about being a woman,” Rachel was ranting. “You know that one morning you’re going to wake up and realize: I am her.” She shrugged. “It’s unavoidable. It’s why men insist on meeting your mother before they get serious—it’s a sneak preview.”

  It was a few days later and we had just finished lunch in town. I had concluded a temp job at a scary manufacturing plant in Secaucus the day before, and Rachel had no classes on Thursdays.

  I had thought a lot about Jeannie’s take on my relationship with Rachel too. Maybe she had a point that I’d liked allying myself with Rachel and against Jeannie. I could admit it. But the fact was, I liked Rachel just because I liked her. That was all that mattered, wasn’t it?

  In any case, there was no one else I liked enough to do the lunch and coffee thing. I figured that counted for something, and the rest would come.

  But anyway, we were talking about becoming our mothers, one of Rachel’s favorite topics.

  “Surely it should be like a buffet,” I argued, using my latte for emphasis. “You pick and choose the traits you like, and skip over the ones that drive you insane with rage and which you vowed you would never, ever have yourself. You’d die first.”

  Rachel eyed me over her own cup. “Genetics isn’t a buffet,” she pointed out. “Try a time bomb. I’ve seen the future, and it involves breasts to my knees and a map of the greater New York metropolitan area across my face.”

  “At least you’re spared the personality defects,” I countered. “No one’s exactly lining up to date the Early Christian Martyr over here, you know.”

  “What part of ‘breasts to the knees’ do you think is okay?” Rachel demanded. “I’d much rather have the personality of a bull terrier and perky breasts, thank you very much.”

  We moved on to less emotional topics—namely, my continuing attempts to find nonhumiliating employment opportunities.

  “Hope is working at a bookstore now. I could work at a bookstore.”

  “Hope is what? Twenty-two?” Rachel shook her head. “What do you like to do?”

  “I like not having this conversation,” I said after a moment’s pause to think about it. “I think it’s only a very select few who have all that drive and ambition. I’m mostly looking for something to pay the bills. If it’s kind of fun also, well, that’s just icing.”

  Rachel considered. “Why not go to graduate school? You don’t have to have this conversation again for two to seven years.”

  “Why would I go to graduate school? I don’t have any idea what I want to do.” I frowned at her. “And it’s not as if I thought college was so much fun. I couldn’t wait to get out.”

  “I’m not unsympathetic to this, really,” Rachel said. “After the whole law school debacle, I flailed around a lot and did my share of hideous temp jobs.” She swept her latte through the air in an arc. “You don’t know pain until you are crawling around in a freezing cold warehouse, affixing stickers to things and pretending that you actually counted all the eight million and seven hundred thousand buttons in the carton.”

  “That sounds like big fun.” I shuddered.

  “So I figured that since the fact that it all sucked was a given, the idea was to get the most out of a bad deal. Since you can make more money with an MBA, I thought: Why not? So here I am. If you have to have a corporate job, might as well be the best corporate job, right?”

  “That’s not a bad theory,” I mused. “But I don’t think I could make it through an MBA course. Isn’t there a whole thing about statistics?”

  “Hold that thought,” Rachel commanded, squinting up at the building we were passing. “I have to pick up a prescription.”

  I opted to stay outside and enjoy the Indian summer. Most of the actual summer had been a haze of high humidity and higher temperatures, but today was gorgeous. Blue skies and a warm sun.

  It was still hard to believe that I was back in New Jersey. If I could only find an appropriate career and stop having fights with various members of my family, maybe everything would be okay after all.

  “Well, well, well,” said a smug voice. “If it isn’t Miss Meredith McKay.”

  Kevin Bigelow, of all people, stood before me.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that I might actually run into him. He was just part of a story. He wasn’t real.

  But here he was, standing with his legs planted wide apart and his meaty hands on his hips. The remnants of his high school hotness were evident in the way he held himself, even if his waistline was starting to rebel against his belt. Happily, he’d rethought the mullet.

  “Hello, Kevin,” I said politely. “It’s great to see you. Gosh, it’s been a long time.”

  “You’re looking good,” Kevin told me. “Look—Ing—Good!” His voice was overly familiar and his smile could really only be described as shit-eating.

  This, I told myself, is the reason Jeannie and I stopped being friends, why I betrayed Rachel’s trust, and the proof to every single thing Jeannie said to me the other night.

  He didn’t really seem worth all the trouble.

  He remembered that summer, I could see, thanks to that smirk of his. Moreover, he seemed to think we were having a moment.

  “I haven’t seen you in years,” he told me, as if I needed him to point that out for me. “But I remember that summer, believe me.”

  As if we’d torn up the sheets across Bergen County. Ew.

  “I remember it too,” I said, and regretted it. Because Kevin gave me a wise nod of his head and a smug little twist of his mouth. The pig.

  “I’m a taken man, I’m afraid,” he confided, as if he could see the yearning written across my face after so many years. He actually winked at me. “You’re still pretty cute, though.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” I gritted out through the horror. Which wasn’t a lie.

  “I have a call,” he informed me. “Good to see you, though, Meredith. Maybe we’ll catch up one of these days.” He smirked. “If you know what I mean.”

  He strode away, his radio squawking at his hip.

  I stared after him with rage in my heart and murder in my eye.

  The worst part, of course, was that I deserved it. I’d brought it upon myself almost ten years ago.

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel said from behind me. “I just couldn’t bring myself to come out here and talk to him. I threw you to the wolves and I hate myself for it.” She sounded remarkably chipper for all that self-hate.

  “You enjoyed that.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I sure did. I’m a bad, bad person.”

  I eyed her. “He’s ‘taken,’ apparently. Be still your broken heart.”

  “Taken by what?” Rachel was deeply unimpressed. “Aliens?”

  Chapter 17

  The Sunday before the wedding, the McKay family succumbed almost entirely to wedding fever.

  By the time Christian arrived that evening to spend his last week as a bachelor under his childhood roof, the rest of us had hit a particularly stellar level of family interaction: feigned deafness (I’m sorry, what did you say? I was in the other room actually doing something, and couldn’t hear you yelling from across the house—), slammed inanimate objects (Oh no, everything’s fine—SLAM—why do you ask?), and overly hostile responses to even the most innocuous questions (Do you know—Do I look like an information booth—).

  “You people need to relax,” Christian said, staring around at each of us in turn, after Hope had predictably stormed out. My mother actually averted her gaze, and my father blinked. I just grinned. “I’m the one getting married here.”

  Much later, I had lost a battle with insomnia and was dealing with my defeat by rereading my collection of Sweet Valley High novels, thoughtf
ully preserved for all time in a box at the back of my closet. There had been a time when Jeannie and I had pretended to be the Wakefield twins, and had enacted their glamorous California lives around the neighborhood. Jeannie, naturally, was the reckless and exciting Jessica, while I was always the bookish and sweeter Elizabeth. I was reliving some of those memories when the door was pushed open.

  “I thought you were escaping.” I laughed, expecting to see Hope, but it was Christian. “Is something wrong?” I frowned at him. “It’s almost 3 a.m.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he muttered, and raked his hands through his hair. He was wearing a T-shirt and those Adidas sweatpants that all men our age seemed to own. He let out something like a sigh. “Partly it’s being back in this house. Jeannie and I agreed that it was good to spend this week apart, but I really hate being back here.”

  “Are you okay?” I watched him, feeling cautious.

  I didn’t think this was a social call. He was probably here as Jeannie’s emissary after our fight, and I definitely didn’t want to talk to him about it.

  That’s actually you, Meredith, I heard her say, pitch-perfect in my head, and steeled myself.

  “The thing is, I need to talk to you,” Christian said at last.

  “You’re kind of scaring me.” I waved a hand at the foot of my bed. “Of course we can talk.”

  He came over and sat there, and sighed again, and then he looked at me with the crooked smile that had once inspired so many teenage girls to carve his initials across their notebook binders. But his eyes, unlike then, were troubled. He looked away, down at his hands.

  We sat there so long like that I thought he might not speak again at all. Or that he’d forgotten and maybe slipped into some kind of zombie state.

  “Am I doing the right thing?” he asked finally. He couldn’t look at me.

  The question hung there between us.

  Of all the things in the world I thought he might say, I didn’t expect this. It threw me. I blinked at him.

  “I walked in the house tonight and it was like walking into the Ice Age.” Bitterness laced his voice. “And I started thinking about all the ridiculousness this summer, you know? Like how Mom and Dad only get along when he’s either away on business for years at a time or hiding out in the basement to get away from her.”

  “The fish are more interesting than you might think,” I ventured.

  “If you say ‘flowchart,’ I’ll smother you with that pillow.”

  “I’m just saying, he’s maybe running to the fish as much as he’s running away from Mom.”

  “Anyway.” Christian frowned at me. “That’s not the only thing. We’ve been paying a lot of attention to how Mom didn’t want to come home, but did you think about the fact that Dad didn’t want her to come home? The more you think about it, the more you realize how incredibly fucked up that is.”

  “Christian . . .” But I didn’t know what I wanted to say, and he carried on.

  “Jeannie’s so incredibly sure about things,” he said. “She always knows what she wants, and she always gets what she wants. You know this better than anyone.”

  “You’re allowed to not be as sure as Jeannie.” I tilted my head so I could catch his eye. “No one is as sure as Jeannie.”

  He shrugged. “That’s what I usually think but lately, I don’t know . . .” He shook his head. “There’s only one other woman I know who always gets what she wants. And I don’t want to end up in a basement trying to convince my kids that fish are more fun than the life I’ve completely given up on.”

  I let that sit there for a moment.

  “First of all,” I said, “you’re not ending up in the basement.”

  “You already think the fish are cool,” he pointed out. “It’s a slippery slope.”

  “And second of all, Jeannie is not Mom.”

  Although there could be worse things, I thought then, than being a supermarket Madonna.

  “I don’t know,” Christian said. “I mean, I don’t really think she is, obviously, but sometimes they get along a little too well and this whole wedding thing has brought out the obsessive psycho side . . . I just don’t know.”

  I laced my fingers together and frowned at them.

  “I think you have wedding jitters, Christian,” I announced. “It doesn’t make you a terrible person. Marriage is a big deal. Maybe you should be jittery.”

  “I think ‘jitters’ is what happens when someone thinks he’s about to make a huge mistake,” Christian replied, sounding sad. “And then he sucks it up and gets married anyway, and thirty years later realizes he’s miserable.”

  “You are not going to be miserable!”

  “How do you know that? No one’s miserable when they start out. Maybe miserable is how you end up, without even meaning to.”

  I stared at him until he looked at me.

  “When we were in the fifth grade, you gave Jeannie six red carnations for Valentine’s Day when she liked Eric Katz because you heard he wasn’t going to give her any.”

  “Yeah, and she beat me up at recess,” Christian reminded me. “Is that supposed to be a tender story of young love?”

  “When we were in eighth grade and that idiot Dave Revello dumped Jeannie the day of the dance, what did you do?”

  “Smacked him down,” Christian grunted.

  “Yes, and danced with Jeannie during ‘Crazy for You’ even though you were going out with Hannah Green at the time and she was not at all amused.”

  “Jeannie was crying over that loser,” Christian said, as if he still couldn’t believe it.

  “And then, come on, you remember when she had mono? You practically nursed her, and you were a freshman at NYU. You certainly didn’t have to take the train out every day to wait on her hand and foot.”

  “I remember all these things too,” Christian said, but I thought he was faking his impatience. “I’m not sure why you’re reminding me. I would have done the same for you or Hope.” He paused. “Well. For you. Hope would beat me up for subjugating her or some shit.”

  I let that pass. “I heard Jeannie tell Ashley that when you guys kissed for the first time, it was as if everything just fell into place.” I smiled. “You always fit. Nothing in the world makes more sense than the two of you together.”

  “I want to believe that’s true,” Christian all but whispered. He shook his head.

  “The thing about Jeannie is that you always know where you stand,” I told him, and even though I would have said it anyway, I realized it was true. “She doesn’t play games.”

  “This means a lot, you know,” he said after a moment. He crooked his smile at me again. “You’re the one who knows us both the best.”

  “Listen,” I said, very carefully. “Jeannie and I haven’t exactly been close in a while—”

  “Yeah,” Christian interrupted. “She told me about that.” He frowned at me. “When did you turn into such a drama queen? I knew the South would ruin you.”

  “What?” Because what else was there to say?

  “You and Jeannie were practically joined at the hip your whole lives.” He looked exasperated. “Of course you’d want a little distance. I still don’t think you had to go all Georgia Peach to get it, but it doesn’t surprise me.”

  I just stared at him.

  He looked at my expression and laughed. “I kept telling Jeannie that you just needed time, and it wasn’t personal.”

  “It was personal!” I was surprised to see my hands trembling. I shoved them under the comforter. “And it wasn’t just her, Christian, it was you too.”

  “That’s why I said it wasn’t personal,” he said. As if we were agreeing.

  “We used to be so close, and then we weren’t anymore,” I said. Very. Slowly. “How could that not be personal?”

  He gave me the exact same look he’d leveled at me on the porch of my old apartment house in Atlanta.

  “You’re my sister,” he said. “That’s a lifetime thing. You don’t get
to get out of it.” He scowled at me. “What the hell goes on in your head?”

  “People change,” I began. His eyes flashed impatience.

  “Whatever,” he said. “You’re the same person you’ve always been; you’re just more wound up about it suddenly.”

  “Maybe I’m not who you think I am,” I countered.

  “Was there a body snatching? Because seriously, I think I’d notice.”

  “I’m not particularly nice, and I’m not particularly good.” I was throwing it down like a challenge.

  “I never thought you were a saint,” Christian pointed out. “You just wanted to be a saint. Everyone has dirty laundry, you know. It’s how you know you’re alive.”

  He wanted dirty laundry? I could do that.

  “Oh, I’m alive.” I eyed him. “In fact, I cheated on Travis.”

  Christian shut his eyes briefly, and shook his head. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I’m not—”

  “I know that you have dirty laundry,” he interrupted me. “That doesn’t mean I want the details, okay?” He shook his head again. “Jesus Christ.”

  He sounded disgruntled, I thought, but no different than usual.

  A sudden, unwelcome thought began to bloom in my gut. What if the distance between me and Christian had been of my own design?

  That was entirely too huge and frightening. I shoved it aside and concentrated on Christian instead.

  We sat in silence for a while, until something seemed to settle in him. He nodded just a bit, to himself. Then he looked at me and smiled.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Just the one small word, but it was the look in his eye that made tears clog in my throat. Something sweet. Something ours I’d thought we’d lost forever.

  It made my heart hurt to think that it had only been lost because I’d been too blind to see it. Was that possible?

  He reached over and ruffled my hair with his hand, and then let himself out.

  Leaving me with chaos on the brain. Again.

  Christian had seemed so irritated at the very idea that we’d grown apart. As if he hadn’t ever even considered such a thing.