“You only think so when it’s convenient for you,” Henry replied. “Poor Gus, so conflicted.”
“I would tell you to go to hell,” I said with a sweet smile, “but that would be redundant, wouldn’t it?”
“We keep glossing over a point here,” Henry said. “I have secret information I’m guessing you don’t want made public. Shouldn’t you be a little bit nicer to me?”
“Are you threatening me?” I hissed at him.
“Easy there, drama queen. I was kidding.”
“That didn’t sound like kidding. It sounded like a threat.”
Henry shook his head at me.
“Are you coming?” Ashley demanded. I’d forgotten about her. “These shoes are killing me.”
Henry aimed a smile her way, and then looked at me. “Well? Are you coming?” he asked, his eyebrows rising. “Or are you waiting around for the rest of the fruit salad?”
“I hate you.”
“You’ve mentioned that.” He grinned. “Well?”
It was a dare.
So I sniffed, and walked next to him as if he didn’t bother me at all.
We made our way back into the party like we were one big, happy trio. I had the Prince of Darkness on one side of me, making sure I was aware of his presence. Silly, whiny Ashley was on the other, oblivious to both Henry’s sharp red horns and my own discomfort. In front of us, the scrum around the bar was getting louder by the second as just about every person I knew in Boston jostled for another drink.
And I, ever the clown, had chosen to dress myself as an oversize blueberry.
Obviously, I had absolutely no recourse but to dive right in and get wildly, embarrassingly drunk. After all, that strategy had worked before. I might be humiliated forevermore about my rendition of “Piece of My Heart,” but at least I could take comfort in the knowledge I’d given people something else to talk about. Something other than the original humiliation of Nate’s defection. The greater the spectacle I made of myself, the more attention I could divert from the real issue.
It almost sounded reasonable.
I left Henry and his bimbette without a backward glance. I kept my eyes on the bar. I had an involved fantasy about drinking myself into a state of collapse, wherein I would be unable to care what I looked like and could furthermore be unable to sing a note. I could hardly wait.
I was so focused on the first martini I planned to order that my sense of self-preservation completely deserted me.
It came back to me in a flash when I realized I’d walked within grabbing distance of Helen. She blinked at me, and opened her mouth to speak.
Absolutely not, I thought.
Without consulting my brain, my body made an executive decision. I dove into a passing crowd of matronly types—all out-complimenting one another with a passive-aggressiveness that put me and mine to shame. I snuck out of the banquet room again—using the sniping ladies as cover—and made for the bathroom as if pursued by the hounds of hell. The bathroom was always a safety zone. Every teenage girl who’d ever wept over some zit-faced adolescent boy knew the comfort of a quiet bathroom stall.
Once inside the bathroom, I dove into the nearest stall, locked the door behind me, and perched there on the toilet seat, breathing heavily.
Surely I would be safe. Surely even Helen wouldn’t—
I heard the door creak open.
I held my breath.
“Gus?” She was right outside my stall. She even knocked. Once. Twice. “Gus? I know it’s you, I can see those blue shoes.”
I flushed the toilet in the hope it would shame Helen into running away, but no, she was still there when I swung open the door. Like, right there. I couldn’t even exit the stall.
“Can we talk?” Helen asked, leaning way over into my personal space. The only place to go was back into the actual toilet, which, while appealing, was hardly dignified. I chose to stand where I was and suffer her closeness.
“Well . . .” I hedged.
I couldn’t imagine what Helen wanted to talk about this time, but I was betting I wouldn’t like it. It was unlikely to be something I might care to discuss—like, to pick a subject at random, the ethics of boyfriend-poaching from women you were supposedly long-term friends with.
“Please,” Helen pleaded with those anime eyes of hers that turned men into fools. I wasn’t immune, either, and it made me cranky.
“Um, I guess so,” I said, because what else could I do?
Helen sighed then. Heavily. Signaling that this time, she wasn’t planning an intervention.
Again, I felt the dizzying urge to slap her, so I looked away—toward the far more dizzying reflection of my vast blueberryness in the mirrors behind her.
I dragged my attention back to Helen, and waited. She had about three more seconds, and then I was breaking for the door. One. Two—
“The thing is,” she said, staring at the hands she’d folded in front of her, “I thought we were friends. I just . . . I wish . . .”
Again, she turned her eyes on me.
“What?” I asked, a little alarmed.
“Gus,” she said, as if saying my name made her sad.
“Why do you hate me?”
No, really.
She meant it, too.
chapter seven
Why did I hate her?
Because when we were eighteen years old you grabbed my hand the first time either one of us got drunk at Freshman Week and swore you would never forget that I held your hair back, I could have said. Because when we were twenty-five you announced you were having a quarter-life crisis and demanded I drive with you overnight to Acadia National Park, where you were sure the first rays of summer sunshine to hit the United States on Cadillac Mountain would show you what to do with your life. Because neither of these memories mean anything to you. Because it turns out you are all of the things I have spent years telling people you are not.
But I didn’t say anything like that.
The desire to punch her in the face got tangled up in the desire to behave like a grown-up, somehow, and I choked.
I turned red in the face and let out a strangled sort of cough.
“Um . . . what?” I asked. As if I misheard her. It was pathetic.
“Why do you hate me?” she repeated, her eyes trained on me. I avoided looking at them directly—the way you avoid looking into the sun—and looked to the side instead, where her frilly bra strap had worked its way down over her shoulder.
“I—uh—I don’t hate you,” I stammered. I couldn’t believe she had the nerve. I mean, of course she had the nerve, but it was still unbelievable.
Helen sighed.
“We used to be friends,” she said. “Good friends, or anyway, that’s what I thought.”
And for some reason, I found I was unable to open my mouth and let Helen know what I thought of her, or point out that this woe-is-me act was at odds with her I’m-telling-you-this-as-tough-love act from the Halloween party. I wasn’t afraid of what I might say, I was afraid I’d start crying again, and even though Helen seemed to have just remembered that we were friends once I still thought I’d rather maim myself than let her see how much that hurt me. I suspected this sort of conflict-avoidance spoke to flaws in my character, but mostly I just wanted to escape her and those wide eyes of hers that tugged so expertly at the heartstrings. Even mine.
I looked around for a way out, but there was nothing. Only a row of sinks, my ugly dress in the mirror, and the party beyond. In a pinch, I supposed I could hurl myself back through the stall door and bar myself inside, but that seemed overly dramatic even for me.
“Well,” I said, because she seemed to want some kind of response from me and I couldn’t stand the silence. “Things certainly got a little awkward.”
If by awkward I meant painful, uncomfortable, and fodder for years of therapy.
“I just don’t understand you,” Helen said softly. “I thought maybe if I could introduce you to some nice guys at the Halloween party, yo
u wouldn’t feel like you had to act out again. It was supposed to be a gift.”
Was that how she was spinning her little act of aggression? She had to be kidding me. Some of my outrage must have shown through, because she hurried on.
“I was just trying to be nice by introducing you to Robert and Jerry,” she said, her eyes so very big and full of shit. “Georgia didn’t have to threaten me.”
“The thing is, Helen,” I bit out, “it’s hard to see how publicly humiliating me was actually you trying to be nice.”
“Henry said you were mad,” Helen said. Sadly. As if Henry had advanced the theory and Helen had dismissed it as impossible until this very moment, when I’d confirmed her worst fears.
Why did everything always have to involve Henry? Why couldn’t I get away from him?
“The problem is that you’re dating Nate now,” I pointed out, shoving the Henry issue aside. “It makes things difficult.”
Talk about understating the obvious.
Helen blew out a breath. “Yes,” she said. She let out a knowing sort of chuckle. “But you know Nate. He doesn’t know how to do anything the easy way.”
This wasn’t happening. I was in hell. Or in an alternate reality in which current girlfriends had overly familiar conversations about their boyfriends with the ex they’d helped kick to the curb. Or maybe I was on a reality television show in which, at any moment, some has-been celebrity would leap out from behind a potted plant and explain that of course this conversation wasn’t actually happening for real—and of course I was being set up while millions of viewers tittered at my predicament from the safety of their living rooms.
“Sometimes,” Helen continued in that same musing sort of tone, seemingly oblivious to my horror, “I think that he goes out of his way to make things as difficult as possible. I totally believe it’s because of his issues with his mom. What do you think?”
It was definitely time for the hidden cameras to make themselves known. Before I was forced to take matters into my own hands or—more frightening—actually engage in some sort of in-depth analysis of the man we’d both slept with. I shuddered at the prospect.
“I don’t . . .” I was at a loss. Also, there was a building hysteria spreading out from my gut, which I definitely wanted to keep inside. Hysteria, in my experience, opened doors best left sealed tight and padlocked shut. I coughed, and started again. “I’m not sure I really . . .”
“You know, because with that kind of mother, it’s not surprising Nate has intimacy issues,” Helen blathered on. I watched in a sort of distant amazement as Helen slid her soft pink bra strap back up over her delicate shoulder. I was afraid that I would be frozen somewhere between discomfort and horror for the rest of my life, forced to contemplate such unknowables as: if Helen couldn’t find a bra to fit her properly, who could?
I was definitely getting hysterical.
Helen aimed a tremulous smile my way. “I mean, you know Nate’s mom,” she said. “Every time we have lunch, I have to remind myself that she’s just a lonely woman who doesn’t know any better, you know?”
All right. Hold up.
Here was what I knew about Nate’s mother:
She had disapproved of me. Not because of anything concrete, let me hasten to add. I’d never disrupted a family outing, let loose with obscenities on the telephone, or dressed like a hooker for Sunday church.
No, Mrs. Manning had, on principle, disapproved of any woman she felt usurped her position in Nate’s life. Textbook stuff, really. Because of this, I’d never met the woman during my tenure as Nate’s girlfriend (a term he hadn’t used himself until near the end, but don’t get me started). We certainly didn’t engage in any cozy Mom-and-Usurper lunches.
Helen, I was quite certain, knew this.
Not only did she know it—she was rubbing it in. This was typical Helen shenanigans, because if I called her on it, she could very easily bat those big eyes at me and claim she’d just been trying to bond with me, the way she’d been being nice when she’d opened the bidding on me as a date. It was passive aggression at its finest: walking that line between inappropriate and friendly, and using it to plant the knife.
And all this from the woman who had stolen her friend’s boyfriend.
She was good.
God, I hated her.
“You know what, Helen?” I asked with the suppressed rage I’d thus far saved for rants to Amy Lee or Georgia. “I think it’s time you and I—”
But I never got to tell Helen what it was time for, because the door to the bathroom swung open and bride-to-be Chloe charged inside with her bridesmaids-to-be, all of them chattering excitedly.
Helen and I were immediately swept up in the commotion. I had to crack a smile and clamp down on my anger, which was never the easiest thing in the world to do anyway, and certainly not when you were dressed like a royal blue clown.
Helen simpered and leaned close to my ear. “I do still want to talk,” she told me in her saddest voice.
And then she sailed into the stall I’d vacated and shut it in my face.
Outside the bathroom, Nate was leaning against the balcony railing, looking down at the bustle of the lobby below. I watched him for a moment, feeling the hysteria in my chest settle into something else. Something that ached and brought a sort of heat to my face.
He turned and looked at me.
The fact was, I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand how he could have cheated on me. I didn’t understand how he could care so little for my feelings. How he could dismiss me so easily. How he could smile at me as if he was still delighted to see me, but think he wasn’t exactly what I’d wanted.
What I still wanted.
I didn’t understand why I still could see how cute he was. How dark his eyes were against his rosy cheeks. I remembered the scratch of his jaw against my skin, and the way he stretched when he was sleepy. More than that, I knew we were perfect for each other. He was a smart guy. He deserved better than a manipulative queen bee bitch like Helen. How could he possibly want her? The only way he could—I knew in my bones—was if he didn’t realize how evil she was.
Looking at him made me feel lonely.
“Is Helen in there?” he asked finally.
“Yeah.” I searched his face for some sign that all of this was a result of Helen’s mind control. Helen had to have planted those strange words in his head. Because none of it made sense otherwise.
“You might try telling Georgia that it’s not cool to tell someone she’s going to ‘make them pay’ when they’re only trying to be nice, by the way,” Nate said, making the sort of face you make when you’re sharing a joke. Not that I thought anything was funny.
“You can’t possibly believe that Helen was trying to be nice.” My voice was flat.
“Helen has a different approach to things,” Nate said, but with that same conspiratorial smile. We know what a handful Helen can be, that smile said. It confused me, even as it invited me to share. “And what did you say to Henry? I know you weren’t exactly a member of his fan club, but when did you start hating his guts?”
“What?” I couldn’t possibly have a discussion about Henry with Nate. My mind actually blanked out at the very idea. “What are you talking about?”
“That Ashley girl doesn’t like you much, anyway,” Nate said with a laugh. “She wouldn’t stop bitching about you. But I keep trying to tell him that’s what happens when you date idiots.”
This affable version of Nate was the one I’d fallen for, not the sad-eyed guy who’d said incomprehensible things on Janis Joplin night. I felt a rush of warmth. Maybe he wasn’t as much a stranger to me as it had seemed.
“I thought you agreed with Oscar,” I said, smiling back at him. “Those who can, do. When it comes to moronic bimbos, anyway.”
“Sure,” Nate said. “But after a while, if you actually have a personality, you have to find a girl with a personality, too. Otherwise you’re basically just masturbating.”
W
e both laughed at that, and then a companionable sort of silence fell between us. The way it always had.
There was no way he and Helen talked like this. There was no way she got him the way I did. I opened my mouth to say so, but it was like he read my mind.
“Gus,” he began in a softer tone, the one that matched the look he sent my way. “You know I never meant to hurt you, right? Tell me you know that.”
“I know it,” I said quietly, although I wasn’t at all sure I meant it. I just wanted to stay in that shared space of agreement with him.
“You’re the kind of girl a guy takes home to his mother,” Nate told me with that same sweet smile. With vaguely sad undertones. “I always knew I could count on you.”
I smiled automatically, but then felt it falter. Because he’d kept me far away from his mother, and what had he counted on me for? To let him go?
“Wait,” I started, confused.
“I’m so glad you guys can talk,” Helen cooed from behind me. I jumped a little bit. Nate turned toward her but didn’t smile.
I clung to that.
“Helen,” I said, because for that single moment there, I’d forgotten about her. Or I’d wanted to.
“Seriously,” Helen said, smiling at me with great benevolence. “I want you and Nate to be friends, Gus. It’s really important to me.”
“Of course we’re friends,” Nate told her. “We’ve all known each other way too long, right? I remember studying for finals with you guys freshman year. That’s a long time.”
I noticed no one consulted me about my feelings on the subject of our continuing friendships.
But “Of course!” I said brightly when they both looked at me. Helen’s smile set my teeth on edge, but Nate looked so . . . hopeful. As if he and I were in on something. Together.
I couldn’t believe how very much I wanted that to be true.
“You can always count on Gus,” Nate told Helen, his eyes bright as they caught mine. He was repeating himself deliberately, I could tell. He was sending me a message. It made me feel hopeful, too.