I collapsed on the couch when they finally left and didn’t move for at least an hour. I demolished the Thai leftovers and listened to the silent cabin around me after it being so noisy for so long. Most of my stuff ended up in the master bedroom with the furniture shoved to the side in my bedroom to make room for more of the equipment. Maybe I could hire some of the teenagers in town to help move the furniture all the way out and into storage.
I fiddled with my phone and searched for mobile labs or shipping containers so I didn’t have to do experiments right next to where I cooked. My stomach sank when I instinctively checked my text messages and nothing waited. Betsy would know what to do, with everything. She’d volunteer her husband and his friends to move my stuff and build a whole other cabin next door to my exact specifications. She’d have a plan for how to snag Archer at the same time, and possibly a self-serving plan to get Archer shirtless and sweaty so she could admire him as well.
My eyes burned and I told myself it was just fatigue and pain that made me emotional. We had one misunderstanding, one fight, and it felt like the end of the world. That wasn’t rational. Betsy would see reason. She had to.
But what if she didn’t? My nose clogged until I had to mouth-breathe like a creep. What would I do without Betsy’s sound advice and common sense and her gentle – and sometimes not so gentle – nudging to get out of my comfort zone and down from my “high intellectual horse” to enjoy life. She kept me grounded when nothing else did. She overlooked all the social awkwardness and friendship missteps I made because she knew I was, in her words, “emotionally stunted” from spending my awkward teenage years as a grad student in a lab surrounded by adults. I still thought I’d gotten the better deal by skipping middle school and high school, but I missed a lot I didn’t even know was there. Like school dances and having a boy put a corsage on my dress for the first time. Giving in to peer pressure to have a beer or smoke a cigarette in an alley so our parents wouldn’t find out. Failing miserably in PE and then having to deal with locker rooms and showers and judgmental bitches.
Whenever I got too big for my britches, Betsy brought me right smack down to Earth with a couple of well-timed observations that demolished a good chunk of my ego. She’d never been intimidated that I remembered everything I read and could just solve equations in my head, that I’d almost won a goddamn Nobel Prize. She ignored all of that.
And what did I bring to the friendship? Being an exhausting social misfit that she constantly had to look out for? I squeezed my eyes shut and a few tears escaped. Sure, I was feeling sorry for myself, but sometimes you needed a good cry and a pity party. More of Betsy’s wisdom.
Of course, if she were there, she’d probably smack the back of my head and tell me to hike up my big girl panties and do the right things to fix my mistake. I took a deep breath and called her, knowing I wouldn’t be able to talk through the tears and guilt, and braced myself for a cold shoulder.
She didn’t answer.
She let it ring through to voicemail twice. I didn’t leave a message, because who the hell still did that?
Instead, I sent her a text message and hoped it was a place to start.
Look, Bets, I’m really sorry. I would have told you, but I couldn’t. Bile swamped my mouth at having to lie to my best friend yet again, even if it was for her own good. It was a weird thing and I thought he was gone for good, then he showed up again. I don’t know what it is or what it means. He could disappear tomorrow. Itinerant ghost-hunters are not reliable that way. Call me pls. xoxo
I waited a good half hour for a response, but she left the message unread. It hurt my heart more. I started thinking on what my next act of groveling would be, and hauled myself upright so I could go ogle my new lab at the same time.