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In which our hero realizes his best friend may have been right, then calls him an assface.
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Parker and I walked into the duty-free shop where a man was arguing with the cashier over the five-carton-per-person limit on cigarettes. We watched them argue for a moment before Parker began, what I can only describe as, aggressively sampling perfume. “Would you like a bottle?” I asked through a haze of fragrance. “I’m about to have fifty thousand dollars in the bank.”
She smiled and said, “I can afford my own, thank you,” then she sprayed me with the pink bottle in her hand and I almost knocked over a table full of tax-free liquor trying to get out of the way. Parker laughed and moved on to look at the purses. I followed.
“So did Garland offer you money to help him get to Paris too?” I asked.
She looked up and said, “That’s kind of a personal question, don’t you think?”
“No,” I said. “You know what he’s giving me.”
Parker considered this for a moment, then said, “He’s giving me a new life.”
She moved again, on to the watches, and again I followed. “A new life? What does that mean?”
“Whatever you want it to mean,” she said, this time without looking at me, and for some reason it pissed me off.
“Look, if you’re going to be all weird and mysterious the entire trip it’s going to get old quick.”
Now she looked at me, and for a moment I understood how a gazelle feels when it makes eye contact with a lion across the Serengeti, but her face softened and she smiled and said, “Oh Edwin Green, like you don’t have your secrets.”
“Like what?”
“Like what really happened between you and Sadie Evans.”
“Oh God, not you too.” I walked away and this time Parker followed me.
“Edwin Green.”
I kept walking.
“Wait. What is wrong with you?”
I stopped and turned around and said, “Can no one talk to me for ten minutes without asking about Sadie Evans?”
Parker laughed.
“It’s not funny,” I said.
She laughed some more, and when I turned to walk away again she grabbed me by the arm and said, “Edwin Green, please believe me when I say I don’t give a shit about Sadie Evans. Not a single, solitary shit, I swear. I don’t care who she’s dating, or what she wore to the Grammys, or when her next movie is coming out. But I do care about you, and helping you with this Sadie thing is, I don’t know, sort of my good deed. So if you can lower your defenses for a moment and talk to me like a friend, maybe I can help.”
I wanted to tell her I didn’t want her help with Sadie, not because I didn’t want her help, but because I’d (1) convinced myself Parker sort of liked me. I mean, I was 67% sure she’d kissed me in the hallway two days earlier, and (2) I liked thinking that she liked me. Obviously I still wanted Sadie back—that’s why I was about to fly to Paris—but if my plan didn’t work it was nice to think I had options. Hot redheaded options. And though I’d gone twelve months without even acknowledging the existence of other girls, this meant (3) Fitz might have been on to something with his smitten theory. I hated when he was right. The assface.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s a reflex at this point. You can’t imagine what it’s like for people to constantly want to talk about the one thing in your life you don’t want to talk about.”
“Oh I could imagine,” Parker said. “So you really haven’t spoken to her in months?”
“No. I haven’t actually spoken to her since a few days before we broke up.”
“Wait, how did you not talk to her when you broke up?” Parker asked.
I looked at my shoes and let her figure it out on her own.
“Whoa, hold on, she dumped you by text, didn’t she? You dated for a year and she dumped you by text and you haven’t spoken to her since?”
I nodded and Parker said, “Tell me again why you’re trying to win this girl back?”
I started to answer but Parker wasn’t finished. “I’m just saying, if it were me, and I’d let some guy pay for a year’s worth of dinners and movies, I’d at least have the decency to dump him in person. Maybe over the phone if he’d been a dick.”
She was joking and trying to prove a point at the same time but she didn’t know what she was talking about. “That’s where you’re wrong,” I said, “we never had an actual date.”
“Wait, what?”
I sighed. I hadn’t talked about Sadie Evans to anyone since Black Saturday, but not because I didn’t want to talk about her, not entirely at least. It was just that she felt so far away, and I thought talking about her would make her seem even farther away. But that was before I had a plan. Now Sadie seemed so close I could hardly fail to grasp her. (Sorry, I’d read some Gatsby the night before to make up for the fact I wasn’t going to school the rest of the week). Besides, Parker wanted to know about Sadie because she wanted to help me, not out of some tabloid curiosity. “Sadie moved to Hornby in first grade,” I said. “You know her dad was a preacher, right? At Hornby Christian Fellowship? Do I have to tell you all this? I'm sure they’ve got her autobiography in the book store. You can read about her on the flight.”
“I’m going to sleep on the flight. I need to hear this right now.”
“Okay, but let’s talk somewhere else,” I said. “All this perfume is making me sick.”