Chapter Twenty-One

Gillian grilled me for details all the way to work. There were a couple of photographers hanging around the apartment and milling in the bushes across the street from the Gazette offices, but they no longer tried to get me to answer any questions or seemed particularly interested in being here. They would die off soon enough, Gillian predicted, because reporters like this were used to living in New York and LA and were likely on the verge of dying of boredom.

“I know how they feel,” I said. I couldn’t stop yawning.

Gillian raised her eyebrows, elbowing me in the side as we walked to our desks. “Oh really? Were you really bored last night?”

“Ow. Will you please stop?” I slumped into my desk. How was it possible that I was back here, in this little, ordinary cube, when just a few hours earlier…I sighed, powering on my computer. Still the same old username and password, the same standard Windows wallpaper, the same queue filled with the same supremely boring stories waiting for me to copyedit.

This was it. This was life. After high school and college, life was the same day being lived over and over, working and trying to live up to some dream that was never going to come true in the first place. Except for some people, but those people are extraordinary. I wasn’t extraordinary. I was a copy editor, and not a very good one, considering that a third of the stories in my cube had come back to me once the assistant editor reviewed them.

Gillian swiveled her chair over to me. “So I guess you’re really not going to tell me anything?”

I just shrugged. It was probably crazy, but I didn’t want to talk about it. I just wanted to curl up in a familiar room with someone who smelled like soap and a leather guitar case. And that wasn’t going to happen.

I didn’t talk much on the way home from work, either. Gillian tried hard to cheer me up. She told me all about the newest scandal on Hospitals & Housewives, and when that didn’t work, she turned on an eighties station and sang Boy George at the top of her lungs.

“Oh, I know! I’ll make pizza tonight. Sound good?”

I shrugged. Jack had ruined pizza for me, maybe for good. “I think I’ll just make a can of soup.” If I even ate dinner. Maybe I’d just go to sleep.

But when we arrived at the apartment, Sarah was waiting for me. She sat on the front stoop, scrolling on her phone, and I told Gillian to go on without me.

I couldn’t tell if she was smiling or just squinting in the sun. Her pale shoulders looked sunburned, and I wondered how long she’d been sitting there.

“You’re here,” I said.

“I knew there was a reason you got into Brown.” She reached into her purse for her lip gloss, applied it, and threw it back in the bag. Then she scooted over a bit so as to make room for me on the step.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.

She stared out across the parking lot. “You know that if you’d told me about it back then, I wouldn’t have, like, stopped being friends with you or anything.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed her, but I knew that she believed it.

Behind us, the apartment doors opened and a couple teenage girls came out carrying beach towels. It wasn’t so long ago that they would have been Sarah and me. But it was already the end of the fifth summer since high school had ended, and every year seemed to go by faster than the one before it.

“I thought you were my best friend,” Sarah said. “You had this whole other life that you never told me about. I don’t think real friends keep those kinds of secrets.”

She was right—they didn’t. “I didn’t know how to be a good friend back then, but I do now. I want to be your friend. I want to be a good one.”

“Good friends don’t keep secrets,” she repeated. “So you have to promise me you won’t do it again.”

My head jerked up.

“This doesn’t mean I’m not mad you. I still am. Really mad. And for the record, I’m mad at Amber, too. I went through with the wedding and all because it was the right thing to do. Well, that, and she practically begged.”

Amber, begging? That was an image I couldn’t conjure. She had probably been pruning my replacement, a peripheral waiting to be called up to the majors. I wanted to ask Sarah but stopped myself. She was continuing anyway.

“She still won’t admit what she did, but I know she played a part in it, too. I’m not stupid. So I’m pretty pissed at both of you. And I’m not sure when I’m not going to feel this way.”

“Okay,” I said. It was fair. It was more than fair. I was lucky there might be a when at all. But there was still something else tugging at the back of my head, and it would do me no good not to face it. “Are you sure we even have anything in common anymore?”

Sarah frowned. “So you’re wondering that, too.”

My throat started to hurt. Life was about spending time with people you connected with, not forcing yourself to fit into places you didn’t. And it wasn’t just me who’d changed. Sarah used to look to me for advice, but now she was the one who had her life together. Maybe she’d had enough of me. Or maybe we needed to reintroduce ourselves to each other.

I turned to her. “I meant what I said before. I want us to do the stuff together like we used to do. Just silly stuff, like milkshakes on the beach.”

“Oh, yeah. That was so fun. I haven’t had a strawberry milkshake in about a thousand years.”

I stared at the blue sky as the sun warmed my nose and hands, nearly numb from an entire day in an office that just fixed its air conditioning. “Today would be a nice day for a milkshake.”

“I can’t tonight. I’m meeting Derek for drinks. I should actually be going.” She started to stand, and I stood, too. “Maybe next weekend?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. She looked like she was going to hug me, but at the last second, we stepped out of each other’s way and she just waved. I waved and watched her go, and then I took the stairs up to my apartment to see what Gillian’s feelings were about ice cream.