7

There’s something about New Year’s Day, isn’t there? A finality. It feels like a door closing as much as one opening. Suddenly, the Christmas tree and decorations feel inappropriate, like a vase of flowers that are beginning to wilt, and you start thinking about having to go back to school and opening your backpack again to discover the homework you’ve forgotten among the black bananas and the Christmas cards you’d forgotten to give out.

But I’d never been more aware of it than on that New Year’s Day.

It started the same way the last one had.

With Michelle, Joni Mitchell, and pancakes.

Michelle, Joni Mitchell, and pancakes and no word from Nico.

“You OK?” she murmured.

She’d fallen asleep with her makeup on, so one of her lashes was stuck to her cheek.

“Great,” I told her with a sore sigh as I reached down to peel it off. “Never better.”

“Sorry.” She yawned and sat up beside me. “Silly question.”

But it wasn’t a silly question.

It was a perfectly reasonable, perfectly considerate question.

The sort of thing your best friend should ask you the morning after you’ve been dumped.

By text, no less.

So it wasn’t so much the question, rather that I didn’t know how to answer it.

I wasn’t OK as I checked my phone again to find there was still no word from Nico. No I’m sorry, ignore what I said, I was drunk text. No new posts on her Instagram, her bleary-eyed and beaming with a group of people I didn’t recognize. No videos of her twirling and singing along to “Break My Soul.”

I don’t know what I’d done. I’d been asking myself that all night, Nico’s words—it’s getting too much—turning, over and over, in an endless, maddening loop until at 4 a.m. I’d wanted to shake Michelle awake.

I didn’t, though, because I knew what she’d say.

She’d tell me that it was Nico.

That I hadn’t done anything wrong.

But I must have.

Even though I was so careful. I was always so careful, paralyzed by the constant, cloying terror that I was going to say something to make Nico decide she’d had enough. So I tried to be uncomplicated—uncomplicated, undemanding, unthreatened by it all—as though Nico was a stray cat I was trying not to spook.

But I was still too much.

I didn’t know how and I was weak with it. Exhausted after lying awake all night, Michelle snoring gently beside me, blissfully unaware of the agony I was in. But she wouldn’t have understood because yes, I was miserable, but it was a pain that was unique only to Nico and me.

So, now I think about it, maybe Michelle was right about that as well. Maybe I did think romance was about aching and pining and wandering the moors in search of my lost Heathcliff because there was something almost pleasurable about it.

It felt honest.

Real.

Something that had changed me at some deep molecular level and I’d never get over it.

“Listen,” Michelle said, then stopped to smooth her hair with her hands, the waves from the night before now flattened after a sound night’s sleep. “I know this is rough, Mara, but it’s for the best.”

I tried not to sneer as I recalled the conversation I’d overheard in Louise’s kitchen the night before and I realized how relieved Michelle must have been that she’d let it play out and she’d been proved right.

“You can’t keep doing this, Mara,” she told me when I looked away.

“Do what?” I asked, but I didn’t want to know what.

I couldn’t bear it.

It was over.

I didn’t need an autopsy.

“Everything is always on her terms.” When Michelle stopped to take a breath, I could tell that she was trying to stay calm and it made my hands fist in the duvet. “Everything. When you see her or hear from her and when you don’t see her or hear from her. Where you go when you do. What you talk about—”

“You don’t know what we talk about,” I interrupted.

“True,” Michelle conceded. “But it’s about balance, Mara. Compromise.”

That prompted a snort. “Yeah, because you’re so good at that, Michelle.”

“Um. Excuse you. Didn’t I just go and see Brighton play Grimsby with Lewis before Christmas?”

She said Grimsby like it wasn’t a real place.

“Don’t you want to be someone that you can be yourself with, Mara?”

“I am myself when I’m with Nico.”

“No, you’re who she wants you to be. Quiet and chill and too unbothered to call her on her shit.”

“What shit?”

Michelle looked at me as if to say, Are we really doing this again?

“You shrink yourself down when you’re with her, Mara. I’ve seen it. It’s like you’re worried that you’re too loud, that you take up too much space. So you make yourself smaller so she won’t notice you’re there.”

I bristled at that. “I do not.”

I did.

After everything that’s happened I know now that I did.

Back then, though, I sat a little straighter and told myself that she was wrong.

Anyway,” I said before she could say anything else, “who cares? I’m happy.”

This time Michelle looked at me as if to say, Are you?

“I am,” I insisted, but even I could hear the quiver of hesitation in my voice.

“Mara, you’re miserable,” she told me when I began tapping aimlessly on my phone.

“Today I am. Of course I am. Look what happened last night?”

I could see from the corner of my eye that she was shaking her head at me. “You’re not happy, Mara,” she said with a delicacy I did not think her capable of, especially when it came to Nico. “I know you, and you’re not happy. Maybe when you’re with her, but then she ghosts you again.”

I felt my jaw click at that. “She doesn’t ghost me.”

Chesca ghosted May.

Nico just got distracted by her music and school and whatever.

It wasn’t the same.

“Mara, listen.” Michelle waited for me to look at her. “I know how hard it’s been for you, watching us all pair off while you weren’t sure that’s what you wanted. Then you realized why,” she said, her eyes suddenly wet, “and you were so happy. Happier than I’ve ever seen you. And I’m worried that in all the chaos, you haven’t stopped to ask yourself if you even like her because Nico is the first girl to show a passing interest in you.”

I blinked at her, slightly stunned. “Of course I like her.”

“Mara, she’s insufferable.”

I was fully stunned by that. “She is not!”

“She is! She’s a pretentious, self-absorbed fantasist who cares more about picking up whatever obscure album she’s pre-ordered from Resident or daydreaming about going to LIPA than getting to know you.”

“Michelle!” I gasped.

“Well,” she said with a huff as she flicked her hair.

She didn’t say I can say it now she’s dumped you but I still heard it.

She must have known she’d gone too far, though, because she thought about it, then huffed again. “OK. That was way harsh, Tai.” She didn’t look at me as she crossed her arms. And she definitely didn’t apologize. But she did say, “I should give you more credit, Mara. There must be something more to her if you like her this much.”

If she didn’t apologize, then I certainly didn’t thank her because I knew what was coming.

Sure enough, she raised her eyebrows and said, “But—”

I cut her off with a groan.

“Mara, listen.”

When Michelle uncrossed her arms and turned to face me, I tipped my head back against the headboard and groaned again because I couldn’t keep having this conversation.

I couldn’t keep defending myself.

Defending us.

But Michelle persisted. “Listen. I only know one Nico, the one I’ve met a handful times who, well…”

She didn’t finish the thought.

But then she didn’t need to, did she?

“Listen”—she stopped to hold her hands up—“I don’t know what she’s like when you’re alone. Maybe she’s a completely different person. Maybe she’s sweet and kind and attentive, but there’s obviously something going on with her, isn’t there? There’s a reason why she comes and goes and blows you off, but if she won’t tell you what it is, you can’t help her, can you?”

I caught myself nodding.

“So all you can do is give her some time to sort her head out.” Michelle shrugged, then flashed me a sad smile. “Mara, you tried. You really, really did, but if she wants to go, then you have to let her.”

She squeezed my arm and I lifted my head from the headboard.

“It’s a shame, but this isn’t what you want. I know it isn’t, Mara. You know it isn’t.”

I wasn’t ready to admit that, so I just rolled my eyes at her.

“It’s impossible to take you seriously when you only have one fake eyelash on,” I told her as I reached over to tug it off. “Besides, it’s not that deep, Michelle.”

But it was.

I could feel the ache of it in my bones.

In my marrow.

“It’s not like I’m going to marry Nico, am I? We’re just hanging out.”

Michelle pulled a face at that. “You’re not ready for just hanging out, Mara.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Save just hanging out for uni. Now you need a nice, reliable girl—”

“Boring, you mean?” I interrupted with a surly snigger.

She didn’t miss a beat, though. “Well, if boring is someone you can text whenever you want and actually shows up when you arrange to meet her”—she tilted her head at me and raised her eyebrows—“then, yeah, boring.”

We stared at each other for a second too long and I could hear my mother laughing downstairs.

Then Michelle laughed as well.

“You know what you need?” She tugged on the sleeve of my hoodie with a satisfied smile. “A Dean.”

“Erin’s Dean?”

“No! Dean from Gilmore Girls. Nico’s a Jess. Your first girlfriend can’t be a Jess, Mara.” She shook her head solemnly. “You’re not ready. You need to work your way up to a Jess. We need to find you a Dean first.”

But I didn’t want a Dean.

Or a Jess.

I wanted Nico.

And, yeah. OK. I know that despite everything I’ve said so far, you probably still agree with Michelle, but hear me out: I know Nico. You don’t. Michelle didn’t. And I knew something wasn’t right.

Nico didn’t mean it.

The thought bumped, grazing the insides of my skull once, then twice, before taking flight.

Nico didn’t mean it.

I was suddenly sure of it.

It was my fault.

I’d tried so hard to be uncomplicated—uncomplicated, undemanding, unthreatened by it all—that Nico thought I didn’t care. Nico always carried herself like someone who’d been hurt and was waiting to be hurt again, so maybe she knew that I was growing weary of her behavior and jumped before she was pushed.

“Listen,” I said, suddenly short of breath as Michelle began scrolling through her phone, clearly content that she’d solved the Nico problem. “I’ve been thinking about her text.”

She didn’t look away from her phone, the screen like a spotlight, picking out her face in the dim stillness of my room. Her full bottom lip and high cheekbones. The crease between her dark eyebrows. Her long, shampoo-ad hair, as smooth and black as penguin feathers, that somehow looked better for being slept on.

“Don’t do this, Mara,” she warned.

But I did.

“Nico always ends texts with two kisses.”

I pulled them up, scrolling through them to show her.

And Michelle had to clock that when Nico replied, she only used a few words. on my way xx or you up xx. That sort of thing. So the message she’d sent the night before was pretty much a novel in comparison. And she always used lowercase. Lowercase with no punctuation because she was too cool for punctuation. Michelle peered at the screen, then returned to her own. “She dumped you. Why would she send kisses?”

I stared at her open-mouthed and she was immediately contrite.

“Sorry.” She winced. “But still…”

“She didn’t dump me, Michelle!”

That got her to look up from her phone and around the room as if checking that someone else heard that.

Then she glared at me as I responded to Nico’s message. “Mara, what are you doing?”

“She said that she doesn’t want anything serious, so I’m telling her that I don’t, either.”

Michelle was too stunned to speak for a second or two.

Then she gasped. “You texted her!”

But before I could defend myself, she snatched the phone out of my hand and pointed it at me.

“You can have this back when you can be trusted.”