Frenemies (13 page)

Georgia interpreted that as following the rules, and gave me an approving smile.

“Was that so hard?” she asked.

“I’m about three seconds away from going postal on both of you,” I said. “But no, that wasn’t hard.”

After a moment, Amy Lee shook her head. “I have to go with Gus. That was pretty condescending.”

“Definitely,” Oscar agreed.

“Really?” Georgia looked crushed. “I was going for encouraging.”

“And I’m the crazy one?” I demanded.

I let them bustle me along with them into a sleigh—the one not containing any of the people I wasn’t allowed to talk to, of course—and then I relaxed into the randomness of the whole thing. The sun was already starting to fade by the time we set off, singing Christmas carols like loons into the coming winter night.

We sang until the stars appeared, and our cheeks were too frozen to sing anymore. I surprised myself by having a great time.

Afterward, we all crowded into the house, Oscar got his hot chocolate, and I came back to earth with a jarring thud. It was one thing to avoid Helen, Nate, and Henry while bundled up in a separate sleigh, singing about angels and mangers and walking in a winter wonderland. It was something else entirely while trapped in a house with them.

Not that they were chasing after me.

Helen smirked every time she looked at me, which rankled, but which I ignored because she was the one I cared the least about. Tonight, anyway. And besides, I knew things she didn’t—things she would kill to know, in fact, about her supposed boyfriend. For his part, Nate shrugged a sort of apology in my direction, but stuck close to her side. I knew it was better that way, since Georgia and Amy Lee were watching me like a hawk, but the truth was, it felt … weird. I wanted to know what had happened. I wanted to know why he’d called that night, and not since. I was sure there was more to the story this time than
I can’t be what you want
or whatever he’d said that night in the bar. I wanted—
needed
—explanations. I forced myself to stop looking at him.

I looked across the room instead, to where Henry lounged in the corner, propping himself up against the fireplace. Waiting. I knew he was waiting because whenever my gaze slid in his direction he met it, in a manner I could only describe as challenging.
I dare you to come over here
, that look said, right out there in the open for anyone to see.

It made me feel jittery. It made me feel as crazy as I was accused of being. It made me think I wanted to take that dare, and that was a whole different kind of crazy, the kind I’d thought had to do with Nate and had last time landed me naked and in the nearest bed with his roommate instead.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I announced. Amy Lee and Georgia exchanged a look. “Do I really need an escort?” I snapped. “Will I get to be alone on the toilet?”

They let me go.

The downstairs bathroom was occupied, so I climbed my way upstairs. The house was a beautiful old Victorian settled on the edge of a field. Stately and graceful, which was reflected in the furnishings. I found the bathroom and locked the door behind me.

Stately and graceful
, I thought.
Two words that will never be used to describe me.

When I came out, Henry straightened from the wall, and it was as if he filled the hallway.

My heart stopped beating, and then kicked back into gear.

I couldn’t describe that look on his face, but it made my knees feel weak.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

He smiled.

“So I’ve been thinking,” he said in a casual, conversational sort of voice, completely at odds with the intent way he watched me. “No smart-ass remarks, please.”

We stood facing each other in the hall. Behind him, I could hear the party noises float up from the floor below. The stairway was right around the corner from where he stood. I could make a break for it.

But I didn’t move.

“I didn’t say anything,” I pointed out.

“And yet I could hear you.” He eyed me. “Imagine that.”

“Were you thinking about something in particular?” I asked. “Or was that just a general announcement? For reference?”

“What did I just say?” He shook his head at me. “Like three seconds ago?”

“I don’t think I want to do this,” I said, barely above a whisper. “Whatever this is.”

“Oh, of course,” he said, this time with more of an edge. “Because talking is scary. I keep forgetting how much you hate it.”

“It’s just complicated …” I began, and then stopped myself.

“I bet it is,” he said. “You need to get over the Nate thing. I love the guy, but come on.”

“You don’t know anything about it!”

“I know Helen deserves him, and that’s not a compliment. She’s nuttier than he is.”

I liked the way he said that—so matter-of-factly, as if Helen’s nuttiness was obvious and there could be no rebuttal. As if Henry would certainly never be sucked into her games.

“But see, here’s the thing,” he said, forcing me to focus on him again. “I think what’s going on between us qualifies as a pattern.”

“What?” I frowned at him. “There were two isolated events. No us. No pattern.”

“I think it’s a pattern,” he said. “Which must suck for you, since you think I’m some illiterate jackass of a spoiled rich boy.”

I opened my mouth and then shut it with a snap. I felt my shoulders sink.

“Which sucks for me,” he continued in a low voice, “because who wants to be into a girl who thinks he’s a jackass? That got old in the fifth grade, believe it or not.”

“Henry …” But I didn’t know what to say. I knew suddenly that despite all of our sparring, I didn’t want to be responsible for hurting him, even in a small way.

“I don’t know why,” he said. “I just like you.” His eyes searched my face. “Obviously, this presents a problem. The jackass issue. But then it occurred to me that you don’t actually know anything about me.”

“I’ve known you for years,” I reminded him. “Almost a decade, in fact.”

He leaned against the wall. “What do I do for a living?”

“You’re a lawyer,” I shot back at once. Then, to be obnoxious: “And you’re a Farland.” The trust fund was implied.

He sighed. “What kind of law do I practice?” he asked.

I thought about it. I had a specific memory of Georgia, ranting about
something
, years ago—but no, it was gone.

I shrugged.

“Exactly my point,” he said. “You just know the basic outline. You have no idea who I am.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I burst out. I felt way too emotional, and tried to rein it in. “What makes you think I care?”

“I care,” he shot back. “This is part of the adulthood thing I believe we’ve touched on previously. I can’t allow myself to keep having romantic moments with someone who hates me, Gus. Right? That’s only logical.”

“But I don’t know you, so it’s okay?”

“Something like that.” He let his gaze drop, and his smirk reappeared.

“Listen.” I had no idea where I was going, but I kept on, in the desperate hope something might occur to me as I floundered. “I handled the whole sex thing badly, I know that now. It was a rough time. And the last time just kind of—I don’t—I mean, it was for all the wrong reasons …” I broke off, flustered.

“It was for the best reason,” he contradicted me.

He reached across the space between us then, and traced a pattern along my jaw. I felt my body react to that—I sighed a little bit, and felt an ache spread through my limbs.

And then he was kissing me.

And it was hot. His mouth was clever and I couldn’t seem to get close enough, to taste enough. He made a low sort of noise and pushed me back against the wall, angling his head so everything got deeper and hotter.

I had no idea what might have happened then, but there was a sudden shuffling noise in the hall behind him, and I jerked my head back and out of his grasp.

I was a little bit dizzy, so it took me a moment to blink and then look around him, behind him, expecting to see someone on a bathroom mission.

Amy Lee and Georgia stood there, a scant few feet away, gaping at us.

“Oh,” I said brightly. “Hi, guys.”

“You have to be kidding me,” Amy Lee said flatly.

Henry turned, and then it was like a face-off. A face-off in a nightmare, except I was awake. My stomach cramped from the tension. I was afraid to look at Georgia, but I forced myself to do it anyway.

“Okay,” I began, “I know that it must seem—”

“You’re fucking him?” Georgia threw at me, scandalized. “Henry?” She didn’t say “
my
Henry,” but I heard it anyway.

“Not in a—I mean we only—um, I—” Language failed me. It had something to do with the way she’d said his name.

“How is that your business?” Henry asked her. He was very polite, but there was a bit of steel beneath.

Georgia’s brows arched up, and then I watched her look at Henry for a long, long moment. Something passed between them, and then Georgia shrugged.

“It’s not my business at all,” she said, but she sounded almost respectful.

I actually thought, then, that maybe it would all be okay. Awkward and weird, but okay. I let myself breathe. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath in the first place.

“Fuck this,” Amy Lee said then, in a strange, deliberate voice that made us all flinch. Everyone turned to look at her, and her flushed, angry face. “Fuck all of you.”

“What?” Georgia looked as confused as I felt.

“Amy Lee—” I started.

“Shut up!” she ordered. She looked at Georgia for a long moment, and then she looked at me. I felt myself wilt. She didn’t look at Henry at all.

“What’s wrong with you?” Georgia demanded.

“I’ve had it with all of this crap, is what’s wrong with me,” Amy Lee snapped at her. “The two of you are exhausting and I can’t take another minute of it.”

“I didn’t tell you because—”

But she didn’t let me finish.

“I don’t care why you didn’t tell me,” she said. “I don’t care if Georgia spends the rest of her life prostrate on the bed, weeping over some loser. I promise you, I have better things to do with my time than keep up with these fucking soap operas.”

“Hey!” Georgia sounded stung.

Amy Lee took a step back, and fired that angry look back and forth between Georgia and me again. I realized she was shaking slightly.

“I’m not in college anymore,” she said. She wasn’t snapping any longer, which, somehow, made it worse. “None of us are, but I’m the only one who seems to have noticed. I have a house. A dental practice. A marriage. We’re talking about babies and college funds, and
you
—” She glared at me. “You’re wearing my bridesmaid’s dress to a party just to fuck with me while
you
—” She turned to Georgia.

“While I what?” Georgia snapped, daring her.

“While you go out of your way to live your entire life like it’s the same Tori Amos album we listened to when we were all of twenty.” She sucked in a deep breath. “You both need to grow the hell up, but I don’t care if you do or not, because I’m not dealing with this shit anymore.”

And then she backed up another step, while we all just stood there and stared at her. There was a beat, and someone was breathing heavily—it might have been me, I couldn’t tell—and then she turned, wrapped her arms around her middle, and took off down the stairs as if our friendship didn’t lie in tatters behind her.

chapter fifteen

E
very song on the radio was about heartbreak, it seemed, of one sort or another. What to do to keep him from leaving, how to get through those awful days right after she took off, the fantasies about the two of you getting back together, the sick realization that he might never love you again and maybe never did in the first place. It was breakup central all along the FM dial, and if the songs weren’t enough, you could turn on the television to just about any prime-time show to
really
stick the knife in.

But no one seemed to talk much about what to do when your best friend broke up with you. There weren’t whole artistic media devoted to the subject. There was Edie Brickell’s “Circle of Friends,” and that was about it.

I discovered—with no help in the form of a song—that what happened when your best friend broke up with you was a lot like what happened when you walked into your boyfriend’s kitchen to find out that he wasn’t your boyfriend anymore. Your world stopped with an audible crash as it splintered, but the
actual world
did not.

I did whatever was necessary to get through the moment.

Amy Lee disappeared down that hallway, and shortly thereafter, from the party. Georgia and I hardly looked at each other, not then and not afterward, when we sat in silence in Henry’s Jeep as he once again chauffeured me across the state of Massachusetts. I turned to Georgia when we pulled up in front of her place, but she lifted a hand instead. She didn’t exactly indicate that I should
talk
to the hand. It was more of a
stop, please
gesture. But it was still her hand in the air, aimed at me.

“I can’t,” she said in a thick voice I hardly recognized. “Okay, Gus? I just can’t.”

What, exactly, she couldn’t do—talk to me, look at me, deal with what had happened—she didn’t explain.

She just climbed out of the car and went inside. I watched the door close behind her and wondered—in an absent way, really, because I was about as numb as it was possible to be without actually turning into stone—if I would ever see her again.

Outside my apartment, I eyed Henry from across the gear shift.

“Want to come up?” I asked.

He smiled, and reached over. I noted that no matter what, he was always so very beautiful, which, for some reason, made me feel sad. Vaguely sad, anyway.

He picked up my hand in his and carried it to his mouth. I think he kissed the back of it, but I couldn’t be sure, I couldn’t feel a thing.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

He was kind. But it was still
no.

I knew that later, much later, I would probably spend whole days humiliated by that exchange, but it didn’t matter then.

I just shrugged, and went inside.

Where I sat in the dark with the dog, and wondered when I would start crying, and whether I would survive it.

I got up in the morning and went to work, because even though I felt as if the world had received a serious wallop, possibly knocking it off its axis forever, there didn’t seem to be any point to sitting in the house, brooding about it. I dressed without paying the slightest bit of attention to what I was putting on, which could have resulted in something sartorially exquisite. I didn’t care enough to notice.

I hardly knew how I’d managed to get myself to work once I found myself on the wide front steps of the Museum. Once inside, I felt as if it were someone else performing my duties, going through my motions.

It was odd Minerva hadn’t noticed, I thought as I walked back out to my desk from the bathroom to see that she was sitting there in my visitor’s chair, awash in bright-colored scarves. For all her assorted manias and delusions, Minerva was usually pretty good at noticing emotional upheavals. (She ought to have been—she thrived on them.)

I studied her as she settled herself more comfortably in the chair next to my desk. Minerva favored bold colors and what she called her
bohemian flair
—thanks to a summer spent in Berkeley, California, at an impressionable age. Apparently, exposure to Berkeley led to a lifelong habit of draping oneself in tapestries, ropes of beads, and the occasional llama. (Okay, I was making that up. I wasn’t actually sure it was
llama.
It could be anything hairy and particularly pungent in damp weather.) No wonder I had a phobia about California.

“Gus!” she exclaimed when she saw me walking toward her. “This new diet is
fabulous
—I can feel the fat simply
melting away
!”

She waved her hand in the general direction of her midsection, inviting me to agree and—preferably—to shriek at length that she looked
simply weak
with hunger so she could accept whatever cakes I then pressed her to consume.

I knew the routine.

This was, evidently, why Minerva had failed to notice my mood. This latest diet had something to do with eating shoots and leaves, if I’d heard her correctly, and had come recommended thirdhand from her longtime best friend and diet coconspirator, the horrifically named Dorcas Good-win who was—for her sins—a middle school math teacher. (Yes. The woman was named
Dorcas
and taught vicious, sniggering thirteen-year-olds. I could only imagine the whispers in the halls, the name-calling in the notes passed in class.)

Their previous diet had involved a series of complicated shakes and revolting powders for a very trying ten-day period.

“This one’s all about
foraging
,” she was telling me. “After all, it’s how our ancestors lived for ages.
Ice
ages, Gus, and frankly I
just
can’t imagine why we’ve rejected the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. There were no fat cavemen racing around the steppes, now were there?”

As if she had personally spent time on the prehistoric steppes, instead of reading? Jean Auel novels like everyone else.

She was nothing if not frighteningly logical when you least expected it, if somewhat hazy on the details of the rise of agriculture. She was also obsessed with dieting. The fact that she remained a perfectly reasonable size ten on a five-six body, no matter how intense her exertions, never seemed to appease her. Once upon a time, when she was a slip of a girl (I’d heard the story too many times to repeat it without snideness), she’d dreamt of being a dancer, and she’d been a size six. That this had occurred when she was fifteen and largely without breasts never seemed to penetrate her diet-muddled brain.

“Minerva,” I said then, because I had to stop her before she started raving about glycemic indexes and the importance of hydration. “You and Dorcas have been friends since you were kids, right?”

“Oh yes,” she said, fastening her gaze on me. “It was practically preordained. You can’t imagine what it was like to be so
creatively named
in the midst of all the Brendas and the Barbaras.”

Until that moment, I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that “Minerva” was a name that had been foisted upon a poor, defenseless child—that Minerva’s parents were as much to blame (if there needed to be blame) for the odd duck of a woman before me as she was herself. Because what could anyone do, when thirteen and gawky and tragically named something like Minerva, but
choose
to
be Minerva.
It was sort of touching, when I thought about it.

“I can’t imagine you as a Brenda,” I told her.

She preened, pleased. “I wanted so terribly to change my name,” she confessed. “I was jealous of the other girls, but in time, I grew into my name and now, of course …” She waved a languid hand. “Why did you ask?”

“Oh.” I had to think about how to phrase the question I wanted to ask. I settled on: “How have you been friends with Dorcas for so long? How do you keep from fighting?”

“We don’t do anything of the kind,” Minerva said with a small laugh. “We fight all the time. She claims I’m attention-seeking and really, she’s dreadfully immature behind all that ranting about
responsibility.
I expect we’ll argue about it all the way to the grave.”

“But do you ever have real fights?” I pressed her. “The kind of fight you’re not certain your friendship will recover from?”

Not that what had happened with Amy Lee could be called a
fight.
In the strictest sense of the term, I would have had to participate in it, if it was a fight. Instead of just standing there while she told me off.

Minerva shifted her legs, and considered.

“You don’t have to tell me the details,” I assured her. Which was a waste of breath, of course. Minerva
existed
to over-share. She made a pensive sort of face.

“I don’t recall the details,” she said after a moment. “I know that we stopped talking for a while—you would think I’d remember everything that led to it. It was several months, I think. I was furious with her—I was determined we would never speak again, unless, of course, she offered a full apology.”

“What did she do?”

“She was very unsupportive of me,” Minerva revealed in hushed tones. “I wanted her to be on board with my decision to open a yoga studio, and she refused. She thought I was being led astray by a certain gentleman we knew at the time”—Minerva batted her lashes coyly—“and she
would not
accept my assurances that my love of yoga would transcend any possible relationship I was having with him.” She sighed. “It was very unpleasant.”

“Do you have a yoga studio I don’t know about?” I asked, working hard to keep my tone even. I was trying as hard as I could to avoid imagining Minerva striking yoga poses, or writhing about on a mat trying to touch her knees to her nose. It was a struggle. And unless there was an attic in the Museum I didn’t know about, Dorcas had been on the winning side of that argument.

“It didn’t work out,” Minerva said with a heavy sigh, as if she regretted the lost yoga studio nightly. “Though I do love the practice of yoga, and often wish … But that’s neither here nor there. She was just so smug—it was unacceptable. We had a terrible argument, and then we didn’t speak. You know Dorcas.”

I did know Dorcas. She was one of those stereotypical New England Women of a Certain Age—the sort who would revel in describing herself as
no-nonsense.
She was always clomping in and out of the Museum in
sensible shoes
, while attempting to force Minerva to cut her hair into
something more appropriate for her years
, something like Dorcas’s own serviceable, manageable bob.

Thinking about it, Dorcas and Minerva could only have met and become friends in childhood. At any other point in life, they each would have viewed the other as impossibly alien. Where Minerva changed her entire self-definition on a whim and the flick of a beaded necklace, Dorcas was
particular
about her position as a middle school teacher, her little house on the outskirts of Braintree, and her lifelong enthusiasm for breeding Cairn terriers. They shouldn’t have been able to tolerate each other and so, naturally, they had been best friends for some forty years.

“How did you start speaking again?” I asked. “Did she apologize?”

“Did Dorcas
apologize
?” Minerva let out a peal of laughter. “Dorcas Goodwin,
apologize
? First she would need to know the meaning of the word, and believe me, Gus—she still doesn’t.”

“Then how … ?”

Minerva fingered the edge of one of her scarves, one in a hue I couldn’t begin to describe.

“One day she simply called me, and carried on as if we’d spoken the day before, as usual.” Minerva raised a shoulder. “And I missed her more than I wanted to hear any apology, since we usually speak
several
times a day, as you know, so I carried on the same way. The next thing I knew everything was back to normal. We never spoke of it.”

“You had a huge fight that you never talked about.” I tried to imagine it, and failed. In my experience, fights were inevitably followed by much longer State of the Relationship discussions which caused far more damage, and left much nastier scars. Which would fill me with trepidation under normal circumstances—but then, as I’d already worried, I wasn’t sure this was a fight so much as a personal exodus on Amy Lee’s part.

“After enough time passed, there wasn’t much to talk about anyway,” Minerva said. “Things worked out the way they should. Dorcas is my oldest friend. She’s more important to me than anything I was angry about.”

She tilted her head to the side then, and fixed me with a surprisingly perceptive gaze. I’d seen it once or twice before, and it always gave me pause. It suggested, among other things, that she knew I thought she was a madwoman. That she encouraged it.

I found I was holding my breath.

“And in any event,” she said slowly, without looking away, “I think the important thing to remember is that all relationships benefit from a bit of breathing room.
Especially
friendships. It’s only when you find yourself without the women who understand you that you realize there are very few women who will.”

That night, I stood in my apartment in front of my answering machine with its big, red 0 and faced the fact that deep down, I’d expected Amy Lee to call. I didn’t want to face it, but it was inescapable. No matter how many times I called my landline from my cell and vice versa, to make sure they were both in working order, there was nothing. Radio silence.

I hadn’t expected her to apologize, necessarily, but I’d half-imagined some sort of
I was having a bad day, didn’t mean to snap
conversation. That would make sense of the whole thing—because Amy Lee couldn’t
really
tell Georgia and me to fuck off and
mean it
, could she? That had to be stress talking. Or maybe—who knew—she was having trouble with Oscar. Or with her dental practice. Once I thought about it, there could be a million reasons why she’d gone off like that. After all, Amy Lee was sort of famous for her temper. She had a short fuse, but the upside was she was usually over it just as quickly. I’d figured she’d spend Sunday ranting and Monday remorseful, and would call that night.

Georgia was a different story. I didn’t know how she would react to the Henry thing, because there was no precedent for it. So while I hoped she would call, I could all too easily see why she wouldn’t. I didn’t like it, but I was the one who’d crossed the crush line. I would have to deal with the repercussions.