In Twenty Years: A Novel (21 page)

“You’re still not getting it.” Lindy sighs like Annie truly is the biggest idiot she has ever encountered, and Lindy surely has seen her fair share of idiots. “You’re responsible for this!”

“I’m responsible for . . . people texting you? What is wrong with people texting you? Isn’t that what you always wanted: popularity, people falling at your feet?” A little spittle flies out of her mouth and land’s on Lindy’s shoulder.

“Do you not understand what happens when you push that little button that you like to push so much, the one that says, ‘POST’? You know what ‘POST’ means, correct?”

Annie’s neck throbs, her heat rash spreading up across her collarbone. She doesn’t need Lindy to patronize her!

“Of course I know what ‘POST’ means!”

It occurs to her, the phone call, the conversation.

“Then that is exactly how I—and the rest of the free world, and probably part of the unfree world—got it! Have you not heard of privacy settings? Actually, have you not heard of privacy at all?”

Privacy settings. Oh.

Annie had changed hers a few months back because she discovered that she got so many more “likes” when her Instagram was open to anyone. Also, what a thrill when a perfect stranger discovered something fascinating enough about
her
life to want to “like” it. So, yes, she had heard of privacy settings and chose to be utterly un-private.

“I have heard of privacy settings,” she says flatly.

Lindy mutters to herself as lights from her phone bounce off her face. “What on God’s great goddamn earth would compel you to tell Tatiana about Leon?”

“Tatiana? Who? Wait, what?” Honestly, Annie had spoken so quickly, so roused in the moment, she hadn’t really remembered exactly what she’d said.

“Obviously, you wanted to screw me! Thanks, well, you did it. Tatiana will officially probably never forgive me.”

“Tatiana is a reporter?”

“Stop acting like a total moron,” Lindy snaps. “Tatiana is my girlfriend.”

Annie’s chin juts out.
Oh.
She’d read about the girlfriend in
US Weekly
, but figured it must have been a ruse, since she was witnessing the very real boyfriend in the flesh. And it’s not as if Lindy wasn’t known for ruses. Wasn’t known for bullshit. Also, since when did Lindy start dating women?

“Since when do you like women?” Annie asks.

“Give me a fucking break, Annie!” Lindy’s face turns the exact hue of decadent apple-red, and for a second, with her wild hair and worse temper, she reminds Annie of Ursula from
The Little Mermaid
.
(Gus went through an endless
Little Mermaid
phase. Annie didn’t judge.)

“I don’t think this is her fault,” says Colin.

“
She
called
me
,” Annie squeals, her humiliation rounding the bend to tears. “And how did she get my number?”

“She’s a goddamn celebrity publicist! Getting your number is probably the easiest thing she’s done all day!”

“Honestly, Lindy, you can’t blame Annie here.” Colin again.

“This was dumb,” Lindy says. “This was a dumb fucking idea. To come back here and think that we could all get along. Pretend like we actually like each other.”

“I do like everyone,” Colin interjects. “Even when you act like a bitch.”

“Oh, Colin,” Lindy steps close, too close, and Annie loses her breath, worried she’s going to kiss him and spark things up all over again. “Go fuck your beautiful fucking self.”

Her motorcycle boots echo on the linoleum floor as she strides toward the exit.

“Lindy really has a girlfriend? I thought . . . genuinely, I mean . . . I read about it but . . .” Annie says to Colin, who sighs deeply and drops his head like an anchor that’s simply too much to hold afloat for one second more. Then Annie remembers: “Lindy! You have my phone!”

But Lindy is past the sliding glass doors now, so Annie chases after her, the doors whooshing to open, then easing closed behind her. She can hear Colin on her heels, then Catherine’s voice trailing them—
“Hey, where is everyone going? What’s going on?”

She catches Lindy on the sidewalk.

“My phone. Can I please have it?”

Lindy narrows her eyes, considering. Then she grabs it from her back pocket, holding it high, prepared to chuck it through the dusk air like a football. But then it buzzes, and Lindy, surprised, instinctively lowers it to eye level.

“Incoming text from Hubs.”

That was Annie’s screen name for Baxter.

“I’ve been waiting on that! Give it to me.”

Lindy holds up a finger. “Pause, please.”

Then her eyes broaden like an open window, and even though the late-day sun casts shadows underneath the hovering trees, Annie and Colin (and Catherine too, as she’s dashed out to join them) can see the color drain from her face.

“Is it Gus? Oh my God, is it Gus?”

Annie thinks of all the things that could go wrong. She should have never left them! She took Baxter to be responsible, but anyone can make a mistake! Annie knows this! Annie knows this so well! Fires! Gas leaks! Car accidents! Locusts! Who knows? The list is long!

“It’s not Gus,” Lindy says.

She averts her eyes and limply passes the phone to Annie.

No, it’s not Gus. It’s Baxter.

Naked Baxter.

Naked, full-frontal Baxter.

Even without his face, she’d know it anywhere. He has three moles just below his belly button, aligned just so, a perfect arrow shooting south. On their honeymoon, Baxter joked that they were like Orion’s Belt—a gateway to all the stars in the galaxy.

Underneath his Orion’s Belt, a message:

We shouldn’t have. But . . . tonight again after the fireworks?

22

LINDY

Well, fuck.

Lindy is at a total loss. Which is at least the second time she’s been rendered emotionally incapacitated in the span of twenty-four hours.

“Is that . . . is that . . .” Catherine is peering over Annie’s shoulder, trying to make sense of just what exactly she (and they) are staring at.

No one answers.

Did I just see a dick pic from Annie’s so-called perfect husband, who is clearly much less than perfect?

Lindy tries to catch Colin’s eye, as if to share a collective
WTF?!
,
but Colin is rubbing his chin, furrowing his brow, looking a little panicked himself.

Annie palms the screen and clutches the phone against her chest.

“Give me that.” Lindy reaches for Annie’s phone, swiping it from her limp hand. “No one should have to see that. Like . . . no thanks.”

“Lindy,” Colin says, then stops.

“Seriously, when did men decide that women want to see pictures of their dicks up close and personal?”

“Be quiet, Lindy,” he says.

“Why? I’m not wrong. You’re a guy, so you have no—”

“Shut up, Lindy!”

Shut up, Lindy!
As if she’s responsible for this!

“I’m trying to lighten the mood.”

“It wasn’t funny.”

“I’m trying to distract her.” She tuts. “She’s not the first person whose husband has sent a junk shot to another woman.”

Well. There. She hadn’t meant to say it so succinctly, but she did. Now it’s out in the open. No pretending it’s anything else than what it is. She says to Annie, “If it makes you feel any better, it’s happened to me.”

It doesn’t appear to make Annie feel any better, who’s currently walking in a teeny circle over and over and over again, as if she’s entered some sort of fugue state.

“Seriously. It happened to me! Does anyone remember that time when I was dating the guitarist from the Strokes?”

Colin and Catherine stare at her like they’ve been lobotomized. Or maybe like
she
has been lobotomized.

Lindy shrugs. “Well, anyway, he did it. And I was just trying to be helpful.”

“Shut up, Lindy!”
Annie whispers, as close to seething as any of them have ever witnessed. She stops circling long enough to march over and snatch her phone back. Then it’s right back to perfectly round orbits on the sidewalk.

Shut up, Lindy!
From Annie? Lindy blows air in and out of her nostrils and clenches her fists into tiny, tight balls.
Shut up, Lindy!
How about you, Annie! How about you shut up? In fact, shouldn’t Lindy still be angry at Annie for unleashing this shit storm on her? Shouldn’t Lindy be the one telling Annie to piss the hell off? If memory serves, that’s exactly what she was doing—and still intends to do!—when her depraved husband accidentally blasted out a shot of his penis right into Lindy’s unsuspecting eyeballs! Lindy is the one who should be furious!

“Listen! Don’t shoot the messenger here,” Lindy snaps. “Like I had any interest in seeing that disgusting close-up of your husband’s genitalia. I’m just trying to be nice!”

“Well, you are
terrible
at nice,” Annie says.

Lindy opens her mouth, because oh, does she have a million things to say to
that
, like:
All I used to be was nice, kind, generous, loving to you, and a lot of good that did me, a lot of notice you paid to that!
But suddenly Leon appears, having apparently stumbled out of the waiting room and into their dysfunctional huddle.

Leon. What is Leon doing here?

“Why are you here anyway?” she asks. Something wicked is rising up from her stomach, and it gurgles loudly. Lindy squashes it down, and then it occurs to her that this bubble of queasiness may be the baby, and that baby is saying that Leon is here because he’s the goddamn father.

“Are we starting this again?” Leon sighs. “I can go. God knows, I
will
go. But you told me to stay.”

Then Annie stops circling the pavement and starts weeping, so quietly at first that none of them notice, but then her shoulders are quivering, and then her body is shaking, and Lindy regrets her stupid anecdote about the Strokes’ guitarist.

Lindy contemplates her own infidelity, her own broken promises, and knows she should check her cell to see how many of Tatiana’s calls she’s now missed; in other words, how many furious voice mails Tatiana has now left her. But even tone-deaf (not literally), Lindy recognizes that when your former best friend has been sent an inadvertent dick pic from her husband, which was clearly meant for someone else, now is not the exact moment to focus on all the ways your own personal life is going to hell.

Annie’s phone hums to life just then. She has it set on this cutesy ringtone that Lindy pinpoints as an electronic version of Pharrell’s “Happy.”

“It’s Baxter,” Annie whispers.

“Give me that.” Lindy grabs the phone and presses it to her ear.

“Hello? HELLO? HELLO? No, wrong number, douchebag!”

She returns the phone to Annie, who’s breathing in and out through her mouth in what Lindy envisions to be the Lamaze technique (she read about it on Babycenter), and who then steps to the curb and vomits. Catherine holds her hair at the nape of her neck and rubs her back, and Lindy is reminded of how often they all did this for one another back then. Twenty years ago and then today. Well, back then, no one held Annie’s hair back because she was too busy holding theirs.

Lindy chews her lip and looks away—
she should be the one holding back Annie’s hair!
—while Annie has another go at purging her insides. Still, though, she doesn’t move.

She remembers that night when she made Annie swear they’d always be sisters. That was the night Lindy thought she might tell her, come clean about her feelings, about her confusion as to where she drew the line with Annie, between friendship and love. But once she kissed her, once she leaned in and put every ounce of herself, stripped bare and completely vulnerable, into that kiss, and once she pulled away from her, Lindy realized Annie didn’t have a clue. That she’d be so blindsided, sweet innocent Annie, that Lindy would lose her entirely. So instead she cast it aside, like a silly prank, like something you’d do late at night at sleepaway camp because your bunkmate dared you to. She told herself that maybe she’d finally tell her at Catherine and Owen’s wedding. That went about as well as most things Lindy told herself she’d do . . . but didn’t.

Lindy wonders if Annie remembers that night, remembers that she kissed her.

“Should I call him back?” Annie asks, when she’s done vomiting. She’s squatting on the curb outside the university hospital, the rest of them in a horseshoe around her. “Maybe I should call him back. Hear what he has to say.”

“You’re not calling him back, for God’s sake,” Lindy barks. She doesn’t know why she’s being so protective, even though she
does
know; she just wishes she no longer cared.

“He’s my husband.”

“He’s a lousy husband. You settled.”

“You don’t know anything about him!”

“No,” Lindy concedes. “But I still know a lot about you.”

“Ha! Like you’re an expert on me? Like you’re the expert on men all of a sudden?” Annie yelps.

“I
am
a bit of an expert, actually!”

“Well, that is just absolutely laughable!” Annie ekes out some sort of weird pseudo-laugh that reminds Lindy of
American Psycho
or
The Shining
. A crowd of onlookers have gathered, trying (and failing) to inconspicuously record a public meltdown of the great Lindy Armstrong. Annie’s fake cackling echoes across the street onto their devices.

“Listen,” Lindy seethes, fully cognizant that they’re being watched, that they’re being judged, that everything that’s being said and done right now is being recorded and will likely air on
Access Hollywood
, on
Extra
, on
TMZ
. Why did she ever want this for her life? To live like a mouse in a lab? Fame seems alluring from the outside, but once you’re inside the bubble, you discover that there’s so little room to breathe, so few chances to get fresh oxygen. She’d been naive, she realizes, to even consider that this weekend could have been an escape from it, that for a wee second she could simply pretend to be who she was before her life blew up into something she couldn’t control on her own.

“Listen,” she hisses, “I am trying to
help
you here! Don’t want my help? Don’t take it!”

“
You
are trying to help
me
?” Annie shouts. “Well, that is absolutely ridiculous! An absolute first in the history of firsts!”

“You are so clueless that it’s no surprise your husband is cheating on you!” Lindy regrets it from the moment the words fly out, even before she sees Annie’s face crumbling like an avalanche, but there’s no taking them back now. Lindy Armstrong does not retreat. She spins toward the crowd because it’s not like they’re not watching, not like they’re not voyeurs into their family dysfunction. “Her husband sexted her a dick shot that wasn’t meant for her! Should she call him back?”

“SHUT UP, Lindy!”
Colin now. “Jesus Christ. What is wrong with you?”

“Fuck you guys. Seriously. Fuck you.”

Lindy salutes the three of them (plus Leon), as Annie’s phone sings out again—
“clap along if you feel like a room without a roof!”
—and then she takes a bow and strides out of the parking lot.

“Lindy!” she hears Leon call after her. She doesn’t slow, doesn’t stop. She doesn’t need him; she doesn’t need any of them. She pretends they’re sorry she’s gone, that they’re sorry it came to this.

But she suspects what they’re really thinking is:
Lindy’s always running from something.
This is nothing new. This isn’t any grand surprise.