I shrug, adding a little gusto to my answer. “I…don’t think I need Mom to find my dates for me.”
“Really?” Confusion and curiosity dance on Jade’s face until the moment I can see a thought cross her mind. “Are you finding your own dates?”
Though no words leave my lips, the room rattles with a loud slurp. I look at Jade over the lip of my tipped coffee mug.
“Are you dating someone?”
“No!” My response is like a knee jerk. Like drawing my hand back with a hiss and shaking the sting from the hot end of my curling iron. I mean, it’s absurd. Why would she even ask that? “Why would you ask that?”
“Because you’re acting all mysterious and purposefully vague,” she answers. “You can’t say Mom doesn’t need to find you dates and not explain why. I mean, besides the obvious meddling and helicopter mom behavior.”
I consider all the reasons for my sudden inscrutable confession. It could possibly be I’ve met my wits end, and the barrage of dating profiles my mom has curated is getting to be too much. Or maybe—more likely—because the constant text messaging, the back-and-forth banter, between myself and Andrew has led into the same hazy territory as my answer.
I’d forgotten our friendship has been the whole point of it all. Every text message, every phone call, every shared meal and movie. It’s become all blurred, leaving me disoriented like I’ve got on a pair of Coke-bottle glasses. But he can’t be the reason my mom can finally give up her efforts. He can’t. We’re all wrong for each other. We want completely different things. His commitment issues and my hunt for monogamy go together as well as oil and water. Or mixing bleach and ammonia, a somewhat disastrous—and deadly, some might say—combination.
“It’s because of her meddling,” I finally answer Jade. I draw out the nasal “-ing” ending to stamp my point. But it comes out a little whiny, and Jade nods with a frown that isn’t a frown at all but more of a statement. An obviously sarcastic “sure, whatever you say” frown.
“All right,” she says. A lazily thrown white towel as she accepts my answer for what it is: a cover. Good thing she doesn’t know for what. “But if…you know, there was something going on, you’d tell me, right?”
“Of course.” It’s amazing how easily the lie slips from my lips. No, it’s not a lie. It’s a…fib. I’ve taken the lie and stretched it out a little bit. Just until I can mold it back into the truth, whatever that may be.
And I know just the way to do it.
“But you know, maybe as long as you’re there to vet for me, it really can’t hurt.”
“Yeah?”
I nod. “Yeah. Only if you?—”
“I will take my job as the official date vetter-er very, very seriously.” She has her palm facing me next to her solemn face with the three middle fingers held up.
“What is that?”
“It’s the Girl Scout symbol of honor and duty. Oh, and sisterhood.”
The straight faces we attempt to hold start to twist into loud snorts and cackles. Our sudden outburst startles Avery in her playpen, and she lets out a tearful wail.
“Oh, Mommy and Auntie Gracie are sorry. We didn’t mean to scare you.”
Jade rushes to an upset Avery’s side, and I’m left with a fresh, new moxie. A hearty determination to clear all the murky, confusing things that make my friendship with Andrew questionable territory. He’s my friend. That’s all. Clear as day. There’s nothing confusing about that.
Maybe I will give Rick a call.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Andrew
My eyes burnas the glare from the computer screen seems to singe my retinas. I’ve been staring at the same reports for the past two hours, and the numbers and letters are starting to turn into a columned sequence of ones and zeros like I’m in the Matrix or something. I lean back in my chair, letting the squeaky hinges from the springs below me echo off the walls of the empty office. The empty office even I shouldn’t be occupying on a quiet weekend afternoon. But I am. Surrounded by the occasional whirring of the vacuum being pushed around by the weekend cleaning crew and the coming and going of Olive as she brings me binders from Mr. Sheridan’s office.
“You really don’t have to be here,” I tell Olive as she dumps a stack of papers on my desk.
“And leave you here all alone on a Saturday? What kind of friend would that make me?” She turns to perch her hip on the edge of my cubicle and adds, “Plus, after what happened last time, I think it’s best you at least have a partner in crime if you’re going to get yourself into trouble.”
“What trouble?”
“Mr. Sheridan’s scotch? You spilling it in his office?”
My eyes round into large saucers. “You knew it was me?”
