“Can I just come in? Please let me come in.”
There was a seven-second pause, and then: “Fine.”
Walking into my sister’s room that night was every bit as shocking as when I’d first seen her and Carter together at Scoops ’n’ Sprinkles. Vivian was a mess, curled up sideways on her bed, her face red and raw, her chest heaving, her breath uncatchable.
“Vivvy.” I sat next to her. I rubbed her back.
“I shouldn’t have said it,” Vivian said. “It was a mistake.”
“What happened?”
“I told—” She was seized by a fresh cascade of sobs. “I told Carter I loved him, and he... He said...”
“What? What did he say?”
“He was such an asshole.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘That’s really awkward because I actually want to brayyyyyyuhuhuh.’”
“Um...”
“BREAK UP!” Vivian violently wiped the tears off her face. “He said he wants to break up, Mags! He dumped me.”
“What?” It seemed impossible. As inconvenient as their relationship was for my life, I knew how happy it made Vivian, and I’d gotten so used to it. And I liked Carter being around! How could it just end all of a sudden?
“His reason was so stupid too,” Vivian said. “He said now that he was almost seventeen, he’d been thinking about life and stuff, how he wanted to be with a lot of different people while he was still young. Screw that. So immature.”
“Yeah,” I said, even though I wondered if maybe Carter had just stopped liking her. That’s what had happened with me and Ryan Fischer from camp. One day in October his DMs started to seem annoying instead of cute. And he way overused the tongue-smile emoji. “What a stupid farthead.”
“Heisa stupid farthead,” Vivian said, plopping onto her back. “I hate him. I hate him so much.”
“Maybe he made a mistake,” I suggested. “Maybe he’ll change his mind.”
“I doubt it. That’s not Carter’s style. And even if he did, I don’t date stupid fartheads.”
“True.”
We sat there talking for at least another hour, and then Vivian asked if I could sleep in her bed with her. It was the best night I’d had in a long time.
The next morning, Vivian felt nauseated by the idea of going to school and seeing Carter, and she was right to, because when he passed her in the hallway after biology, he didn’t even acknowledge her existence.
So Vivian was single again. Single and heartbroken. Mom was appropriately sympathetic but also strangely delighted to hop on the Carter Hate Train, loving the idea that she and her daughter could bond over their respective breakups. I found myself experiencing yet another jarring family shift, another sudden rearrange that left me on the outside. I tried to get in on it by invoking my situation with Ryan Fischer—“Men are ridiculous. Look at these emojis!”—but we all knew it wasn’t the same.
Even when Vivian returned to school in January after winter break and learned that Carter had been stricken by some mysterious condition that left him unable to remember the past year, she and Mom still referred to him as The Jerk.
“I don’t want to say it,” Mom said at one point, shrugging, “but maybe it serves him right.”
“I think that’s too mean, Mom,” Vivian said. “I feel really bad for him.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I take it back.”
But I knew Mom really meant it. Her anger at Dad seemed tohave gotten intertwined with her anger at Carter.
Cut to three years later, and I was now in Carter’s grade, both of us sophomores. Like Vivian, I felt bad for the guy, but I also knew I wanted nothing to do with him. We had no classes together, so that was easy enough to accomplish. I went the rest of sophomore year and most of junior year with minimal Carter Cohen contact (MCCC).
But then, that June, I started working at Scoops ’n’ Sprinkles. Just like Vivian had.
