“So, you really like Eddie.”
“I’m in love with him,” Rebecca said.
“I think I might be too,” I said. “So, maybe he’s just a heartbreaker, and we should be friends. What happened between you two?”
“He changed me,” Rebecca said. “I don’t just mean from a human, either. He was. I don’t know. He had this allure to him. This charisma, this charm. It was like... whatever he said at any given time seemed like a great idea. I started skipping classes at school. Hanging out with him and his boys. It was so much fun, but I felt like I was losing who I was, you know.”
I nodded.
“My ex was like that,” I said. “He was very persuasive. He still couldn’t talk me into being with him. And the thing is. I liked him a lot. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t give in. I didn’t want to lose that inner part of me, you know? That piece inside, that independence. And it drove him nuts. He got mad. It was like. I wouldn’t do what he wanted, and he couldn’t just accept that I wanted to be myself. You know?”
“Look at me,” Rebecca said. “Standing here dressed like a hooker, ready to literally throw you off this roof after I ripped your head off. All over a man. Just a boy, really.”
“We lose ourselves in our relationships,” I said.
Rebecca stood back, looking up at the moon and sighed.
“This is crazy,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m doing up here. There’s a million other things I could be doing with my time right now.”
“Are we good here?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Rebecca said. “I think it just helped to talk about things, you know? Eddie just never wanted to talk. It was always, hey, maybe later, sweetheart. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Fuck. I should have listened to my mother.”
I looked over the edge of the parapet. The parking lot seemed really far down. Far enough down to not walk away if I fell. The breeze rolled in around me, and a wave of dizziness sent me back into the safety of the rooftop doorway.
“How do we get down?” I asked.
“I didn’t think this far ahead,” Rebecca said. “Truthfully, I didn’t plan on letting you go. I was going to murder the shit out of you.”
I laughed, in that way you laugh at things and have to find them funny when there’s a pistol pointed at your face.
“Look. Eddie’s no good for you. You need to focus on Rebecca again, right? What do you want? What do you need?”
“I’m hungry,” she said. “I could really go for a nap about now. I don’t know.”
“I mean like. Long term goals. Can you enroll back in college?”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Night school? You could take online courses.”
“You’re crazy,” Rebecca said.
“You have to find who you are,” I said. “That’s so important in moving on.”
“You’re right,” Rebecca said. “We’re both better off without him, am I right?”
There was a silence as the wind cut between us again. I thought to myself, This is not the time, this is not the time, but inhaled and breathed.
“Look. I feel like we bonded and had a sisterhood moment, and I would feel completely guilty if I took the spirit of that and stabbed you in the back with it, so I’m just going to be as honest as possible. I know that you and Eddie had problems. That’s probably because you’re two separate people. But I haven’t felt this way about somebody in forever.”
Rebecca paused, her face turned toward the moon, and she seemed to digest this for one long moment that seemed to extend onwards and onwards…
“I absolutely respect that,” Rebecca responded. “You just have to do what you need to do for yourself, right?”
There was a smile on her face. Everything in my stomach seemed to curdle at the look of it.
“And I have to do what I need to do for myself, which is move on,” Rebecca said. “And if I’m really over Eddie. Like, really, really over him, I won’t give a shit what happens to his little hookers.”
