“The sweetest. But she’s getting caught up in the fantasy of it all. I don’t blame her for that, but I have to be the grown-up here. I have to consider how much it will hurt her when this doesn’t work out.” I’m back to my talking points. The ones I spat at Reid and can’t seem to keep out of my mouth.
Nisha laughs. “Hurtsher? You’re aware you’re self-sabotaging, right?”
I can’t help but laugh too. Nisha has a gift for getting right to the point. “Fully aware of that. Reid is too. He called me out on it.”
“I’m quickly remembering why I liked him.” Nisha blows out an exasperated breath. “James really did a number on you, Lil, and you’re dragging all that into this thing with Reid. He was a good kid, and now he seems like a good man. A good man is hard to find, you know.”
“Yeah. I’ve heard that one before.”
I think back to my conversation with my mother, when I’d told her with such conviction that we don’t have to let our pain rule us. Why have I reserved my compassion for others while keeping myself locked in the cell of my mistakes, cataloging every misstep, memorizing each one in painstaking detail, as though cocooning myself in them could prevent me from committing them again?
I hear a knock on the door. Emme comes in, her hair a staticky pink halo around her face. She climbs into bed next to me. Nisha beams when she sees her.
“You’re up early,” I say.
“I got your text and I wanted to come talk to you. How was last night?” Emme’s voice is brighter than the time would suggest. Usually, she wouldn’t get out of bed for another four or five hours.
I glance at Nisha. She smirks at me over her mug.This is on you, babe.
“We had a nice time, but I don’t think Reid and I will be seeing each other again,” I say.
Emme’s face falls. “Why not?”
I smooth her hair behind her ear. “It’s just too complicated. We both have a lot going on in our lives, and we live on opposite sides of the country.”
“But that’s what planes are for. Used intentionally, of course. I don’t need to tell you they are a cancer to the earth.”
That’s what Reid said, I don’t say.
Emme looks at me thoughtfully. Then she turns to Nisha. “What do you think?”
Nisha takes a pause so exaggerated, I wonder if she has somehow fallen asleep with her eyes open.
But then she nods. “You know, when your mom and I met on the first day of our freshman year, I thought she was the coolest person I had ever met.” I give her a skeptical look—I’ve never heard her say this in my life. “I know you think I’m lying, Lil, but it’s the truth.” She looks back toward Emme. “She was so calm, cool, and collected, with her tastefully curated book collection and her little slip skirts and cropped cardigans. All her attention to detail, the way she protected her routines—I envied it. I wasthis sprawling mess, and she was this quietly interesting, mature city girl who had no problem leaving parties early and declining dates with guys if they were boring. She wouldn’t let anything impinge upon her peace.
“But then, the summer before our junior year, she tells me that she’s actually really unhappy. That the pressure of holding everything together is completely overwhelming, and she’s so afraid that she’s wasting the best years of her life chasing this idea of perfection. She’s burnt out, we’d call it now. So, she asks me to help her figure out how to have fun. Real, genuine fun. You know what I tell her?”
“What?” Emme is rapt, and honestly, I want to ask Nisha the same thing: I remember that time, and I remember that feeling, but I cannot for the life of me remember this conversation.
“Get out of your own way and let yourself feel the good feelings. Obviously, your mom is a great student. She understood the assignment.”
Nisha turns her gaze to me.
“So the next day, I take her to a tiny café on St.Mark’s to go see this musician named Jeff Buckley. And then your mom meets this ridiculously hot guy and spends every minute of the next week with him, even though the new school year is about to start. She falls in love, and even though she never tells me those words herself, I know what love is when I see it. So, Emme, what’s important in this story is not that the hot guy made your mom happy.”
I watch Emme mask a grimace as she bravely weathers the news of her mom thinking a guy was hot.
Nisha gives us both her slyest smile. “It’s that sheletherself be happy first, and she stayed out of her own way long enough to make it count. And guess what? She still got straight A’s the next semester. Maybe she was a little anxious, but her life did not fall apart because she let herself go for a second. Actually, her lifeexpanded.”
I return to that moment now, recalling with sudden clarity Nisha’s edict to go forth and be free. Me coming home with that thrifted gunmetal slip dress and her telling me not to waste it. I swallowed her advice whole, stopped focusing on accumulating gold stars. I remember the way my summer had opened up—how I’d roamed downtown with my camera in hand, collecting freckles across my collarbone and stories that tumbled from my mouth at parties with a newfound ease.
And I realize, too, that if I had not embraced this mindset, I would have stayed home that night while Nisha sailed to Sin-é with another friend—maybe Trisha with the tinkling laugh or Monique with the bee-stung lips and the lilting Montrealer accent. And one of them would have noticed him: the boy in the freshly pressed suit, with hair that curled around his ears in the humid air that made everything else wilt. That night would not have belonged to me. Reid would have walked into someone else’s story.
And here I am, thirty years later, still with so much to learn from that girl who was sometimes afraid but resolved to go forth anyway.
Here I am again, on the precipice of genuine connection, of freedom, of opportunity, and I’m running in the opposite direction of it all.
Nisha drains her mug and lets out a jaw-cracking yawn. “OK, this hippie shit is working. I’m gonna try to sleep for a couple hours before my parents get up. Love you girls.”
