“I’m sorry I had to do that in front of your friend.”
“Hmm?” It was harder to tune her out when she moved to perch on the opposite arm of the couch.
“I figure if we both start treating each other with more respect, things will go a lot easier.”
Hearing Shelly talk about respect was like hearing an atheist talk about God. “You mean the respect that you didn’t show me just now on the balcony? Or when you went through my mail? Or earlier in the hall, when you trashed my mom to complete strangers? That kind of respect?”
“I’m trying to apologize here.”
I let my silence speak for itself.
It had taken me a while to figure out Shelly once she’d grafted herself onto our lives. She wasn’t a gold-digging home wrecker siphoning life and money out of my dad; she was worse. She thought she loved him, and the cherry on the deluded sundae? She thought he loved her. I don’t know, maybe he had at first. But that was the thing with my dad: he could be so charming. I guess that was what made him such a good salesman. He’d sell something so hard that I think he sort of had to believe it himself. When they’d first gotten together, Shelly must have seemed like a ray of sunshine in his otherwise gloomy life. Always smiling and praising him, never complaining about the hours he worked or the way his hair was thinning. I’m sure she made him feel like a man when, for his whole life, he’d felt like anything but. And in return, he’d lavished her with gifts and trips until her head spun so much that she didn’t have to think about the wife and daughter he already had.
Now Shelly was stuck in the lackluster apartment where he’d stashed her—and me—enduring his eighty-hour workweeks and two-plus years of broken promises, including the as-yet-to-appear—and realistically never would—engagement ring.
I guess you could say that Shelly’s happily-ever-after hadn’t turned out as she’d hoped, and the fallout had been extreme. Every weekend that she got saddled with me was a fresh reminder of the lives she’d helped destroy. If I was being charitable, maybe I could chalk up her not leaving my dad to guilt in addition to reckless stupidity, but regardless, Shelly brought out the worst in me.
Her shoulders slumped. “Fine. I don’t even know why I try with you.”
“Yeah, your life is super hard.”
“But that’s just it. It doesn’t have to be.” Shelly moved to the coffee table in front of me. “Aren’t you tired of playing the bratty teenager? ’Cause I gotta tell you, I’m tired of being on the receiving end.”
“What can I say? You inspire me.”
Shelly made a half-aborted gesture to touch my hair. “I still remember what you were like before.” A ghost of a smile. “You used to let me braid your hair and ask me to teach you new yoga poses. We were friends. I know you remember.”
I couldn’t forget. When she’d started working for my parents as their personal at-home trainer, Shelly had been like a granted wish I didn’t know I’d made. She was energetic and friendly and so pretty. Unlike my parents, who always seemed to be embroiled in some pressing task that required Shelly to hang around waiting for them, Shelly would ignore her phone and focus entirely on me. She’d do my hair and tell me about college and how the guys she went out with were so immature. More than that, she’d ask about my day and my life, and listen like it mattered.
The shift had been so subtle that my thirteen-year-old brain hadn’t caught it. She’d gone from asking about soccer practice to coaxing details from me about the caustic relationship between my parents and commiserating with me once I spilled. By the time I’d realized what was going on, it was too late. Dad started meeting Shelly at his office, and Mom, not to be outdone, upgraded to a full-time fitness coach named Hugh who worked her out in ways it was illegal to pay for outside Las Vegas. Three months later, papers were filed, lawyers went to war, and Mom began a passionate affair with Jack Daniels.
And Shelly couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t let her braid my hair?
It took everything I had to not flinch from her. I wasn’t thirteen anymore. I viewed her past friendship with me like the stain it was, and I wasn’t about to alleviate her occasional pangs of conscience by pretending otherwise.
I locked eyes with her. “I remembereverything.”
Shelly nodded at me, once, twice, and dropped her hand to her thigh. “Okay. I get it. You hate me. I might hate me, too, except I think I might be smarter about it.”
I raised an eyebrow at that.
“I put up with a lot, and not just from you and your mom.”
I propped up my head on my arm and raised an eyebrow. “Oh no. Don’t tell me there’s trouble in paradise?”
“You’re trying to get slapped, aren’t you?”
My other eyebrow rose. For all her talk—and with Shelly there was always a lot of talk—she’d never once threatened me. I hadn’t thought she had it in her. I once saw my mom throw her out of the house by her hair, and all Shelly had done was cry. Was there an actual spine hiding behind the Barbie-doll facade?
I suppose the proper reaction to an adult threatening to hit you would be fear, but Shelly wasn’t the kind to inspire anything. She had maybe ten pounds on me—not counting her boobs—and not even as many years. I had friends with siblings older than she was.
I think Shelly realized that her scare tactic had been a bust. She sighed. “Things are going to change around here. I promise you that.”
“Sure they are.” I successfully fished the remote out from under the cushion and gestured for her to stop blocking my view. She didn’t move.
“I know you think I’m temporary, but one of us is sorely mistaken.”
I turned on the TV and leaned so that I could focus on the screen. “You don’t really think he’s going to marry you, do you?”
