She sighs into the receiver. “Hey, you.”
It’s melodramatic, I know, but I could cry. Instead, I try my best for nonchalance. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing, really. Everyone’s at my brother’s soccer game.”
“Why aren’t you?”
“I stayed home from school, so now my mom won’t let me leave the house for the rest of the day. ‘On principle,’ she says.”
I nod, even though she can’t see me. “Are you sick?” I ask with real concern.
For a moment, all I hear are her steady breaths. “Yes. No.”
There’s this wall between us that wasn’t there before. I can feel it. And on the other side of the wall is some pieceof her life that she doesn’t know how to talk to me about. “Hey,” I say. “You can talk to me. Even if it’s about other people.”
It’ll hurt, I know, to hear about her life without me. Her friends. Her more than friends. But I’d rather her be transparent with me than to be left out of any corner of her world.
“It’s Andrew,” she says.
“So... I guess y’all are still together?”
She’s quiet for a second. “Well, yeah. He’s my boyfriend.”
My mouth goes dry. I don’t hate straight people, I swear. But the wordboyfriend. I hate it. Especially coming out of Grace’s mouth. It makes my toes curl. “I thought you were going to break up with him,” I say, but it’s more of an accusation.
“I was. I am.”
I’m angry. At the both of us. Because somehow I had tricked myself into believing that he didn’t mean anything to her. That what we were doing wasn’t cheating.
“You don’t get it,” she says.
I don’t respond, because she’s probably right. I don’t know what it’s like to live a double life.
“I’m back here,” she says. “And you’re not, and now I can’t remember why I was supposed to break up with him. I cheated on him. But I still like being around him.”
I’m here. And you’re not.It’s all I can hear. Anxiety fills my lungs. And maybe she cheated on him this summer, but I feel like I’ve been cheated on, too. “Shouldn’t you at leasttell him about us?” It’s hard not to feel like she’s stomping through the memory of us with a giant eraser, removing any evidence of me.
She shrugs with her voice. It’s this sound I can’t explain. “We only have our senior year left. It feels silly to ruin it now. He’s going to Iowa anyway. And—”
“I know how you feel about long-distance.” I’ve felt lots of things about Grace. Sadness. Frustration. Confusion. But now I’m just pissed.
“Yeah.”
I expect for the conversation to be over, but it’s not. There’s a moment or two of weighted silence before Grace says, “Oh my God. My mom started subbing at my school.”
I’m both annoyed and relieved by the change in subject. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth a few times. I have to make a decision right now. I have to decide if I’m going to hold on to this anger, which could downright ruin my already fragile relationship with Grace, or if I’m going to stifle my emotions in favor of any future we might have.
“Awww,”I finally say, “your mom’s not so bad.”
She laughs into the receiver. “No. This is bad.”
I listen as she tells me all about how embarrassing her mom is and how she’s only doing this because it’s Grace’s last year of high school and she’s feeling sentimental. Her mom cries every time she sees her in the hallways and always checks in with all her teachers. I tell Grace about swimming at the Y and Freddie and how I knew him and Agnes when I was a kid. She asks lots of questions aboutFreddie. She has no reason to be jealous, but the idea that she might be satisfies me a little too much.
We talk late into the night, taking breaks for dinner and for Grace to catch up with her family to get the play-by-play of the soccer game. When Hattie and Tyler finally come home, they head straight for Hattie’s room. I narrate their actions and moans for Grace as we giggle back and forth, and I try not to gag. It’s well past one in the morning when our conversation dissolves into heavy, sleepy breaths.
Hattie tiptoes into my room and looks at me with pleading eyes as she crawls into my bed, sighing into the cool sheets.
I flip my bedside lamp off and creep out to the kitchen for a glass of water as I whisper, “We should probably hang up.”
