Why am I still standing here, screaming about French people?
I needed to tie this conversation up in a pretty little bow. I needed closure. I couldn’t say good-bye to my best friend without it. He was leaving, going to France to chase a girlfriend I knew he didn’t love. I was losing him. And it was my fault. We couldn’t leave each other angry.
“I’ll figure it out,” he said. “Try not to make me feel worse about my situation, though I know that’s hard for you.”
“Your situation? It’s alwaysyoursituation. What aboutmysituation?” He just stared at me. He was hurting; I could tell. But I was hurting, too. “Listen—”
“What?”
“Don’t interrupt me.” I cleared my throat. “Gavin... it’s just... I’m going to fucking miss you, okay? I’m having a hard time right now, and life is about to get a whole lot harder the second you leave.” I started to cry.
He hated it when I cried, but he didn’t ask me, “Why are you crying?” He never had to ask.
He took a deep breath in through his nose, then released it forcefully in a burst of frustration. A second later his car stalled. He put it in gear, got out, and swooped me up in a bear hug. “Penny, Penny, Penny... my crazy girl,” he said as he rubbed my back. I was wiping my snot-covered nose on his black T-shirt and he didn’t care one bit.
He held me for a long time. When he started to release me, I said, “It’s not enough.”
He picked me up again and squeezed me harder. Tucking his face into my neck, he said, “It’ll never be enough.”
“Why?” I said, fully bawling against his shoulder.
He brushed a strand of my hair, damp with tears, behind my ear. “I have to go, and so do you. You need to be with your family now.”
I felt the lump in my throat growing. “You don’t have to constantly remind me that I have a family. I love my family. But you’re a part of it, too, and that’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m fucking crying in the parking lot in front of Bank of America.”
He pulled away and we stood there, two feet apart, staring at each other, as if we were committing each other to memory. Allowing one another to really look at and take the other person in, stripped down to our bones, without scrutiny.
“Is this it?” I asked.
“This is it, P.”
I shook my head, leaned up on my toes, and wrapped my arms around him. We hugged again for a long time before he got into his car. I tried to hold on to the feeling of having him in my arms, or maybe I was trying to hold on to the feeling of being held in his.
He started the engine as I stood there, waiting for him to leave.
“We’ll talk on the phone or email or something, okay?”
“Okay,” I told him.
He swallowed nervously. Looking up at me from the car window, he said, “I wish it were you, Penny.”
That was my bow. He knew I needed it, good or bad—no matter what feelings it shook loose from our long and complicated history together.
2.Fourteen Years Ago
PENNY
If you had asked me, at the age of sixteen, if I saw myself living at home at twenty-one, I would’ve laughed in your face. Yet here I was, at the beginning of my senior year of college, still waking up in my childhood bed and having breakfast with my parents and little sister, Kiki, every morning.
I had spent my entire life in this house. My dad was a microbiologist at a pharmaceutical company in Fort Collins, which paid just enough to send me to college but not enough for me to live in the lap of luxury in my own apartment, according to my practical father.We live five minutes away from Colorado State—and you have a perfectly good bed here. He wasn’t wrong, but still—it put a major damper on my social life.
My mom’s job was doting on Kiki. My sister was twelve years younger than me—definitely anoopsbaby. Even though my parents had always wanted a second child, they had given up all hope after ten years of trying, and then, “Oops! Here comes Kiki.” Where I was dark-haired and olive-skinned, like my dad, Kiki was blond and fair-skinned, like my mom. I always thought my mom liked Kiki better because of that.
Keeks had been on the pageant circuit ever since she was a baby, so the poor kid acted like a trained Pomeranian. Though I had nothing against pageants, I couldn’t understand why my mother was so determined to be a stage mom to my little sister when I was practically begging her to come to my ballet recitals. Mom had been a beauty queen when she was younger, but still... it never made sense to me why she couldn’t relate to ballet, too.
We ate breakfast together every morning in the kitchen, at the round wooden table, on country-style chairs. Dad would read the paper, Kiki would do her voice exercises, and Mom would cook and serve us, wearing the same apron she’d had since I was born. I would just sit there and wonder how I’d spent my entire life in the same city but had no social life to show for it.
“Why don’t you get involved in a school club or a sorority?” Mom asked as she slid runny eggs onto my plate. I grimaced. She was a terrible cook. I mean, how can you fuck up eggs? Especially when you make them three times a week?
