“I’m okay. Just a lot happening at once.”
“I know. That’s why I came to check in.”
Gin Bennett, as always, is a better friend than I could dream of being.
I hum a sigh in the back of my throat, and somewhere in the dark, a bullfrog croaks back. We laugh—a sound that plays on the soundtrack to all my best memories. So many are set here at this house.Myhouse, although I’m not sure it’ll stay that way. I could buy a house anyplace if I sold this one. Even…
“So the suburbs, huh?”
“The suburbs,” Gin echoes. “Cue the minivan and the two-point-five kids. Isn’t that crazy?”
“It feels crazy,” I admit, “but I know it’s not. It makes sense.” But it still feels like the end of something I’m not ready to leave behind.
“And we don’t want kids right away,” Gin clarifies. “Rishi’s dadis planning to retire in the next two to three years, so…we’ll probably start trying around then.”
Her words stick like pushpins into the spongy cork of my brain.Trying. Two or three years.There’s aplan. It sounds so impossible—hypothetical, at best—but I remember what Gin said at the start of summer, how excited she was to be a Bhat instead of a Bennett, to start a new chapter with a new last name. A new family all her own.
“You’re gonna have…the coolest kids,” I decide, “and I am going to buy them a drum set and ruin your life.”
Gin winces. “All the more reason to wait a few years.”
“And then someday, they’ll come here to ski over spring break, and they’ll be all bummed that their cool lesbian aunt won’t buy them booze.”
At this, she laughs. “Aw, I want to go skiing here again.” She leans back and lifts her feet, gripping her imaginary ski poles as the porch swing transforms into a chairlift. We’re nineteen years old again, riding to the top of the only ski hill in Galena; then there’s no stopping till we hit the bottom. One good run of a life blurring by. Even the bumps don’t slow us down much.
Gin breathes out a long, nostalgic sigh. “We’ve had some good times here, huh?”
“Some bad ones, too,” I joke. “Back when I sucked.”
I wait for her laugh, but instead, it’s crickets. Literally. Their scratchy chirping underscores the rattle of the wind in the catalpa trees.
“You didn’t suck,” Gin finally says. “Be nice to my friend Alice.”
“She wasn’t very nice to you.”
“That’s not true.” Her voice is sharp, and I jolt. It’s as though Gin has smacked my words right out of the air. “Sometimes you act like our whole relationship was bad. And our friendship before it. I know you don’t remember very much, but…” Three cricket chirps, then she looks at me sideways. “It wasn’t, you know. Bad.”
I give a weak smile. “I’m not sure I believe that.”
“Well, Iknowit,” she says. “I loved having you in my life, Alice. It got hard at the end, yeah. You were mean when you were drunk, and you were drunk a lot the last couple of years, but you weren’t a bad person. You were just…young.”
“And an alcoholic.” I don’t use the word often, and even now my throat closes around it, trying to trap the truth. The running joke around Dunlap College was that you weren’t an alcoholic until after you graduated, but it wasn’t so funny once I became the punch line.
“You had some issues to work out,” Gin agrees, “and I didn’t really understand that back then. But you’re not defined by your worst moments, Alice. None of us are. Being drunk and unreliable…I think a lot of people go through that on some level in their twenties.”
“You didn’t.”
Her laugh is one longpfffft. “That isnottrue. Remember? Chrissy told you in Palm Springs. I had quite the ho phase after we broke up.”
I bite back a smile. “I wasn’t sure how much you remembered from that night.”
“Oh, you mean this night?” Gin tugs her bangs, and I snort a laugh. “This haircut won’t let me forget.” Carefully, she kicks off from the porch, setting the swing into gentle motion. When shespeaks again, her voice is just as gentle. “There were bad times, Alice. But there were good times, too.” Then her tone shifts, like the soft protective barrier has been stripped away. Beneath it, her voice is almost breakable. “What hurt the most was how you disappeared after we broke up.”
My chest feels tender, like pressing on a bruise. Am I remembering this wrong?
“You threw me out, Gin,” I remind her.
“Of the apartment.” Her tone sharpens—not angry but direct. “I didn’t throw you out of my life, Alice. You were my best friend before we started dating, and I needed space when we broke up, but I didn’t want you gone forever. But you never reached out, and when I tried, you had already blocked me on everything. Then I heard you quit Cold Sweat, and I kept waiting to hear from you, but it really took your dad dying for you to finally call.” Her voice fractures, but she threads it back together, not quite finished. “Then I read thatRolling Stonearticle and found out he’d been dying for a full two years…that broke my heart, Alice. I could’ve been there for you. I felt like such an asshole that this was happening and I didn’t even know.”
