They’d laugh. Then they’d start kissing again. Then would come the sex part. Thefucking.
I said it out loud. Yelled it actually. On my yellow bicycle, pedaling hard, I yelled it.Fuck him. Fuck everyone. Fuck everything.
Forrest had conned me. All those questions he’d asked about my thoughts on life were just his way of keeping me on board as someone who’d ensure that Jilly and Hayward stayed occupied while he fooled around with Brenda. I was a dope and a loser to have ever believed otherwise.
It’s one thing when people you never trusted in the first place turn out to be mean—people like Olivia. The worst thing is when the person who lets you down is a person you loved more than anyone else in the world.
39
Summer Love
Something shifted in me. Maybe there was a direct correlation between the level of devotion you could feel for a person, if you believed he cared about you, and the depths of hatred you’d reach if you discovered otherwise.
This was what happened to me then. Over the space of time it took me to ride my bike up the hill from the library, the long way along the lakeshore back to Wonderland—more than an hour—my whole world changed. Where, so recently, Forrest had represented everything good in my life—his approval all that mattered—what I wanted now was for him to feel the kind of grief and pain I was experiencing.
If I hurt this way, so should he.
There was only one person on earth capable of understanding what I was going through: Regina. Unlike to Forrest, for whom it turned out I had been nothing more than an amusing plaything, to Regina I was a respected friend and confidante, an ally.
Regina took me seriously. She’d called me her one true friend. All this time I’d looked at her with a mixture of judgment and pity. Now I understood how brave she was, how wronged she’d been. I understood something else too, an ominous piece of information that Regina had yet to take in. From what I’d overheard at the library, the affair withBrenda wasn’t just a replay of Forrest’s usual summer behavior. What was going on was more than a summer fling.
Those two wanted to be together, not just for some stupid version of the summer love fun Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta sang about inGrease. They were talking about always. For real.Forever.
Brenda had called her husband an idiot. Forrest wanted to leave his wife. There seemed no other way to interpret what they’d said.
I already knew that Regina’s appeal for Forrest (not his love for her, maybe, but his desire) had expired a long time ago. She’d said as much herself back when we had our conversation down at the lake.
What I understood now was the hardest part: Forrest Emerson had no real interest in me either. Maybe he did once. Maybe he never did. But whatever little piece of his heart he might have reserved for me in times gone by, I didn’t occupy one inch of that place anymore.
I was last year’s American Girl doll.
In my fourteen-year-old brain, there seemed only one thing to do now: I would tell Regina what I’d discovered about Forrest. Whatever she wanted to do with that information, I was on her team now.
40
She SaidWe
Iwaited a day before I told Regina what I’d learned at the library. I was afraid of what she might do. I’d heard my mother’s assessment:You never know with that woman when the next time will be when she goes off the deep end.I didn’t want that to happen on my watch.
I chose a moment the following afternoon when the children were at sailing lessons. Forrest was gone, of course, off on one of his supposed triathlon-training sessions. Prudence was doing laundry.
I knocked on Regina’s bedroom door.
She was typing one of her to-do lists. She seemed so engrossed in it that I had to say her name twice before she looked up.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
She looked up from her typewriter, identical to the one in the kitchen.
“I guess you never saw this room before, did you?” she said.
I looked around, as if studying the room for the first time. There were pill bottles everywhere, plus Regina’s record player, with a pile of very old albums strewn across the floor—classical, from the looks of them—along with balls of knitting yarn, a lace shawl, slippers, some kind of animal skin (deer maybe?), and a glass table displaying specimens of exotic insects impaled by pins. There was a photograph ofRegina and Forrest looking young and in love, and a machine that made sounds like the ocean, probably meant to help her sleep. What looked like a very old Barbie doll on a stand, wearing a black sequined evening gown, was poised next to the bed on what looked like a custom-made stand. Beside her, the red typewriter.
I stood at the foot of the bed. She did not suggest I take a seat.
“I was at the library the other day,” I told Regina. “I went there to pick up a book.”
She didn’t rush me. She did not say, as some might, “Cut to the chase.”
