FaceTime beeps through on my phone. My pride has taken enough of a beating that it sits back and lets me sob openly to Ollie this time.
“Babydoll,” she cries when she sees my face, already streaked with a few tears. “Grab Mr. Kittenface.” She crosses her arms and waits for me to grab my old, sweet-faced teddy. “Hug him so tight.” I do, laughing wetly at myself and us. “That’s my girl. That’s how hard I’d be hugging you if I were there. Tell me. Everything.”
I nestle Mr. Kittenface in my lap, tugging on his ears while I blubber about Ma’am Lovett, the Southern kids whose shoulders are as icy cold as their climate is tropical, my mom fury, my Lincoln fury... I let it all stew and bubble until we’re both crying.
“Whew. Holy shit.” Ollie unleashes a shuddering sigh. “What a day. You’re wrecking me, you know that, right? And you have every right to cry over every one of those things, but please never, ever speak that asshole Lincoln’s name again.”
I whimper. “Remember when—”
“No.” She pulls the phone close to her face, so she’s one gorgeous, blurry eyeball and a perfect swoop of winged liner. “No, no, no. We’re not going down the LiNeOl road again.”
LiNeOl. Ollie’s nickname for the three of us since we were assigned to the same science group in eighth grade. After years of being our friend around school, I was scared dating him would be a disaster for everyone, but Lincoln was that amazing boyfriend who jumped from friends to more and never let it get weird. He never treated Ollie like a third wheel. He knew her favorite candy was Nerds when we went to the movies and got her purple tulips on Valentine’s Day when she didn’t have a boyfriend.
Ollie used to say she wanted to find the Lincoln to her Nes.
He had sex with five other girls. That I know of.
Five that he confessed to. And there had to be some times when he came back from one of their beds and climbed into mine, whispering about how much he wanted me, how beautiful I was, how we were so perfect together. He threaded his fingers through mine and pressed himself deep inside me, listening to me moan after he’d probably done the same things, heard the same things from another girl’s mouth in another girl’s bed.
Did I ignore the smell of other girls’ perfume and the vague explanations of where he’d been that made no sense? Was I as dumb as the wife of the weasel my mother was having a torrid affair with?
“I...I just never got to really figure it all out. He’s called. I haven’t answered. Yet. But sometimes...I want to,” I confess, hanging my head in shame. I’d never confess that to anyone but Ollie.
She blows out a long breath. “I know. He asks about you. Constantly. But listen to me—the truth is, he is sad he lost you. He is. Because he’s not a complete idiot. But he used you, Nes. He disrespected you. And I will never, ever forgive him. He lied to both of us, and we can’t trust him. Ever. Again.” She tucks her shiny black hair behind her ears and gives me a hard, dark-eyed stare. “You are gorgeous, inside and out, and you deserve so much better. You hear me? He was your first, Nes. Not your only.”
She looks so sad, like she thinks I’ll get off the phone with her and call him. So I confess something else, something so new, I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. “I did get asked on kind of a date today.”
“What?” she screams, almost dropping the phone. I watch her orange walls and Karen Geoghegan poster swirl in the background. “Are you kidding me? Tell! Tell me every damn detail now!”
I grab hard on the tail of her laugh and fly with that happiness. I don’t skimp on details, and Doyle is even more attractive in my retelling. If that’s possible.
“That’s retro hot!” she gushes. “Baseball date? So adorable. I’m happy. I wish I could come and bat or umpire or whatever.”
Her words cause a patch of thorns to bloom in my throat. I miss her so much. “Me too, Olls. Me too.”
“Hey.” She changes the subject before we get murky with sadness. “Just...don’t compare him to Lincoln, okay? I know he was your first love and all. But Lincoln only seemed perfect—he was actually a huge, gaping asshole. Remember that,” she warns.
I do. I will. I promise her three times, and I’m still not sure she believes me.
Later, after Ollie and I have gabbed late into the night and my Chinese food has congealed into a cold lump of tofu and water chestnuts, I creep out to the living room. Mom isn’t sleeping on the couch with an empty bottle of wine rolling on the floor like she’s been doing about once a week lately, so that’s good. Her bedroom door is shut though, and I half want to go in and sit on the edge of her mattress so we can chat like we used to. There are four episodes of the stupid medical romance she and I are obsessed with rotting on the DVR, but neither one of us has invited the other to watch.
The last episode we watched together was the night before she got a barrage of intense and threatening emails, phone calls, and even a delivered package from the scorned wife, who was close friends with half the office staff my mother depended on to keep her department in line. My mom had a few options: stay and push back against a possibly unhinged woman whose husband she’d slept with, in hopes said furious woman would stop the harassment and not deliver any more “anonymous” boxes of shit (yes, literal shit, hopefully animal) to our apartment; endure “lost” memos, meetings that the scheduler “forgot” to mention, and general iciness from the office staff who were solidly loyal to the guy’s wife; or hightail it outta Dodge.
Only a moron would have gone for anything other than door number three. Mom gave her notice the morning after I found an obviously fake “STD Home Testing Kit” left on our mat, which I assumed was a lame prank that wound up at the wrong address.
I press a hand on her door and slide it to the doorknob, then stop and pad away. I should go to bed, but I head outside instead and drag the hose over to the sad little twig dying in our backyard. I turn the hose on and sit with my feet in the pool, swatting mosquitoes and looking at the fat pearly moon while the water gurgles. For the first night in years, I distract myself by thinking about a boy who’s not Lincoln, and it feels like fraud. And maybe a little like hope.
While Ma’am Lovett scrawls Bible verses that correspond to the old man’s fishing trip in dusty chalk on the old blackboard before the bell, I palm a guava, working up the nerve to let it wobble in the center of her desk.
“Agnes?” She puckers her lips at the bobbling fruit.
“We were out of apples.” I wave to her with my book, and she dusts the chalk off her hands and takes the guava.
She presses it to her nose and inhales deeply, eyes closed, lips pursed. “Heaven.”
“Well, I have been called an angel. Now and then.”
Ma’am Lovett shakes her head somewhat lovingly before she goes back to the blackboard. The Generic Mean Girls from yesterday snort and whisper on cue, like they’re literally working off some D-list high school movie script on how to be total sociopaths, and then there’s a laugh that sounds sweet and warm, like taffy left in the pocket of your shorts at the shore.
I flounce to my chair, my heart so light, I warn myself to pull away before I wind up like Icarus, too close to the sun and falling hard.
“Doyle Rahn. Fancy meeting you here.” I smile at the familiar face sitting one row over, two seats back, and get an eyeful of daggers from every girl in between us.
Doyle either doesn’t know he’s the object of all the girls’ wanton desire or he’s so used to it, he doesn’t notice