“‘Ey, girl!” He wrapped his arms around me and shook me. “I’ve missed you!”
“Michael!” I feigned excitement. Michael and I had never really gotten along. That’s what happens when you make my best friend cry hundreds of times. It really irritated me that she’d brought him to my house on Christmas Eve. But if she hadn’t, I felt kind of certain she would have just not come. I always tried to rationalize this trait of hers.
Whatever it was that had changed in me lately had no patience for it.
He put his arm around her, and she held his hand. Leah cooed as he kissed her on the tip of the nose.
Yuck.
“Hey, so you’re at Manderley Academy, right?” Michael said, adjusting his attention to me.
“Yeah, it’s in—”
“I know where it is,” he interrupted in that … way of his. “Didn’t some girl go missing from there?”
I felt shaken as my two worlds collided. My mom turned. “Missing? What happened? Did you know her?” She looked at me.
“N-no.”
“Yeah, she was hot in those missing photos, too. If she had a boyfriend, I bet he’s pissed he didn’t hang on to her.”
Leah thudded him in the chest. “Mikey, shut up. She’s missing, it seems wrong to talk about her like that.”
“Hang on to her?” I repeated his words. “She’s missing, she’s not flitting around the world with some other guy.”
I couldn’t believe I was defending her. But somehow, she felt like mine to think bad things about. Certainly not Michael’s.
“Whatever, I’m just saying she’s hot. She’s been missing since the end of last year. I read it online somewhere. She’s probably dead.”
“Oh, my God,” Leah said, ignoring Michael’s more ominous prediction, “that’s just so incredibly General Hospital.”
“She’s got some friend, Diana or something—”
“Dana,” I corrected, automatically.
“Yeah, Dana—she was hot, too—said that she didn’t know where the girl was but she was sure she was still out there. She’s all over interviews online.”
I felt light-headed. It was too strange to hear my best friend’s annoying douche of a boyfriend talking about Becca and Dana.
“That’s so weird. Is everyone freaking out at your school, then?” Leah’s eyes were wide.
I nodded. “Yeah, everyone’s really worried.”
“That’s just awful. That poor girl.” My mom clucked her tongue and started moving the cookies from the tray to a cooling rack. “I hope they find her. Her poor friends, they must be so worried! Oh, and if she did have a boyfriend … that must be just the worst kind of worry—Oh! The corn bread! I’d nearly forgotten it.”
I wanted to press the reset button, and make it so Michael had never come. It would have made things infinitely better for a thousand reasons, but right now his little bit of online stalker info was making me feel nauseous.
“Look!” Lily ran over to me and presented me with the drawing she’d had her nose to for at least ten minutes.
I crouched down to her level, thankful for a change in subject. “What have we got here?”
It was the most tactful way of asking an easily offended child like Lily what on earth she’d been trying to depict with the four free crayons she’d smuggled out of Harry’s Restaurant and Pub.
“Jasper,” she said, pointing to the thickly drawn figure that took up a third of the page. He looked like a horse. “And that’s me.” She pointed to a squat little girl with a crown on her head. “That’s the house, and that’s Mommy and Daddy.”
“Where am I?”
She stretched her mouth out to either side and looked guilty. “Um …” She ran into the other room with a red crayon, and came back a moment later with a stick figure drawn in on the backside of the sheet. “You were just here on the other side. Because you’re not here anymore.”
Ouch.
I smiled, feeling as separated from my old life as the little crayon me, and put an arm around her. “That is an excellent drawing. It should definitely go on the fridge.”
I pinned it up with a magnet and all the other drawings.
An hour and a half later we had finished eating my mom’s best Christmas Eve food (chili, corn bread and—less happily—green beans) and were watching It’s a Wonderful Life. We watched it every year. Even Lily could be heard whispering some of the lines to herself in her small falsetto voice as she played with toys by the Christmas tree.
The sun had finally set, and there was a slight chill wrapping the blanket around my feet. Jasper was curled up next to me, breathing quietly. Michael and Leah were sitting next to me on the sectional sofa, holding hands and whispering things to each other too often and stifling giggles. My parents were in their respective chairs. My dad was falling asleep, as he almost always did during movies, and my mom was sipping on her warm—and spiked—apple cider.
I thought about Michael and Leah. Just about anyone who didn’t know the intricacies of their roller-coaster romance might look at them now and think they were in love. Maybe that’s what it had been for Becca and Max. Maybe they weren’t as in love as everyone thought they were. Maybe they weren’t blissful and bound for a lifetime of happiness. Maybe everyone had been wrong. The thought lifted my heavy heart for a second before it fell again.
Because what if I was wrong? Maybe Michael and Leah were what love was. They always came back to each other, no matter how bad they were for one another. They chose to forget the wrongs of before and stay together. It was their choice. There must be some reason they got back together and stayed with each other through thick and thin.
Was that love, or were they just emotionally destroying each other? My phone buzzed on the cushion under me. It was a text from Max.
Watching It’s a Wonderful Life … you said you watch that every Christmas, too, right?
I clicked off my phone’s screen, feeling an unexpected urge to cry. It was stupid, and I knew it. But suddenly I felt the weight of realizing that no one had ever felt that way about me. No one had ever not been able to stay away from me. Whether Michael and Leah were true love personified or not, they always came back to each other. And even if Max hadn’t loved Becca like everyone said, then it made no difference. Something had kept him magnetized to her. Something, it was to be assumed, other than her beauty and charm.
Michael and Leah whispered things to each other, not meant for anyone else to hear. Suddenly I couldn’t help but imagine Max and Becca sitting next to me instead of them.
Jasper jerked in his sleep, bringing me back into the room and its reality. I looked back at the screen. It was the part where Jimmy Stewart is sitting at the bar, and the weight of his entire life seems to fall on his shoulders.
I texted Max back.
Yeah, I’m watching it now. I miss—
I backspaced over the last two words, shaking my head and feeling embarrassed for myself, and pressed Send.
I didn’t know what else to say.
Leah giggled next to me at something Michael said. I fixed my eyes on the screen.
It was like nothing could satisfy me. At school all I wanted was to come home, and once I finally got there, my best friend was an entirely different person and seemed