Now, no doubt Juilliard is freaking amazing and it’s right in the city. But Ollie had done a million hours of research and Oberlin was her nest, not Juilliard. A few weeks before it all went to hell at my place I stumbled on her early acceptance letter to Oberlin hidden under her mattress. It had been stuffed there for over a month. She never said a word to me about it.
I wasn’t sure if she thought I wouldn’t be happy for her. I don’t know if she thought I needed her too much, what with my life falling to pieces and everything. But, as far as I was concerned, Ollie and her bassoon were going to Oberlin, no questions. I pulled her mom aside and spilled about how I was afraid Ollie was settling and then I totally sold her on encouraging Ollie to go to Oberlin. Then I picked up and left for Georgia. I needed to show Ollie we could love each other from afar. That she had to go wherever she needed to go, and I’d be there for her no matter what.
Only I guess I kind of thought it would all stay the same. And that’s exactly why it’s so brave and noble to sacrifice for the person you love—because it hurts like hell. Things change. And they may not go back to the way they were before.
Ever.
My mother comes in from work as I’m simultaneously hashing through all of this, listening to angsty, dark music, and contemplating the intolerable stupidity of my day at school.
“Hey, honey.” She cracks the door of my room open. “You want to grab a bite?”
“Nope.” It’s rude, but I have to put on a happy face for so many people all day long, and last night’s spat left a dull ache in my head, like a hangover headache.
“You know, we have a couple episodes of our show waiting, and I’m kind of dying to see what happens with coma guy.” She leans against my door frame, but I can tell she’s working hard to look like she’s at ease. “I finally read the article you tried to show me. The one about the fan theory where the coma patient is—”
“It was a dumb theory. So wrong. Spoiler alert—coma guy is one of the armed robbers who held up the bank across from the hospital. His crew dumped him because they thought he was dead and never told anyone. The head nurse helps him escape, but she doesn’t make it to Mexico to meet him because at the last second they bring in the victims of the horrible car crash and her ex-fiancé is one of the patients.”
My mom’s face goes through a few expressions as she processes the information: shock at the twist, curiosity about how I know, disappointment over the fact that there’s no reason for her to watch it now. I realize I’m the worst kind of troll. Only a very messed-up person spoils three of five episodes in a series’s final season.
Part of me takes sadistic delight in hurting my mom like she hurt me. Part of me wonders what kind of terrible, petty jerk I’m turning into.
“I didn’t realize you watched the episodes. Well, at least one of us got to enjoy them.” She already looks sufficiently bummed. I could stop there. A good person would.
“I didn’t watch,” I blurt out. It’s almost involuntary, like I’m possessed by the vengeful spirit of a chronic television drama spoiler. “I just read about it.”
“You never look at spoilers.” I try to interpret the wrinkles in my mother’s forehead like fortune-tellers read palms. I realize there’s no secret mystery, just the stress-induced skin creases that come from dealing with a belligerent teenage daughter.
“I do when I don’t really care about a show. It was getting so stupid.”
Eight seasons. One hundred twenty-four episodes. Three flus, a few dozen snow days, rerun marathons during heat waves and summer vacations at my maternal grandparents’ lake house, episodes with pints of ice cream to forget boy problems, low-key birthday celebrations just the way we liked—One Hundred Thousand Beats had seen us through it all, and this is the way I honor my old faithful medical drama?
“Okay, enough.” Mom presses her fingers to her temples like she’s trying to ward off a migraine with her bare hands.
“Enough what?” I will her to fight, to explode, to tell me why she chose that gross man over me.
“Of this attitude all the time. I’m not some monster who ruined your life. You keep pushing me away, but—have you spoken to your father?” Just before she really lays into me for being a jerk, she flips and brings up my dad.
“I texted with him last night.” It’s not a lie. He sent me a bunch of screenshots from this site that puts witty text on famous art. I know it was just a ton of crying cat emojis from me and stupid art jokes from him, but it counts as talking. Sort of. “Why are you bringing Dad into this?”
“You...you really need to set aside some time and talk about what you’re feeling with him—” Mom says in her best teacher voice.
“Why? Because it’s too much trouble for you to have an actual conversation with me?”
“When are you going to stop punishing me, Agnes? I’m human, you know. I mess up too.” She clutches the door frame with a white-knuckle hand, her hazel eyes blinking too fast because she’s getting teary.
I debate asking. Or just telling her how I feel. Instead of vulnerable honesty, I choose caustic sarcasm.
“You sure do!” I exclaim with a big, fake smile. “And now here we are, in the middle of Nowhere, Georgia. I’d love to talk about how unfair this is to you, but I don’t want to fail my classes on top of having the entire school hate me, so I better hit the books... You can go whenever.”
I wait, breath held, for her to morph from the sad little rag doll’s shadow she’s been and fly at me like the raging Irish-tempered harpy she always turned into when I put a toe too far over the line before. I half salivate for her to come at me, my ears pricked to hear her screaming that I “better learn some respect” and that she’s “not one of my little friends.” I want it to be like old times, the way we were before, even if that means enduring a screaming fit.
But she doesn’t raise her voice.
The hot mix of adrenaline and hope seeps out of me as she turns on her heel and pads back down the hallway. I’d bet a round-trip ticket to JFK that she’s opening a bottle of merlot and flipping to the melancholy Celtic mix on her iPod. Boo frickity hoo.
Maybe she should have dated one of the thousands of nice, normal single guys who chased her all over the place instead of getting low-down and freaky with a married coworker whose wife aired their dirty laundry far and wide across the five boroughs. Maybe she should have told her only daughter what was going on instead of shutting her out until things were too screwed up to fix.
Just at the moment when my brain cannot handle one more pulse of confusing information, my phone rings and Lincoln’s gorgeous, traitorous face lights up the screen. It’s like he has a timer set to know when my emotions are most jumbled. I clutch the phone to my chest, and my body crumples around it.
I should have deleted this picture of him from my phone when my hate was surging and made me strong. He sent it to me long before I suspected him of screwing me over. His dark hair is plastered to his head and he’s holding a surfboard. There’s sand all over his dark brown shoulders, and he’s smiling so wide, his eyes crinkled, his white teeth bright against his wet skin. His index finger points to the Saint Christopher necklace I gave him before he left.
He claimed that he sent me the picture because he missed me, and he said he was pointing at the necklace because he was telling his cousin about his wahine purotu who gave it to him for safe travels when he went back to New Zealand over the summer so he and his father could participate in a Maori leadership convention. Which was all so sweet when I thought I was his only “pretty girl.” But now I look at that picture and wonder if he was with other girls on that trip—girls who could flirt with him in Maori, with sweet,