Frenemies(11)

She reached over and grabbed my hands in hers, and I had to order myself not to leap back in fright. It was a close call. I really didn’t like her touching me. For all sorts of reasons, but not least because she had her usual perfect manicure and I knew my own nails were in their perpetual state of scraggly disrepair. Like I needed further reasons to feel inadequate.

“Come on,” she said.

At that point, I went into what I can only describe as an out-of-body experience. Because I didn’t jerk away from her, or tell her where she could go. I just let her lead me away from the party, to a secluded little corner of the unused sewing room—once Henry’s grandmother’s refuge, if I remembered the story correctly. And if Henry’s grandfather was anything like Henry, I could definitely see the need for refuge.

I stopped contemplating Henry’s family tree and shifted my gaze to Helen, who sat down uncomfortably close to me on the rigid little settee. Her wing scraped against my shoulder.

“What was the other night all about?” Helen asked, gazing at me with what looked like pity. Of all horrible things. “Gus.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to scare you, or make you angry, but I wanted you to know I’m a little worried about you. A lot worried, to be honest.”

Oh my God.

She wasn’t trying to apologize, which I’d sort of assumed she’d been planning. Because she had to at least pretend to be sorry, didn’t she? This, however, sounded much more like tough love than the tearful appeal to my tender sensibilities I’d had every intention of throwing back in her face.

This wasn’t going to be tearful at all, at least not on Helen’s part. Not if I read that tone of hers correctly.

This was an intervention.





chapter four





An impromptu Janis Joplin karaoke intervention, for God’s sake.

My life was a sad, sad farce.

“Worried about me?” I echoed her stupidly. “What?”

“Worried,” Helen said firmly. She reached over and took my hand. I stared down at her pale, manicured fingers as they closed over my scraggly ones. “I know you, Gus. I know it’s just not like you to make such a fool of yourself in public.”

The clincher was the tone she used, the one that suggested we were such close, deep friends that she felt comfortable saying these potentially hurtful things.

“If you know me so well,” I managed to get out past my brain’s inability to accept that this conversation was happening, “I’m curious why you didn’t foresee the fact that I wouldn’t react too well to you stealing my boyfriend.”

To my surprise, and eternal horror, my eyes welled up when I said it. I looked away. I would scratch my eyes out with my own scraggly fingers before I’d let her see me cry.

“Oh, Gus.” She sighed. “I don’t think ‘steal’ is the right word, but you can use it if you need to.”

I wanted very much to stand up then. I wanted to leap to my feet, actually, and scream at her. But I was afraid that if I moved—even just a jerk of the hand to make her stop touching me—I wouldn’t stop at screaming.

I breathed in, and then out. I forced myself to count, very slowly, to twenty. Then thirty. Then, hell, fifty—

“You can’t say I didn’t try,” Helen said, getting to her feet. She finally let go of my hand and I cradled it with my other, uncontaminated one. “We’re too good friends for me to let something as crazy as that performance just slide by. I hope you know, both Nate and I were scared for you. You should think about that.”

I wanted to tell her that Nate hadn’t sounded too thrilled with her when he’d spoken to me that night. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed as if what Nate had been saying was that I was too good for him, which meant Helen was just dirty enough. I would have told her all that—happily—except there was still too much moisture around my eyes and I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea.

“Fine,” Helen said. “Be this way, if you need to.” She shrugged—audibly, thanks to her wings—and then flounced out the door.

I just sat there for a moment and tried not to scream.

The fact was, I’d been concentrating a whole lot on Nate’s part of this mess. How my boyfriend could have left me, how I hadn’t noticed that he was cheating on me, etc. The usual stuff. I was hurt and confused, sure. But really? It was Helen I wanted to kill.

It didn’t matter that on occasion she drove me insane. We were friends. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t the kind of friendship I had with Amy Lee and Georgia, or that no one seemed to understand that, even if it was different, it was real. Helen and I had lived in the same room for ten months. We’d been eighteen and away from home for the first time together. She taught me the secrets of applying eyeliner and mascara, and I taught her how to cook pancakes and make chocolate chip cookies from scratch. We lived on ramen noodles and microwave popcorn for the entire month of March that year. I knew that she had bad dreams sometimes and that she’d regretted losing her virginity to that guy in high school because she’d really liked his best friend better. How could all of those things be true? How could she have done something so horrible to me when she was part of that history?

And more to the point, how dare she talk to me as if she were on some moral high ground here? Was she completely insane?