Frenemies(15)

For some reason, I thought, looking down the street to where the Victory Gardens began and the public allotments spread out along the Muddy River, Henry Farland had been placed on this earth to challenge my claims to impending adulthood. If I concentrated hard enough, I was sure I could blame him for the Janis Joplin tragedy, too, even if he hadn’t actually been there. Around Henry, I behaved like the overwrought twentysomething I wanted to leave behind, forever one emotion away from hurling a cocktail across a room or bursting into inappropriately public tears. But the key difference was that I was not, in fact, that twentysomething for very much longer. I could choose not to behave like her. After all, I couldn’t change Henry. I could only change my reaction to Henry. And once I became the Zen goddess of social situations, I could shove my enlightenment directly down his smug—

I literally stopped in my tracks when I saw the figure outside my building—unmistakable even from this distance.

Although—happily—faced in the opposite direction, so that I could admire her delicate, pretty profile.

Helen.


One of the major benefits of living in the same apartment throughout my histrionic twenties was that I had been forced to develop numerous strategies for the avoidance of unwanted guests over the years. So while the horror of Helen’s appearance outside my door was extreme, and I planned to rant about it at length when I was safely inside my apartment, alone, and could make the necessary phone calls, she didn’t stand a chance.

I banked to the right before she turned and saw me, and then froze for a moment or so, convinced that God hated me and that at any second I’d hear Helen calling my name. But there was only the blare of road rage from the passing commuters and the far-off sound of a dog barking in the Fens. I made my way along the narrow alley between my building and the neighboring one, around the back to the freezing-cold and architecturally sketchy fire escape. As the smells of fried dinners and excess garlic wafted all around me, complete with the soothing, homey sounds of electric guitar music from the fourth floor (Berklee College of Music students) and the loud argument from the second floor (newlyweds, the rumor was), I hauled myself up to my third-floor windowsill. Rung by frigid, wobbly rung.

Another thing I learned in the madness of my twenties: don’t look down.

Once outside my apartment, I wrestled with one of the two ancient, heavy windows that offered me a stellar view of the chipped brick building across the way and stained concrete “patio” below. I knew from experience that if I could jiggle the left window long enough and in exactly the right way, I could get the lock to fall open, allowing me to crawl through it into the corner of my bedroom where I kept the pile of not-quite-dirty-enough-to-merit-the-use-of-my-laundry-quarters clothes. Sometimes they were on top of an old leather chair Amy Lee and I had found on the street during college, sometimes they beat the chair into submission.

I jiggled, and then I jiggled some more. I’d forgotten how long it took, and how loud it was. Not to mention how cold and dark it was outside on the fire escape. The last time I’d done this, I’d been basking in the warmth of entirely too many White Russians—the reason Georgia and I gained about fifteen pounds the year we were obsessed with them—and might even have been humming a merry tune. I was rather unfortunately sober tonight, however. I sent a fresh batch of hatred Helen’s way, and scowled at the window. This close, I also noticed that it was in serious need of Windex.

There was a cough from behind me and I froze—convinced that somehow Helen had chased me back around the building and, who knew, maybe even up the rickety fire-escape ladder. She was a wily one. But when I sneaked a look around, there was only my next-door neighbor, leaning out his window to glare at me from behind huge tortoise-rimmed glasses. It wasn’t that he was unattrac-tive—it was just hard to tell where he could be hiding his hotness behind that bright blue robe and the wild wisps of hair not quite covering his head.

In any event, the message I was receiving was this: my next-door neighbor did not approve of me.

Which was fine. He’d moved in months before and I’d barely seen him. I didn’t even know his name.

“Oh,” I said. As if it was perfectly normal to find me hanging about on the fire escape. “Hi! Don’t call the police or anything. I actually live here, I just—”

“I know you live here,” he snapped at me. “Augusta Curtis, apartment 309. I’m well acquainted with your habits.”

“That’s me!” I agreed with a broad, fake smile. Freak-azoid stalker, I thought. The guy looked older than me, and as my friends liked to point out to me, only freaks and weirdos chose to spend their adulthood in a dump like my apartment building. “Although I prefer ‘Gus,’ actually—”

“Well, Gus, I’ve been meaning to talk with you about the level of ambient noise for some time. Since I moved in five months ago I’ve kept a journal of noise violations.” His brows collided over the top of his eyeglasses as he intensified that glare he had trained on me.

Amy Lee had been somewhat excited for me when he moved in, I remembered then, because he wasn’t the usual college kid (the only sort of person who normally rented in the building) and she figured bookish-looking meant smart and interesting. Then he’d started pounding on the wall during movie nights, and she’d declared him an enemy of the state. We called him Irritating Irwin. I had never been interested enough to investigate his mailbox to find out his real name.