Frenemies(2)
Much worse.
Nate and I first met years ago when we both attended Boston University. We became members of a wider group of friends who fell into two rough and interwoven groups themselves: those who had originally gone to BU together and others who had met thanks to summers spent on Cape Cod. We all became one big group of people who were loosely connected and spread out across the greater Boston metropolitan area, leading to a rollicking social life with competing parties almost every weekend.
And in this big group, Nate was the favorite. Everyone loved Nate. He was so good-looking and sweet-faced at eighteen that some women (who will remain nameless) had been known to lurk around the bushes to take pictures of him on the sly. He was also nice, which was so surprising it often stopped people in their tracks. He was sweet to everyone, universally considered cute, and, unfortunately, taken. Girls mooned over him and treasured the intimate conversations they had with him every now and again over beers when his girlfriend was somewhere else. Guys pounded him about the shoulders when they met him and thereafter, inevitably, called him “solid.” Everyone loved Nate from afar until he’d finally broken up with Longtime Lisa (as she was known) for the last time in April.
The month of May was like the first season of Desperate Housewives, with all the girls playing Edie and Susan to Nate’s Mike the Plumber, in a pitched battle to soothe his broken heart. Amy Lee and our other best friend, Georgia, took bets and predicted—accurately—that it would all end in rebound tears.
By the time Nate and I hooked up at a Fourth of July party, I figured we were out of his rebound woods. I’d been waiting for Nate for a long time. Amy Lee had a point about the kind of guys I’d dated throughout my twenties—commitment-allergic “musicians” and banker boys had been my specialties, and I was over them. More than that, Nate and I were a good match. Even an obvious match. I might not have the kind of irritating (to other women) bland attractiveness that girls like Longtime Lisa had, but I felt I was cute enough. More to the point, we had all the same friends. We liked the same things. We’d even lived in the same freshman dorm. I liked the story we could tell about how, once upon a time back in college before he’d fully committed to Longtime Lisa, he and I had almost kissed outside Sicilia’s Pizza at 3:30 a.m.
Getting together with Nate made sense. It was the third part of my three-part plan for my twenty-ninth year, the one I’d come up with shortly after turning twenty-nine the previous January. The key to being a well-adjusted adult, I’d decided, involved three things: good friends, a good job, and a good boyfriend. I already knew that Amy Lee and Georgia were the best friends anyone could want—we’d been friends for over ten years and were practically family, and yet we had a much wider, active social group too, so no one had to feel claustrophobic. I was a librarian in a small museum near Boston Common, and I loved it. So what could be better than a boyfriend so perfect that other women plotted ways to impress him? A boyfriend who I’d actually been friends with for years? With Nate, finally, everything was as it should be. I could see our future stretch before us, one perfect fantasy after the next. I had nothing to fear from thirty. I was a complete adult, life was going along as planned, and there would be no need for the stereotypical I’m-about-to-turn-thirty breakdown.
And the fact that Nate was so cute that even Amy Lee sighed over him was just a bonus.
Across the room, Nate shifted position on his bar stool, so I could see his puppy-dog eyes for myself. And also the person those eyes were focused on: Helen.
I felt rage sweep through me, prickling along my scalp and then shooting along my skin to the tips of my toes.
The thing about Helen was that she was that girl, I thought as I knocked back my beer, and then helped myself to the rest of Oscar’s. He didn’t complain, he just raised his brow at Amy Lee and then launched himself toward the bar for refills.
You could say that I’d conducted a study of Helen, I thought then. It began the day she sauntered into the tiny, concrete-walled room we would be sharing for our freshman year, smiled at me and the remains of my high school hair, and claimed the bed beneath the windows. The better bed. I didn’t even put up a fight. I was dazzled.
Helen, with her fashionably ratty jeans and casual assumption that everyone wanted to hang out with her, was cool. Impossibly cool. Even the fact that she had one of those jarring donkey laughs like Janice on Friends just made her interesting, when on anyone else, a laugh like that would be dorky beyond belief. Nothing about Helen was dorky.
Helen had no qualms about walking up to the cutest boy in our dorm and asking him what was going on that terrifying first night at college, and then inviting herself along. She didn’t care if the more insecure girls hated her. She intimidated our RA simply by turning up and draping herself across a chair in that boneless way she had. She didn’t seem to notice any of the tension or envy she kicked up in her wake.
Helen was a guy’s girl. She never met a guy, in fact, who didn’t want to be her friend. She never met a girl who did. I, meanwhile, was very much the opposite. My knowledge of boys at eighteen came entirely from fantasy novels and certain classic WB shows. I was a girl’s girl. The moment I met Georgia and Amy Lee, I knew I would be friends with them, because we were all the same beneath the skin. Living with Helen was like seeing behind a curtain. I got to see what it was like to be everything I couldn’t be.
She was that girl. The one I had believed for eighteen years existed only in the imaginations of Hollywood screenwriters. And the fact that she was my roommate meant that I got to be that girl along with her, if only in my own mind.