Frenemies(45)

“Hey!” Georgia sounded stung.

Amy Lee took a step back, and fired that angry look back and forth between Georgia and me again. I realized she was shaking slightly.

“I’m not in college anymore,” she said. She wasn’t snapping any longer, which, somehow, made it worse. “None of us are, but I’m the only one who seems to have noticed. I have a house. A dental practice. A marriage. We’re talking about babies and college funds, and you—” She glared at me. “You’re wearing my bridesmaid’s dress to a party just to f*ck with me while you—” She turned to Georgia.

“While I what?” Georgia snapped, daring her.

“While you go out of your way to live your entire life like it’s the same Tori Amos album we listened to when we were all of twenty.” She sucked in a deep breath. “You both need to grow the hell up, but I don’t care if you do or not, because I’m not dealing with this shit anymore.”

And then she backed up another step, while we all just stood there and stared at her. There was a beat, and someone was breathing heavily—it might have been me, I couldn’t tell—and then she turned, wrapped her arms around her middle, and took off down the stairs as if our friendship didn’t lie in tatters behind her.





chapter fifteen





Every song on the radio was about heartbreak, it seemed, of one sort or another. What to do to keep him from leaving, how to get through those awful days right after she took off, the fantasies about the two of you getting back together, the sick realization that he might never love you again and maybe never did in the first place. It was breakup central all along the FM dial, and if the songs weren’t enough, you could turn on the television to just about any prime-time show to really stick the knife in.

But no one seemed to talk much about what to do when your best friend broke up with you. There weren’t whole artistic media devoted to the subject. There was Edie Brickell’s “Circle of Friends,” and that was about it.

I discovered—with no help in the form of a song—that what happened when your best friend broke up with you was a lot like what happened when you walked into your boyfriend’s kitchen to find out that he wasn’t your boyfriend anymore. Your world stopped with an audible crash as it splintered, but the actual world did not.

I did whatever was necessary to get through the moment.

Amy Lee disappeared down that hallway, and shortly thereafter, from the party. Georgia and I hardly looked at each other, not then and not afterward, when we sat in silence in Henry’s Jeep as he once again chauffeured me across the state of Massachusetts. I turned to Georgia when we pulled up in front of her place, but she lifted a hand instead. She didn’t exactly indicate that I should talk to the hand. It was more of a stop, please gesture. But it was still her hand in the air, aimed at me.

“I can’t,” she said in a thick voice I hardly recognized. “Okay, Gus? I just can’t.”

What, exactly, she couldn’t do—talk to me, look at me, deal with what had happened—she didn’t explain.

She just climbed out of the car and went inside. I watched the door close behind her and wondered—in an absent way, really, because I was about as numb as it was possible to be without actually turning into stone—if I would ever see her again.

Outside my apartment, I eyed Henry from across the gear shift.

“Want to come up?” I asked.

He smiled, and reached over. I noted that no matter what, he was always so very beautiful, which, for some reason, made me feel sad. Vaguely sad, anyway.

He picked up my hand in his and carried it to his mouth. I think he kissed the back of it, but I couldn’t be sure, I couldn’t feel a thing.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

He was kind. But it was still no.

I knew that later, much later, I would probably spend whole days humiliated by that exchange, but it didn’t matter then.

I just shrugged, and went inside.

Where I sat in the dark with the dog, and wondered when I would start crying, and whether I would survive it.


I got up in the morning and went to work, because even though I felt as if the world had received a serious wallop, possibly knocking it off its axis forever, there didn’t seem to be any point to sitting in the house, brooding about it. I dressed without paying the slightest bit of attention to what I was putting on, which could have resulted in something sartorially exquisite. I didn’t care enough to notice.

I hardly knew how I’d managed to get myself to work once I found myself on the wide front steps of the Museum. Once inside, I felt as if it were someone else performing my duties, going through my motions.

It was odd Minerva hadn’t noticed, I thought as I walked back out to my desk from the bathroom to see that she was sitting there in my visitor’s chair, awash in bright-colored scarves. For all her assorted manias and delusions, Minerva was usually pretty good at noticing emotional upheavals. (She ought to have been—she thrived on them.)

I studied her as she settled herself more comfortably in the chair next to my desk. Minerva favored bold colors and what she called her bohemian flair—thanks to a summer spent in Berkeley, California, at an impressionable age. Apparently, exposure to Berkeley led to a lifelong habit of draping oneself in tapestries, ropes of beads, and the occasional llama. (Okay, I was making that up. I wasn’t actually sure it was llama. It could be anything hairy and particularly pungent in damp weather.) No wonder I had a phobia about California.