Frenemies(49)

With all of that in mind, it also made sense to call him.

I got his voice mail, which didn’t surprise me—I didn’t want him to pretend I was some random guy again. While I could see why he’d done it, it made me feel icky, the same way that old video for “Part-Time Lover” with Stevie Wonder did. It was all just gross. I was a fully grown woman, who was taking charge of her own destiny. Voice mail was much better. Voice mail, I could handle.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s me. I really want to talk to you about what’s going on. We never talked about that night, and I think we should. I wish I hadn’t missed all your calls. I feel like there’s stuff we need to work out, don’t you? Call me.”

I was proud of myself when I hung up. Short and sweet. To the point. No hemming or hawing.

Go to hell, Amy Lee, I thought with extreme smugness. I can too be a grown-up.

A feeling that was confirmed, about an hour and a half later, when my cell phone rang. Nate’s name scrolled across my screen.

“I’m glad you called,” I said, picking it up.

“I bet you are,” Helen snapped at me.

I felt my stomach drop to the soles of my feet.

“Why are you calling me from Nate’s phone?” I managed to ask.

“Why are you calling my boyfriend?” she countered.

“You have to be kidding me.”

“You better leave Nate alone,” Helen hissed. “Don’t think I’m not wise to your little games, Gus. But you better remember that I’m not like you. I won’t sit back and watch it happen, do you understand me?”

“Are you threatening me?” I was flabbergasted.

“I’ll do whatever I have to do to babysit what’s mine,” Helen threw at me. “And if you think I’m going to—”

I heard Nate in the background then.

“What are you doing?” he demanded. “Is that my phone?”

“You want to tell me why you’ve been calling Gus?” Helen screamed at him. “She’s on the phone right now! You can tell us both!”

I just sat there, listening with the part of me that wasn’t frozen into place.

There was what sounded like a scuffle. Then Nate’s voice on the phone.

“I’ll call you later,” he told me, as Helen shouted something (happily) incomprehensible in the background. Then he hung up.

And for the first time since she’d walked away from me in that hallway out in the country, I entertained the possibility that Amy Lee might have a point.

My life was completely out of control. My best friends had stopped talking to me. I was, apparently, embroiled in a love triangle, except the only embroiling I’d been involved in recently had been with someone else entirely. Henry thought I was a nutcase, with good reason if I was honest with myself, and my mind kind of skittered away when it landed on that land mine. I suspected I had just made things a lot worse with Nate.

All of this, and I was turning thirty in less than a month.

I looked around at my apartment. At the dorm decor and the books all over the place as if a library had exploded nearby and I’d stockpiled the remains. The mismatched furniture I’d rescued from curbs and dumpsters across the city. I dreamed of showplace houses—hardwood floors and eat-in kitchens, but I figured that would happen … someday.

Nothing in my life indicated I was ready to put aside my childish things. I loved working at the Museum, but a steady, good job didn’t exempt me from all the other ridiculousness in my life. I thought it was perfectly reasonable to talk shit about Henry. I was always willing to leap from zero to total dramatic outrage at the slightest provocation, because I always had before and it had, until recently, been fun. I spent entirely too many hours thinking of ways to push my friends’ buttons, just for my own amusement. I behaved like a teenager on a WB show after sleeping with someone. I wanted my ex to pay for dumping me even as I wanted him back, and I played absurd mind games with the woman he’d left me for. The one I was furious with for betraying our weird, twisted friendship though I had no qualms plotting to do the same if I could.

For all intents and purposes, I might as well be the same excitable twit I’d been when I was twenty-two.

Why was I such a baby?

I sat on the couch mulling these things over until light began to creep in the windows. I dozed then—but it was more of an exhausted coma than any restful, peaceful slumber.


I woke a few hours later, immediately cranky and with Linus panting directly into my face from about an inch away. I shoved his head away from me, and ignored the little dance he did when he realized I was awake.

“No,” I told him. “Go lie down.”

He ignored me, taking up one of his toys in his mouth and shaking it ferociously in my direction. Even my dog rejected my authority. Even he suspected I was failing miserably in the grown-up department.

I swung up to a seated position and scowled around the living room.

I was, I realized, going to have to do something about the way I lived. It was like that Rilke poem I’d taped to my walls in college: “for here there is no place/that does not see you. You must change your life.”

The phone rang again then, and I groaned as I fumbled around to look at the caller ID. But it wasn’t Helen, ready for round two. It wasn’t even Nate, the way I sort of expected it to be.