Frenemies(50)

It was Georgia.

“Oh,” I said into the receiver without bothering to say hello, “are we talking on the phone? Because I got the distinct impression you were giving me the silent treatment.”

“I’m sorry,” Georgia said in the same tone of voice. “Let me check my voice mail for all the calls you made to me—oh wait. You didn’t make any.”

“Which one of us threw up her hand—very daytime talk show, by the way—and said ‘I can’t’?” I demanded.

“I meant I couldn’t talk about it then,” Georgia said with a sigh.

“I’m telepathic this week,” I told her. “But not last week, so I must have missed that. Sorry.”

Georgia sighed again, more pointedly.

“Do you want to get some breakfast or not?” she demanded. “It’s fine if you don’t. We can just hang out on the telephone and be snotty to each other. We can talk about Henry. Totally your call.”

I sighed even louder than she had.

“Fine,” I said. “Give me forty-five minutes.”


We met in a place near Georgia’s condo. I found her sitting at a corner table of the small café, her hands cupped around a huge mug of coffee. She had her usually big and vibrant hair scraped back into a severe ponytail, and seemed to be practically vibrating with tension. I thought that boded ill.

“I can’t even talk about how cold it is,” I announced by way of greeting. I was also hoping to distract her. I began unwrapping myself from my layers and layers of winter wear. I draped my scarf, extra sweater, mittens, and hat on the back of my chair and sat. “I don’t understand why I live here, when I happen to know there are places with no snow, ice, freezing rain, or nights that start at like 2 p.m.”

“Because none of those places are Boston,” Georgia said with a shrug.

I nodded at the simple truth of that, and ordered myself a bottomless latte from a passing waiter. Neither one of us spoke until it appeared before me. I didn’t look at Georgia as I stirred in five packets of Splenda. When I did, she was shaking her head at me.

“What?” I asked.

“How can you put anything that sweet into your mouth?” she demanded. “Ugh. I think it would trigger my gag reflex.” She put a hand to her throat. “I think it already has.”

“I don’t understand the whole I can only drink black coffee thing,” I countered, eyeing her mug. “I bet those are the same people who will only read tedious, obscure novels because they think it makes them more intelligent. When really, they just read a boring book. Same with coffee. Why choke it down black and bitter when it can taste like dessert instead?”

“Maybe I just like the taste of it without a pound of sugar and six gallons of cream, because it’s coffee, not coffee ice cream.” She raised her lawyerly eyebrow at me.

“Maybe you do,” I said, raising my own librarian eyebrows right back at her. “But that’s just your taste. It doesn’t make you a better person. I can’t stand people who assign moral judgments to personal preferences.”

Georgia considered me for a moment. “I think that’s your way of talking about Henry,” she said. “And we’ll talk about that, believe me. And I guess we’re going to have to talk about Amy Lee, too.”

“I haven’t heard from her,” I said, watching her face. I was terrified I’d see pity or something there, which would indicate they’d talked to each other and were leaving me out. The way they had once, years ago, in a different fight I would have said I’d forgotten about. But she just pursed her lips slightly, and shook her head.

“Neither have I,” she said. “That’s a little extreme, even for her, but there’s something I want to talk to you about first and if I don’t do it right now I’m not going to do it at all.”

“Oh God,” I moaned, setting my mug down with a thud. “Are you breaking up with me too? Because I was much better with the silent treatment. I was perfectly content to convince myself that you were really busy, or held up in court, or buried in some document production somewhere without cell phone service—”

“I hooked up with Chris Starling,” Georgia blurted out, cutting me off.

That hung there for a moment.

We stared at each other, and it was hard for me to imagine that I could look any more shocked than Georgia did.

“But I thought …” I shrugged helplessly.

“I know!” she groaned. “I don’t know what happened to me! I was still upset about Jared, and I was so angry about the Amy Lee thing and your secret Henry thing, and we were in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and he smiled at me in that way he does and I thought Gandalf eyes and boom!”

“Boom?” I echoed.

“The next thing I knew we were half naked in his hotel room.” Georgia let out a shaky breath. “I’ve become a cliché. I hooked up with the boss. If I’d done it at the office party, I could be the laughingstock of the office as well. Not like it matters. I can pretty much kiss my dreams of a partnership good-bye.”

“Wait,” I said, reeling. “How did you get from half naked to your partnership? What are you talking about? You have to tell me what happened!”

So she took a fortifying sip of her (dark and bitter) coffee, straightened in her seat, and told me.