Frenemies(59)

“Boys are easier to get along with than girls,” she said. “They don’t judge you, or whisper about you behind your back while they’re nice to your face. They either like you or they don’t.”

“You flirt with them, Helen! That’s why they like you!”

“Like you don’t flirt.” She shook her head. “Oh, please. You try to entice men with your I’m so smart and funny thing, but that’s not flirting? What is?”

Any leash I had on my temper snapped with that one. And unfortunately for Helen, I had a lot of ammunition.

“Hmm, let me think—” I pretended to think for all of six seconds. “How about wailing about possibly getting stung by a bee in December so other people’s boyfriends fawn all over you and carry you back to the car?”

“I can’t help it if I’m allergic,” Helen snapped.

“Or how about the way you have to lean so close to every male who crosses your path? You have to lean in, and then gaze at him, and then look away while moistening your lip.” I acted it out for her, with a complimentary flip of the hair, as I had done many times before for the amusement of my friends. “What the hell is that?”

“I can’t believe you study me!” Helen cried. “And like you’re one to talk. ‘Oh Henry! You’re so evil!’?” She mimicked me in a high, grating falsetto. “?‘Every girl in Boston fawns all over you, but I’ll make myself different by hating you! Evil, nasty Henry! Notice me, Henry!’?”

I actually saw a haze of red before my eyes, and had to blink to clear it. I also took a few deep breaths.

“Fine,” I told her. I didn’t want to touch anything she’d said with a ten-foot pole. Or, for that matter, a large steel girder. “Maybe we’re both in glass houses here.”

Helen seemed to deflate a little herself. She looked away, and I watched her catch herself just as she went to do that lip thing.

“See?” I said, pointing. “You lick your lip! You do it on purpose!”

“Um, hi, I’m not flirting with you, Gus. ”

“You flirt with everyone, Helen. You’ve been doing it since you were eighteen.”

“Anyway, it’s automatic,” she said, but she didn’t do it again.

We stood there for a moment, and the wretched absurdity of the situation rose up and threatened to choke me. Here Helen and I were, standing on a staircase, fighting over a guy I might have just realized wasn’t worth it. If I didn’t escape this situation that I’d helped make, I might be the first person in the history of the world to actually implode. I felt it coming, boiling up inside me like the stomach flu.

And with it, the unwelcome thought that none of this had ever been about Nate. Not really.

“Okay,” I said briskly. “This has been unpleasant and I guess I’m going to go—”

“Did you sleep with him?” she asked, cutting me off.

I was convinced I hadn’t heard that right.

“What?”

“I want to know if you slept with him that night,” she said, shifting on her feet a little bit so that she suddenly looked stiff and almost wooden. “Why else would he call you so many times?”

She didn’t look at me. It was the anti-Helen. No flirtatiousness or leaning. Just words.

I stared at her. “Is this a joke?”

She pursed her lips slightly. “I have to know.”

“And you can’t ask him?” I asked. The evil part of me started to enjoy herself. “It must suck, not being able to trust your boyfriend.”

Helen just watched me, saying nothing.

Maybe Helen was right. Maybe there really was a girl like me. Because the urge to mess with her almost overcame me. Why shouldn’t she get to feel the way I felt? Why shouldn’t she taste a little bit of her own medicine? Her performance in my apartment the day after the Park Plaza came to mind. How would she like it if I pulled that on her? Why shouldn’t I play her game?

Because he just wasn’t worth it, I told myself. Reluctantly. I could tell her I’d slept with him, and embroil myself in who knew how much further drama with the two of them, or I could tell her the truth and wash my hands of them both right there and then. I could continue being an immature brat or I could grow up, for once.

It was a harder call than it should have been.

“No,” I said, without realizing that was what I’d decided. “We didn’t sleep together. I never even saw him that night. He just left me messages.” I held her gaze and remembered something she’d said to me once. “I’m not like you.”

She didn’t like the last part, but still she looked relieved. And why shouldn’t she? I’d just given her my boyfriend. Her boyfriend. I wasn’t sure, suddenly, that he had ever been mine.

She knew it, too. Her eyes were calculating as they swept over me, no doubt looking for my angle.

I didn’t know it myself.

“Merry Christmas, Helen,” I told her softly, and then I went to find my coat.





chapter nineteen





For the first time in years, since I’d left for school when I was eighteen, I was delighted to escape to my childhood home for the holidays. Everything in Boston had gotten way too out of control, and the best way to deal with that was to relax into the embrace of my mother’s decidedly anti-Atkins, anti-Food Pyramid holiday cooking.