Frenemies(60)
Which I did with such dedication that I thought about very little else for days, except, occasionally, my expanding waistline. Happily, that was what sweats were for.
Things I was not thinking about included:
Nate Manning, and his conspiratorial smiles. The ones that reeled you in and ruined you, because you thought they were something special.
Amy Lee’s deafening, spine-crushing silence.
Helen Fairchild, who had said things I found I just couldn’t dismiss, much as I tried. I could dismiss a lot of her that girl behavior, but I couldn’t dismiss the fact that despite it, we’d remained some form of friends for over a decade.
The way Henry had looked at me at that last party, as if I was a deep disappointment to him. As if he’d never known he was supposed to be off-limits in the first place. Which made me ache.
My emotional immaturity, particularly as pointed out by Amy Lee.
Nate, Helen, Henry, and me; my rectangle of ridiculousness.
And finally, the fact that my family clearly thought I was “going through something,” if their overly careful manner around me was any indication. It reminded me of my actual teenage years. (On the upside, they’d all seemed to enjoy their presents, which was a point in my favor, I thought.)
After a few days, the joys of ingesting cookies by the handful in between three square meals a day paled somewhat, and I headed back into Boston. I might have been imagining my father’s sigh of relief when he left me at my place, but I wasn’t entirely sure. He could just as easily have been cursing the snow as my unpleasant attitude.
I picked up Linus from the kennel that same day, and despite his tremendous joy at seeing me again—which he expressed in the form of big, slurpy kisses and a lot of protest barking—my apartment seemed lonelier than before. I kicked my duffel bag into the bedroom and then returned to look around at the exact same things I’d been looking at for the past decade. I sat in my living room and glowered at the posters on the wall for a good long while, and then, just like that, I decided I’d had enough.
Unless I planned to move, which I didn’t, it was time to stop brooding and start living up to my conception of myself.
I didn’t even unpack my bag, I just set about the most intense spring-cleaning my apartment had ever undergone. I pulled down all the posters, sorted all the books, and hauled everything collegiate, untouched, ridiculous, or otherwise embarrassing out of the apartment in garbage bags.
It was brutal, and there were many painful moments. In the depths of my closet, for example, I located the baggy flannel shirt my post-grunge college crush had left in my possession. It was right next to a selection of old mix tapes from high school, piled high in a dusty brown bag, all of them so old the song lists had faded away. I got rid of both the shirt and the bag, but it hurt more than I wanted to admit.
It was mid-afternoon on my second day of Total Life Reorganization—which had involved, that morning, the purchase of actual bookshelves I planned to hang on the wall as opposed to the rickety mishmash of bookcases I’d picked up here and there over the years—when there was a knock on my door.
My heart raced a little bit, but I had, thankfully, gotten it under control by the time I opened the door. Which was a good thing, since the person standing there was Irwin.
“Oh,” I said, blinking at him. Partly because I was feeling a touch crazed, and partly because Irwin wasn’t wearing his trademark robe, preferring to rock the holiday appliqué sweater and a pair of elastic-waisted jeans. “I must be making a lot of noise. I’m sorry.”
“No, no,” he said, blinking right back at me and the chaos that must have been clearly visible behind me. “Are you moving out?”
He restrained his probable joy at this prospect, which made it possible for me to be polite.
“Just cleaning out the college-era stuff,” I said, not pausing to consider the possibility that Irwin might not be as fascinated by this process as I was. “Which is pretty much my entire apartment and everything I own. All I have to do is get this ratty furniture out of here, and figure out how to get my new bookshelves on the wall, and I’ll be good to go. Don’t worry, I shouldn’t make too much noise after dark.”
Irwin stood there, the gold menorah on his dark blue sweater practically glowing in the hallway. He opened his mouth, then closed it. Then opened it again, then shifted his weight from foot to foot, and I was starting to think we would stand there forever when he finally spat it out.
“Why don’t I help you?” he asked, and then turned bright red.
He didn’t blush a little. He turned crimson. It was somewhat alarming.
The old Gus would have screamed no way, slammed the door, and mocked the man mercilessly with her friends.
The new Gus decided that the man just wanted to be neighborly, and maybe even friendly. If our shared history was anything to go by, he didn’t interact with others often, and if his continuing blush was any further indication, this was a big deal for him.
The new Gus also wanted the damn furniture out of her apartment, and she couldn’t do it alone, superhero fantasies or no. She also had few options for mocking calls to friends, since Amy Lee was off the list and Georgia had all her calls forwarded to voice mail.
“That would be really nice of you,” I told Irwin with a big smile and let him inside.
With Irwin’s help (his name, I discovered, was Steve, but I was never going to be able to think of him as a Steve), I removed all the mismatched curbside furniture I’d collected since college and left it on the curb for the next owner to locate. There was a sense of closure in that—from the curb my furniture came, and to the curb it was returned. I was confident that Boston’s student population would help themselves to it all before nightfall.