Frenemies(72)

“By ‘her’ you mean Helen, right?” I took a sip of my wine. “That would be your girlfriend? Who you talk about this way to your ex-girlfriend?”

Nate’s smile dimmed. “You and Henry don’t make any sense,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? The guy spends his entire life looking for new bimbos to score with. A girl like you can’t possibly be with him.”

I was clearly supposed to jump all over the girl like you part, so instead I asked, “Why do you care who I’m with?”

“You’re not, are you?”

I wanted to tell him I was with Henry more than I could remember wanting anything else. Anything besides actually being with Henry, that was. I sighed.

“I’m not with anyone, although I can’t understand how that could interest you even—”

Nate was all smiles when he cut me off.

“I knew I could still count on you, Gus,” he said. “Promise me you won’t do that to yourself. Promise me you won’t go there.”

It was unimaginable to me that I could ever have wanted this guy, so desperately, for so long. Maybe my desperate pursuit of him after that night hadn’t been about him after all. Maybe it was about the other huge event that had occurred that night, the one I’d been avoiding ever since. The one that, had I looked at it clearly, would have changed everything for me.

But Henry had been the unthinkable. He had been off-limits.

In any event, midnight was fast coming, and the New Year was about to dawn. I had much better things to do than entertain this conversation.

“Gus,” Nate said. “Not Henry, okay? Not my roommate. Show a little respect.”

I just shook my head and left him there.


We all screamed the countdown, the ball dropped in New York City, and the band began to play “Auld Lang Syne.” I hugged Amy Lee and Oscar, and Georgia did a little jig with me before dashing from the room yet again, to make another phone call. Couples were hugging each other in the center of the dance floor, and off to the side I saw Helen perform one of her come-hither looks on Nate.

Henry, standing near them, caught my eye again.

I smiled.

He held the look for a long moment before he turned away.

That was that, then. It was a new year. I would find him in it, somewhere. I was sure of it.

In the meantime, I had exactly one day left of my twenties.

It had been a long, weird year. The entire Nate debacle, from its giddy beginning in July to its extended bitter end. The Henry thing. Or things, to be precise. Helen. Amy Lee’s blowup and the new life she had in front of her. Georgia turning over a new leaf and actually letting herself see what Chris Starling had to offer.

A year ago I’d decided that I would cap off my twenties in style, but really, all I’d done was cram the essence of them into one final year. The second half of one final year, in point of fact. The truth was that I’d been spending years running away from myself. I hid myself in drama, silliness, stupidity, banality. So afraid to grow up. So afraid to involve myself in relationships where I might be expected to give the same love I got—instead of sixth-grade shenanigans. I bored myself with all the when I grow up nonsense, but I was worried it would never happen even as I longed for it.

This time, though, I thought I’d actually learned something.

This time, I thought I really might be ready.

Maybe being an adult wasn’t crossing some arbitrary age line into wisdom. Maybe it was like anything else—training wheels and mistakes, trial and error, and now and again that feeling that you might have wings.

I liked the idea of it enough to let it move me to my feet, and then out to the dance floor where my friends were waiting. We didn’t have wings, but we could dance.





chapter twenty-four





I turned thirty without noticing, while I slept an exhausted sleep that tried to make up for the New Year’s festivities as well as the emotional hangover from the Amy Lee upset. When I woke in the morning on January second, I was bleary-eyed, in dire need of caffeine, annoyed with my rambunctious dog, and, apparently, thirty.

Talk about anticlimactic.

Georgia, Amy Lee, and I had stayed up half the night after the party ended, giggling as if there’d never been any rift between us. Oscar had sacked out earlier in their room, with Linus curled up beside him. The next day, we ate breakfast overlooking the stormy bay outside the windows, and then piled back into our cars to join the traffic jam headed back toward Boston.

Once in my apartment, which still delighted me in all its bookshelved goodness, I passed out fully clothed across my bed, woke briefly around 11 p.m. to throw off my jeans and crawl under the covers, and slept away the last of my twenties in a dreamless sort of coma.

Linus barked at me from the door to the living room, completely unconcerned with my advanced age and lack of epic dreams. He just wanted to pee.

Outside, the snow had started to fall sometime before I woke, so the city streets were quieter than usual. Linus romped around in circles, barking happily at the snowflakes. I caught a few flakes on my tongue on the off-chance I was being secretly filmed, because that was what cute girl-movie heroines did, and then headed back indoors.

My parents had left a singing message on my machine while I was out, which, not for the first time, caused me to wonder exactly where I’d come up with the singing voice I’d had way back when I dreamed of Broadway. My sister would probably leave another song later in the day, but at least I knew she tried to sound bad.