We Are Okay(48)

“No,” Javier says. “I have it under control.”

“My dad is the boss tonight. My mom is the sous chef. Our job is to stay out of their way.”

“Fair enough,” I say. We step into the elevator but neither of us presses the number of my floor.

“Let’s go to the top,” I say.

The view must be the same as it was the first night we were up here, but it looks crisper and brighter, and even though we can’t hear Ana and Javier as they chop and stir and laugh, I feel that we are less alone.

But maybe it doesn’t have to do with Ana and Javier at all.

“When did you decide to do this?” I ask her.

“We thought you’d come home with me. That was our only plan. But when I realized that there was a good chance I wasn’t going to convince you, we figured out that we could do this.”

“Last night,” I say. “When you were on the phone . . .”

She nods. “We were planning it out. They wanted me to tell you, but I knew that if I did you might give in and go back before you were ready.” She holds her hand up to the window. “We all understand. It makes sense why you don’t want to go back yet.”

She takes her hand away but the imprint is still there, a spot of warmth on the glass.

“When I was waiting for my parents at the airport, I kept thinking of something I wanted to ask you.”

“Okay,” I say.

She’s quiet.

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve just been wondering if there’s anyone here you’re interested in.”

She’s flushed and nervous, but trying to hide it.

“Oh,” I say. “No. I haven’t been thinking about things like that.”

She looks disappointed, but slowly, her expression changes.

“Let’s think about it now,” she says. “There must be someone out there.”

“You’re doing it again,” I say. “This is like the Courtney and Eleanor thing.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not like that. I just—it would make me feel better. It would make you feel better, too.”

“I don’t need to be with somebody in order for it to be okay that you have a boyfriend. It’s okay already.”

“Marin. I’m just asking you to think about it. I’m not saying you have to make some huge decision or fall in love or do anything that complicates your life.”

“I’m fine as I am.”

But she isn’t backing down.

“Come on,” she says. “Think.”

This is a New York college—it isn’t Catholic school—and so many of the girls here wear little rainbow bracelets or pink triangle pins, so many of them talk casually about their ex-girlfriends or call the chair of the women’s studies program hot. I’ve never joined in, but it’s only because I don’t talk about the things I left behind. But I’ve noticed, I guess, even though I’ve tried to close myself off. I’ve noticed a couple girls in spite of myself.

“You’re thinking about someone,” Mabel says.

“Not really.”

“Tell me,” she says.

I can see how much she wants this, but I don’t want to do it. Even if there was someone, how could I keep telling myself that I’m fine with so little, that all I need is Hannah’s friendship and the pool and scientific facts and my yellow bowls and a borrowed pair of winter boots, if I spoke a girl’s name aloud? She’d become something I wished for.

“Is she pretty?”

It’s too much coming from her mouth and the look in her eyes is too earnest and I’m too overwhelmed to answer. I guess she needs this—for us to move on—but it feels like another loss. To think a new girl is pretty, and not in a way that lots of people in the world are pretty, but pretty in a way that might mean something to me. To look into Mabel’s dark eyes, try not to stare at her pink mouth or her long hair, and say that. To think that a girl who is practically a stranger could be the next person I love. To think she might take Mabel’s place.

But I think about Mabel’s warmth on the pullout sofa. I think about her body against mine and I know that a lot of what I felt that night was about her, but that some of it wasn’t. Maybe I am already hoping for that feeling again, with someone new. Maybe I just didn’t know it.

Something in me is cracking open, the light coming through is so bright it hurts, and the rest of me is still here, wounded, even though I know it’s all for the best.

“That night at the beach,” Mabel says. “And the days after, until school ended and all through the summer . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I thought I’d never love another person.”

“I thought that, too.”

“I guess we should have known better.”

“I don’t know about that,” I say.

I close my eyes. Here we are on Ocean Beach. Here’s the whiskey bottle in the sand and the sound of waves crashing and the cold wind and the darkness and Mabel’s smile against my collarbone. Here we are in that spectacular summer. We are different people now, yes, but those girls were magic.

“I’m glad we didn’t know better,” I say.

“I guess you’re right. It would have been simpler, but you know . . .”