Kiss Her Once for Me (95)

She’s right, of course. She always fucking is. But the anguish is so big inside me, so debilitating, that I crave somewhere else to put the blame. “I can’t believe I failed so epically,” I admit.

“Wait.” Meredith flops her entire body across mine. “What does failure have to do with anything?”

I squeeze my eyes shut and try not to picture Jack shouting at me in the snow. You’re a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I failed at being Andrew’s fake fiancé,” I tell the inside of my blankets. “I failed at getting the money. I failed with Jack. I’ve lost Katherine, and the grandmas—”

“I’m struggling to see how any of that is failure. Fuck-uppery, sure, but not failure.”

“You wouldn’t,” I snap at her. “You’ve never failed at anything in your life!”

Meredith rips the blanket back again. “Where the hell did you get that idea? Everyone fails!”

“You don’t! Look at you! It’s Christmas, you just flew across the country on a last-minute red-eye, and your study notes are still all over my house.” I gesture wildly to the stacks of yellow legal pads and textbooks she’s already unloaded.

“Yeah, I’m studying!” she shouts at me. “Because I failed the bar exam!”

I cough derisively. “You didn’t fail the bar. You haven’t taken it yet. The test is in February.”

“I took it in July,” Meredith corrects. “I took it without telling you, and I failed.”

I stare at the flushed face of my best friend. “You…you what? Wait. Why?”

Meredith takes a slow, deliberate breath, gathers her red curls into a pile on top of her head, and holds them in place using the scrunchie on her wrist. Her face looks vulnerable, exposed.

“Meredith, why would you take the bar without telling me?”

“Honestly?” She sighs. “Because you have some really toxic ideas about failure, and I was worried about how you might react if I failed the first time, which was likely, since a lot of people fail the bar. And I did.”

“I… you…” I stumble over my attempt at a response. That my best friend, this person I love with my whole heart, who I talk to every single day, experienced this huge life event and felt like she couldn’t tell me about it….

“And it doesn’t really matter if I fail the bar once or twice, as long as I keep going. Once I’m a lawyer, I won’t care how I made that dream come true, but Ellie—you had this dream you worked so hard for, and you experienced one setback and just quit.”

Why does everyone always make everything about Laika? “I didn’t quit. I got fired,” I argue, trying not to think about that conversation with Jack at the Singhs’ cabin. I had a neurotically crafted ten-year-plan I refused to deviate from. And when things got hard, I couldn’t cope with changing the plan. So, I just gave up instead. I got fired from Laika and walked away from art entirely. Maybe because most things had walked out of my life, and maybe because I wanted to be the one to walk away first.

It hits me, the weight of this secret Meredith kept from me. “Shit,” I mutter, the tears crowding against the backs of my eyes. “I’ve been a terrible friend to you.”

“You haven’t been a terrible friend,” Meredith reassures me in her non-lawyer voice, the gentle one she uses when I’m being especially pathetic. “We all have seasons of needing and seasons of giving.”

“But I’ve been in my season of needing so long, you felt like you couldn’t come to me with something really big and important. I’ve failed horribly at being your best friend.”

“Jesus!” Meredith erupts, boomeranging back to anger and frustration. “Are you listening at all? You can’t fail at friendship! And failure—actual failure—is part of life. Remember when I got that D-plus in pre-calc fall term of freshman year?” Meredith asks slowly. “And the prof told me he only gave me the D-plus because he felt sorry for me and didn’t want to give me an F?”

I honestly don’t remember that at all. I can’t imagine the bold, confident girl pouring bleach into a shampoo bottle over her cheating boyfriend ever getting a D-plus. And I can’t imagine anyone ever feeling sorry for her.

“And it doesn’t fucking matter,” Meredith plows on, “because I have never once needed to use calculus.”

I’m still crying. Meredith is still draped across my body like a weighted blanket.

“And I get it, Ellie,” Meredith says, gentle and coaxing again. “You have parents who are shit heaps. Linds and Jed suck, and you thought being perfect and never failing was the only way you could avoid becoming them. But your trauma is something that happened to you; it’s not who you are. It’s time to talk-therapy your way through it so it can stop controlling your entire life.”

I snort a laugh and a little bit of snot comes out with it. Meredith reaches for a tissue and wipes up my snot, and if that’s not love, I’m not sure what is. “Jed and Linds don’t love you,” Meredith says bluntly, cutting me off at the emotional knees. “But that doesn’t mean you have to be perfect to deserve love.”

The thing is, I used to dream about someone who would always choose me above everything else. There was romance in that dream, sure. I wanted someone who would see all my flaws and still lean in and tell me I’m beautiful. I wanted someone who would hold my hand in public and hold the rest of me in private, a warm body in my bed, a constant presence in my life.