Little Lies(57)

Because in it, Kodiak is smiling, and there’s a girl tucked under his arm. Pretty, blonde, and tall. She looks like a model. I force myself to read the caption. Date night with my favorite girl.

And my poor, stupid heart breaks all over again.

But it’s the last time I creep on him.

It was bad enough when I saw him kiss that girl the night before he moved away. I’d been working up the nerve to go over there, wanting to keep it together long enough to say goodbye. When I’d decided I was ready, I looked out my bedroom window and there he was, kissing the same girl he’d taken to his eighth-grade graduation dance.

My chest felt like it was caving in then, and it feels the same now. I can’t watch him fall in love, not while I live in a bubble created by my overprotective family where I can barely talk to someone of the opposite sex, let alone contemplate dating.

After a restless night’s sleep, therapy with Queenie the next day does not go as planned. All I want to do is sew. I crave the satisfaction of creation in the midst of my own personal destruction. All the little lies I told myself to make the truth less painful have finally caught up with me.

I pull out the finger paints—I rarely use them anymore, but they’re always my default when I’m feeling particularly volatile.

Queenie waddles over. “Bad day?”

She places her palm on her swollen belly, pregnant with baby number three. Kingston, her husband, has been playing for Seattle forever. He’s a goalie and closing in on retirement—at least that’s the conversation I’ve overheard between him and my dad. Kingston has the kind of personality that puts everyone around him at ease. He reminds me of still water, always in motion, but still somehow serene; whereas Queenie is a carbonated beverage—bubbly, effervescent, and always exciting to the senses.

I take a breath, an attempt to quell the storm inside. I don’t want to snap at Queenie, and I’m very aware that getting shitty with a pregnant woman will make me feel bad, but I’m on edge today.

So I blurt out the truth. “Kodiak has a girlfriend.”

Her hand stills on her stomach, and her eyes flare, which tells me I’ve shocked her with this revelation.

“Have you spoken to him?”

I can’t figure out her tone. She sounds half-concerned, half-hopeful.

I dip my fingers in the lime-green paint, desperate to do something with my hands. “No.”

“So how do you know he has a girlfriend?” Her words are careful, calculated, and yet still conversational.

Queenie is an excellent therapist. I’ve learned a lot from her over the years. She’s almost my friend. Almost, but not quite. She’s halfway to maternal, because she’s only ten years or so younger than my mom. She’s also paid to help me, though I’m aware not all of our sessions are billed, because her and her husband are friends with my parents. But I’ve been confiding in her for over a decade.

Sometimes I wonder if we’re too close for this to be as effective as it should be. Queenie is a habit, a source of comfort in a world of complete unknowns. She’s a constant in a sea of uncertainty—something my parents aren’t willing to take away from me.

I could lie and tell her my brother mentioned it. Maverick still talks to Kodiak all the time. But I don’t see the point, and all I want right now is to finally purge him out of my system. “He posted a picture on social media.”

She’s quiet a moment. “Have you two been in touch at all?”

I turn back to the sheet of paper, swirling the colors together until they’re as ugly as my jealousy. “No.”

“And how do you feel about him having a girlfriend?”

I dip my fingers into the black paint, not bothering to rinse off the other colors, and rub them together. How do I feel about Kodiak having a girlfriend? “It’s inevitable, isn’t it? That’s what teenagers do. They date, experiment, fall and get back up again, suffer their first broken heart, maybe experience other firsts.”

Robbie dated the same girl for two years, but then they got accepted to different colleges and broke up. Maverick has had a whole slew of girlfriends already and left a trail of broken hearts in his wake. River always has girls tagging after him, but he’s too into football to care.

“That all sounds very rational, but it doesn’t tell me how you’re feeling,” Queenie presses.

“I haven’t talked to him in more than two and a half years. I haven’t seen him in over two. I shouldn’t feel anything.”

“But you do,” she says softly. “And that’s okay, Lavender. It’s human. You were very close for a long time.”

I stare at the swirls and lines on the paper, at the ugliness I’ve created. “I don’t want to feel anything. I don’t want to be hurt, or jealous, or disappointed. I don’t want to feel betrayed.” I dip my pointer finger in the red paint and drag it through the mess I’ve created, splitting it in two so it mirrors my insides.

“I thought I was past all of this, but I’m not, Queenie. He was such a huge part of my life, and then he was gone.” I snap my fingers, drops of black and red splattering the paper. “Nobody understands what it was like, what it’s still like sometimes. And I know it wasn’t healthy. I know that. But he was mine, and then he was nothing. Is nothing.”

We talked a lot about the loss of that friendship in the aftermath, how it echoed a death. I couldn’t imagine how awful it would be to really and truly lose someone. How does a heart recover from losing someone fundamental to its existence? It gave me a new, deeper fear. I obsessed about death for a while, wanting to know where we go when we die. Does our body cease and our mind go on, voiceless and floating in the nothingness? Are we eternally alone with ourselves?