The Swap(19)

“Freya invited us over tonight.”

“Oh.” I stopped. “For dinner?”

“For magic mushrooms.”

“Seriously?”

Jamie went to the cupboard and pulled out a glass. “Apparently Low can hook her up.”

“Are you into it?”

Jamie and I had taken ’shrooms in college. I’d had a decent trip, though I’d spent most of the night rubbing her back while she vomited into a garbage can.

“I don’t know.” Her pretty face looked troubled as she poured water from the Brita. “I had a hard day today.”

“Did something happen at the store?”

“No.” She turned away, grabbed a cloth, and busied herself wiping mustard from the counter. “I got my period, that’s all.”

“Jamie”—my voice was gentle—“you can’t get sad every month.”

“I know that,” she replied, still vigorously cleaning. “I wouldn’t have, but I was late. I got my hopes up a bit.”

“How late?”

She hesitated before answering. “Two days. But my period is like clockwork. I thought . . . maybe . . . I’ve got an assistant, my stress levels are down. . . .”

I moved toward her, tried to draw her into a hug, but she pecked my cheek and stepped away.

“I’m fine now. Really.” She rinsed the cloth under the faucet. “Freya and I had lunch. We talked about how society expects women to become moms. Everyone thinks I’m defective because I can’t have a baby. Freya doesn’t want kids and people think she’s a heartless monster.”

“And then you decided to get high on psychedelics?”

“Basically, yeah.” She smiled as she wrung out the cloth. “She thought a night of friends and music and tripping would make us appreciate our childlessness. I’ll probably just have some wine, but the rest of you can take mushrooms, if you want.”

“Sounds kind of fun.”

“I knew you wouldn’t want to miss a chance to see your boyfriend.”

I rolled up a dish towel and whipped it at her butt as she laughingly skittered from the room.

“My boyfriend,” I muttered to myself as I pulled the fish from the fridge. Of course there was nothing romantic about my feelings toward Max Beausoleil, but I liked the guy. He was a small-town boy who hadn’t let fame and fortune go to his head. Or, maybe it had gone to his head, but then the fallout from the illegal hit, the lawsuit, Ryan Klassen’s overdose, had brought him crashing back down to earth. Like everyone with a TV, I’d watched the replay of Klassen’s incendiary stick in the face, and Beausoleil’s retaliatory check. I saw the anger and aggression on Max’s face in slow motion. I also saw his tears as he apologized to the Klassen family in an emotional press conference outside the courthouse. It was hard to muster pity for the rich, handsome athlete with his sexy blond wife hanging off his arm. He’d pled guilty to assault to “spare them the ugliness of a trial,” but many thought it was a PR move, that he was crying crocodile tears. I’d been one of them.

Growing up, I’d hated his type. The scene at my Seattle high school was straight out of The Breakfast Club: jocks, stoners, Goths, rich kids, nerds . . . I was firmly, and quite happily, entrenched in the nerd clique. In fact, I was a member of a nerd subset known as the creative nerds. We were the Dungeons & Dragons players, the Warhammer fans. My group was held in even lower esteem because of our lack of earning potential. The computer geeks and gamers would end up with lucrative careers as programmers and coders. We were destined to work in comic-book shops or toy stores.

No one looked down on us more than the jocks. When we contributed to class discussions, they snickered, coughed into their hands and said, “Dork!” They pushed us into lockers and knocked us down in noncontact games of soccer and baseball. They even broke into the resource room we’d commandeered for our lunch time D&D sessions and messed with our laborious setup. My smaller friends bore the brunt of it. I was just under six feet tall, quick and agile, so less of a target. But I wasn’t big, strong, or competitive. And I was intelligent and inquisitive. To those sports-obsessed assholes, that made me a loser.

When Jamie told me that her new friend was married to Maxime Beausoleil, I knew I’d hate the guy. He was a jock, a bully, a killer. Still, I was glad Jamie had found Freya. My wife was happier, lighter, laughing more. When she came in from a walk or a wine date with her friend, she looked placid and content. I hadn’t seen that look since before she realized that her life with me was incomplete. That she and I were not enough. I wouldn’t begrudge her that friendship, but I would steer clear. Jamie knew me well enough not to suggest we become “couple friends.” And then one day, I bumped into Freya at Hawking Mercantile.

I was prepared to dislike the California blond in her impeccable makeup and pricey yoga pants, but she won me over. In a brief, ten-minute introduction, she found a way to compliment my wife, her shop, me, my career, my past career (“teaching is the noblest profession”), and my marriage. I was powerless in the face of her beauty and charm. So when she said, “Why don’t you two come over for dinner? Max will love you.” I agreed.

Max Beausoleil was nothing like I expected. Well, he was huge like I expected, but he was also soft-spoken, humble, and interested in me. He asked me about my books, said they sounded great and promised to buy them for his nephew (the sure-fire way to win over any writer). When I complimented their stunning home, he brushed it away, gave credit to the architect, the builder, and his wife. Our next get-together was at our house. Jamie was embarrassed by our humble abode, but Freya kicked off her shoes and curled up on the sofa. “I love this place. I feel so cozy and at home here.” Over the salmon steaks I’d barbecued, Max and I discovered that we both liked kayaking, canoeing, and fishing. I told him about two summers spent working on a commercial crabber, and he talked wistfully about fly-fishing as a kid in the North. The amount I liked the guy was in direct proportion to the amount I’d expected to dislike him.