Georgie, All Along (20)
Right, the fic. That reminds me.
I hold up the shirt again, shaking it out and raising an eyebrow at Bel, who makes a gesture with her thumb to indicate it gets donated, too. I am definitely going to check with Harry before I carry out these orders. Maybe she’s holding a grudge about the sciatica. And the hickey.
Once I’ve tossed it on the pile, I take a deep breath and focus. I can’t let myself be distracted by the Fanning I used to know and the one I only just met. I want Bel to know what I found in the fic, want her to know what I’m thinking, and not only because she’s my best friend. I want her to know because that notebook was as much hers as it was mine, even if there is more of me in it. I’m not looking for permission, but I’m definitely looking for . . . a blessing, maybe? A that’s a great idea. I’m desperate for validation, a withdrawal I’m going through from my job. Nadia was demanding, but she was also grateful. She always acknowledged everything I did; she always made sure I knew how necessary I was to her life.
I open my mouth to speak, but before I can, Bel sits up again, propping herself on an elbow. “Wait,” she says excitedly, the same light in her eyes as when she wrote the word shit on the side of a building. “Did you ask him what Evan is doing these days?”
“No!” I say, as if I’m affronted. As if I didn’t, for a split second, collapse the two of them in my fic-addled brain.
“Obviously I haven’t been back long enough to know the gossip around here, but I’d bet good money he’s still in Iverley,” Bel says. “He had hometown hero written all over him! Before the brother packs up, ask him. Imagine! You could have a hot little affair with your big-time teenage crush! It’s practically a Hallmark movie!”
I snicker, but Bel cannot know how much this idea does not appeal. First of all, the last thing I need is some sort of romance when I’m supposed to be focusing on myself and figuring out what I want. Second of all, in a Hallmark movie, no one ever has a hot affair. They open up a bakery and then get married six months later, and to me that sounds like the worst.
But the ribbing she’s given me is the opening I need, and I stand and crawl onto the bed beside her, shoving thoughts of the sciatica and the hickey out of my brain as I lie flat on my back. This way, we’re both staring up at the ceiling fan that’s circling lazily above us, and it’s familiar in a way that makes us both go quiet. When we were young, we’d lie this way during sleepovers, lights off, talking about all kinds of stuff—Bel’s strained monthly weekends at her dad’s, especially after he got remarried, my mom’s ups and downs with her arthritis, Bel’s schoolwork, and, of course, my crush on Evan Fanning. Probably this is how we came up with the idea for the fic in the first place, though I can’t quite remember its specific origins.
“Okay, so,” I finally say, which everyone knows is the agreed-upon code for best friends when one of them is about to drop some kind of bomb. “The notebook from yesterday.”
She laughs. “Oh, now see. You do want to have a summertime fling with the one that got away!”
“No, I’m serious.” I can tell she turns her head to look at me, but I keep my eyes up. “I read it last night, cover to cover.”
I don’t tell her that I read some parts of it twice, or that I dog-eared some of the pages. I don’t tell her that I went to that empty page, the one I tore in half so I could give Levi Fanning my number, to make a list of what I thought were the best ideas from the fic. I don’t tell her that the list is the first thing I looked at when I finally came fully awake this morning, sometime after ten.
“Yeah?”
“I know we were just kids screwing around.”
“‘Just kids’ isn’t a thing. Important stuff happens to kids. Kids do important stuff.” She nudges my foot with her own. Bel is going to be such a good mom.
I nod. “I noticed that I . . . well, I put a lot of effort into that notebook.”
When I glance over at her, I see her expression has turned serious. “So what?” she says, immediately defensive. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
It’s not Bel being sharp with me—it’s Bel being sharp on behalf of me. In school, whenever I’d get even in the neighborhood of beating myself up about my grades, she’d always remind me—no matter that her own were off the charts—that grades weren’t everything, that I was the smartest person she knew, that algebra was probably a scam anyway.
“I know there’s not. I actually . . .” I trail off, trying to find some way of explaining to her everything I thought about last night. “I actually think it could help me.”
She turns partway onto her side, rearranging her soul mate to support her bump. “Tell me,” she says, her voice soft and serious.
I clear my throat. “Remember how I told you what Nadia said to me, the day she announced her . . . retirement, or whatever?”
“Ah, yes.” I don’t even have to look over to know she’s got a full face of annoyance on. “Her intentional isolation,” she adds, using the phrase Nadia had repeated with an almost pathological frequency in the weeks leading up to her move. A ranch she and her husband owned, in New Mexico. Hours from the closest airport. “An opportunity to escape all this,” she’d said. “To be my own person again, to be self-reliant.”