Georgie, All Along (87)

I shrug. “Maybe.”

“Georgie,” she says, her voice serious. “Thank you. Thank you for coming.”

I roll my eyes dramatically, a performance to keep taking her mind off everything. “Of course I’d come! What do you think, I’d let an ambulance bring you here? The costs on those are unreal, you know.”

She huffs another laugh. “No, I mean—thank you for coming here. Back home. I don’t know what kind of shape I’d be in if you hadn’t.”

Now it’s my turn to laugh, a snort of self-deprecating humor. “Are you kidding? You would have been fine. I should be thanking you. What would I have done, if I couldn’t come back? I’d probably be squatting in Nadia’s guest house, eating beans straight out of a can.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. You would have figured it out.”

I wave a hand, scoffing. She still doesn’t know about that blank space that’s been sticking around.

“Georgie,” she says again, and I meet her eyes. They’re more than serious now. They’re insistent. Almost indignant.

“Yeah?”

“You would have. If I ever made you feel like you wouldn’t, I want you to know—that was about me, not you. I wanted you to come back, and I wanted to keep you close. I wanted you to see this big new life I was living. I wanted you to tell me it was okay, the way you did just now. Convince me it would be good, no matter what.”

“You never made me feel—” I begin, but this time, when she squeezes my hand, it’s gentle and speaking. You know I did, she’s saying, and I do know. Time to think, I remember her saying to me, that first day I arrived, her eyes coaxing and sympathetic. Maybe even pitying.

There’s a long stretch of silence—or the particular not-silence of hospitals. Strangers’ voices and beeping machines and squeaking shoes on linoleum floors, televisions covering up noises you don’t want to hear.

“Do you remember why we started the fic?” she asks.

I blink down at where Bel’s fingers still squeeze mine, and for a second, there’s a strange collapsing of moments in my brain—this morning, the fic laid out on the linens of Levi’s bed, and right now, Bel’s hand and mine clasped on top of white waffle knit.

“To . . . I don’t know. Get ready for high school. Get excited for high school.”

She shakes her head. “No. I mean, yes, in general. But do you remember specifically why we started it?”

“I guess not. Was it my mom’s idea? You know my mom.”

“It wasn’t your mom’s idea. It was your idea. And you came up with it because of me. Because I was so scared to go to that school.”

“Everyone was scared; it was—”

“Not like I was scared. You know that, Georgie. You remember that.”

And once she’s said it, I do remember. I remember the way Bel would ruminate over it, the way she had stomachaches for a year straight. The way she’d talk about what clubs she would join, what AP classes she would take, what GPA she wanted to keep for all four years. I remember the way she’d started to talk about college, even back then—the schools she wanted to apply to, the work she’d have to do to get in.

“You wrote the fic because of me,” says Bel. “So I wouldn’t be scared. So I would think about the fun things. You used to give me assignments. ‘Write about what would happen if the Jonas brothers came to our school,’ you said. ‘Write about your dream car.’”

It’s me who’s squeezing her hand now, something tense and scared moving inside me. At first I think it must be disappointment: that notebook I’ve been hanging all my hopes on, the evidence that I once upon a time thought about my own future, and I hadn’t done it for myself at all? I’d been the same back then as I still am now. A puppet. A blank unless I’m filling myself up with someone else, unless I—

Bel breaks the spell by pulling her hand from mine, pressing her palm low on the right side of her belly, wincing. But she breathes deep and slow, and I watch her, realizing I’m not disappointed at all. I’m standing on the edge of a dock, ready to jump in. I’m shaking a can of spray paint. Watching a dance floor fill with people. It’s so close; it’s about to click.

“Georgie,” Bel says, winded now.

“Yeah?”

“That thing you always think is a liability. You not making plans. You not always knowing the exact thing you want for the future.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s wonderful. It’s the most magical thing about you, the way you adapt. I think maybe—maybe the world takes advantage of that quality in you, Georgie. I know I have, and I know Nadia did. But it isn’t your flaw. It’s your gift, and the only reason people don’t tell you all the time is because they’re too caught up in their own shit.”

She presses her hand down again, that little wince, but again she breathes through it.

“They’re busy making sure they have a certain job title by the age of thirty. Or that they get pregnant at what they think is the exact right time, or deciding to move someplace they take to be better for raising a family. They’re buying furniture from catalogs and making their too-big new houses look like no one’s ever lived there.”

“Bel,” I say, scolding her gently, because no matter what she thinks of herself right now, gripped with this pain and fear, I know she’s being too hard on herself. I know the most magical thing about her is the way she doesn’t adapt. The way she holds on to her plans, tenacious and determined. Maybe some of these plans were the wrong ones, made for the wrong reasons, but it doesn’t make it any less impressive that she’s executed them.