Not If I See You First(41)
“I just stopped trying to make excuses.”
What did my dad say?
“He told me I f*cked up. And he was right. He said I wasn’t welcome at your house anymore and to leave you alone or I’d just make things worse. So I did. I’ve been trying to give you as much space as I can but they wouldn’t switch me to a different Trig. I’m trying to keep things normal and not weird for you.”
You don’t want me to forgive you? Or was that a typo?
“Don’t forgive anyone who breaks your trust. Rule Number Infinity. Some things are unforgivable.”
Unforgivable.
I…
“You’re breathing funny again,” Petey says.
Quack.
I fumble with my phone to play Sarah’s text and Southern Matron speaks for her.
“Rick and I broke up last night.”
I leave Petey to his cartoons and run up to my room and call Sarah. She answers on the first ring.
“What happened? You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she says, and she does sound fine.
“How’d it happen?”
“I called him and told him we should end it, though there wasn’t much of it to end.”
“You broke up on the phone?”
“Yeah, I know. We’ve been saying that’s cowardly but when it came to me doing it, I realized if someone breaks up with you, do you really want to be stuck with them in a café or someone’s house? Better to give them the option to hang up and be out as quickly as they want. And that’s what happened. He wanted to get off the phone pretty fast.”
“What’d you say was the reason? What was the reason?”
“We were just together out of habit. He tried to argue, but… he’ll be relieved later if he isn’t already. Deep down I think he knows I’m right.”
“Wow,” I say. “I had no idea.”
“You had some idea. You’ve been calling him my Sort Of Boyfriend.”
“Just by Hollywood standards. Compared to movies you guys were pretty lukewarm but movies aren’t real. I thought you guys were just… more real, I guess. Nothing had changed in a while, at least as far as I knew.”
Silence.
“You sure you’re fine?” It seems like there’s something she’s not telling me.
“Yeah. How was your date with Jason?”
“What? It was… it was okay. We can talk about that later. You’ve been together with Rick for almost two years—aren’t we going to talk about it for more than thirty seconds? I mean, why last night?”
“It was just a long time coming and it finally did.”
“But you never said anything.”
“It’s not like we fought or did anything worth talking about. Things have just been blah. Then running around the mall all day, it reminded me there are plenty of guys out there, you know, so I thought it was time to try something else.”
“Those guys weren’t after us.”
“I know, but you were out on a date with a guy you just met, and other stuff.”
“What other stuff?”
“You know, just… stuff.”
“I don’t know. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We don’t talk about Rick much.”
“Because you don’t. How you’re feeling about Rick isn’t something I would just bring up without anything happening. I tell you everything… I just figured you… told me everything, too.”
Silence.
“There’s nothing to tell. It’s really not a big deal.”
“But…” I can’t tell if her breakup is a big deal and she’s trying to be cool about it or if it’s really not a big deal for her but is for me. Not that she did it but that it happened without her even giving me a clue.
We talk a lot every day but not about everything. She doesn’t like to talk about her deadbeat dad, so I don’t ask and I try not to talk about my cool dad too much. We didn’t talk about Rick for the same reason, I thought, just the other way around, that she didn’t want to rub it in that she had a boyfriend.
But Sarah’s not just my best friend—she’s my only really close everyday friend. Faith and I go way back and I can count on her but we don’t know each other’s details anymore. Now I’m realizing that Sarah and I don’t talk about Sarah’s life outside of school much at all. Not her dad, who pretty much only sends her cards on her birthday and Christmas except when he forgets. Not her mom, who struggles as an accountant to afford to stay in their house and not move to an apartment. And, apparently, not her boyfriend even though she’s been thinking about their relationship a lot lately and last night called him and broke up. The fact that she went through all that without sharing even a hint of it with me… it’s making my stomach twist into a hard, cold knot.
“But what?” Sarah asks.
Something’s shaking loose inside me. I feel maybe angry but definitely sad that Sarah and I aren’t as close as I thought… Am I being selfish, thinking about myself when my best friend just ended a two-year relationship? And my normal impulse to ask about this directly, to blurt out cold hard truths, is failing me and I don’t know why. It’s like all the other truths I toss out easily mean nothing but this one means something and that’s making it different.