Here So Far Away(28)

“Who doesn’t resent the wind?” I said, pushing open the door for them.

Bill gave Nat a little shove inside. “That should be the title of your autobiography.”

Nat wasn’t a big fan of Pierre’s so her mood didn’t improve as we sifted through the bins. “Have you heard from Sid?” I asked.

“Couple of postcards.”

“Only one for me.”

Course, I’d only written to him twice.

This wasn’t surprising. Sid’s parents sent him to a different camp every summer and we wouldn’t hear from him the whole time he was gone, but then he’d be back and it was like he’d never left. He was like a windup toy: you could drop him anywhere and he’d keep on walking.

“Bill calls him sometimes,” I said, watching him try on ladies’ hats in the next aisle over. “He says it’s . . .”

“Awkward.”

“Yup.”

Which was surprising, if nothing new, because Sid was so fun and animated in person. Lisa’s favorite thing in the world used to be when we’d reenact Andy Garcia’s love scenes with Sofia Coppola in The Godfather Part III, Sid emoting like hell, me channeling a block of Swiss cheese. But get him on the phone and he’d keep drifting off, like he couldn’t focus on you if you weren’t in front of him.

“This made a lot more sense before he moved,” Nat said.

“What do you mean?”

“Before it was two guys, two girls—”

“Three girls.”

“You’re a boy-girl hybrid, so you cancel yourself out. Now it’s one guy, two girls, and you. Sid’s gone, you and Lisa aren’t talking, and even if you were, you can’t hang out with Keith when Joshua and the Face are around, and how’s that going to work? What if Sid leaving was the beginning of the end?”

“The end of what?”

“Us. Our group. What if we only worked when we were all together?”

“Stop it,” Bill said, marching into our aisle. He’d gotten himself done up in a Jackie O. pillbox hat, a faux Chanel jacket, and Minnie Mouse gloves, and he looked positively stricken, clutching his pearl-encrusted collar.

“Okay,” Nat said. “Don’t get your pearls in a knot. I’m just saying—”

“Stop it!” He started blowing in her face, sending her wispy white bangs flying.

“You stop it!”

Bill took off his pillbox hat and dumped it in the bin beside him. “I can’t lose my best buddy, my girlfriend, and my whole damn group.”

“Wait, Tracy dumped you again?” Nat said.

“Well, no. I dumped her.”

“Dumped her how?”

“You want the transcript?”

“But you never break up with her,” I said. “Ever.”

“So, yeah, the thing is . . . The thing is she said I was spending all my time running between you girls, and something about taking her for granted, and something-something you have to choose, so I chose.”

“You chose us?”

He nodded.

“You chose us,” Nat echoed.

“And Lisa.” He gave me a meaningful look.

“And Lisa,” I said. “I’ll fix it—promise. I mean, with just you two losers, how would I know if I should get this green shirt or that green shirt?”

“Neither of those shirts is green,” Nat said. She retrieved the hat from the bin and perched it on her head. “So, Bill, maybe we could, uh, study together some time? You know, since my study partner moved away.”

To put this into context: Nat and Sid could be competitive about grades, and spent hours together cramming for tests and talking smack about how lazy Bill was because he didn’t have to work at all to get straight As. Which meant that Nat was making an excuse to hang out with Bill in his time of need, and, as my mother would put it, for once she turned over the hem to hide the stitching.

“Sure,” he said. “We could do that. Just as friends?”

“Get over yourself. Someone’s got to keep an eye on you. Now that Sid’s gone, there’s one less person to stop you from getting back together with your ex–T. rex.”





Thirteen


I said I would fix it, and I meant it.

As usual, Nat had located a raw nerve and pressed her finger on it. Maybe we only worked as a five, and even if we could work as a four, what was going to bring us back together? Bill and Nat had made it sound like it had to be me, but I hoped they’d had the same conversation with Lisa. One of us just had to make the first move.

Our school held eight hundred kids, from seventh grade up, smaller schools feeding into it like tributaries. There were those who could walk down its hallways in a resplendent burnt-orange satin blouse with puffed sleeves and a little tie at the collar and have their stock rise with every laugh, and there were those who could not. Not to brag, but I was in the first group, so I had my icebreaker, found in one of the bins at Pierre’s.

I also had a large slab of my mother’s famous gingerbread that she let me take as a pick-me-up for Bill, but when I dropped into the seat in front of his in homeroom, he was already covered in crumbs from Nat’s mother’s famous date squares. “If I knew how much nicer mothers are to the dumpers than the dumpees,” he said, mouth full, “I’d have broken up with Tracy a long time ago.”