The Girls I've Been(32)

I’ve skirted around it. I told myself I didn’t need to tell her. But now that I’m holding my secrets and Wes’s secrets and some of Iris’s, my loyalties are split, and I don’t want them to splinter as well.

“You gonna rest?” I ask him, and he nods underneath the blankets. “Okay, we’ll be out by the pool.”

I keep the door open halfway and then tilt my head toward the back door. “Do you want?”

“Oh yes, I want,” Iris says, and the crispness to her voice sinks to the bottom of my stomach like a rock hurled into a still pond. She’s upset and she deserves to be, because it’s one thing to be best friends with your ex, it’s another to kind of live with him.

We go outside and I wait until she’s settled on one of the chaises that Lee built from wood pallets and I found cushions for at a rummage sale.

“So,” Iris says. “Are you going to say I can explain?”

I sit down on the edge of the second chaise, flipping the tag on the cushion back and forth between my fingers.

“I like that you two are friends,” she says when I don’t offer up any explanation. “I really do. But I didn’t . . . Does he live here?”

“Not officially.”

“Almost every time I’m over here, he’s here, too, unless he’s with Terry or at the shelter,” Iris says slowly, like she’s just realizing it. “Last week, Lee was helping him with a practice essay for college. There’s those onion crackers he likes in the pantry, and I know you think they’re gross. And he has a room in your house. Across from your room.”

“Please don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like it’s sordid or something. It’s not.”

“Then what is it? Because I’m confused,” she says, with such earnestness that it kills me. “No one at school knows why you two broke up. I asked around when I became friends with both of you. I got the same story from everyone: that one day you were together and the next, bam, broken up, no explanation, ever, and you went back to being friends like nothing happened.”

“That’s not how it was.”

“Then how was it?” she asks. “How is it? Because now I’m wondering if I’ve stepped into the middle of some prolonged break that’ll mend someday. And I’m not doing that, Nora. I am not the bi diversion in act one of the rom-com where you end up back with the hot guy in act three.”

“You aren’t a diversion from anything,” I say fiercely, because I don’t know how to deal with hearing her fear like that. “There’s nothing to be diverted from. You . . .” I let out a breath. “You terrify me,” I blurt out, because that? That is the truth.

And that is probably the wrong thing to say to her, because it makes her scowl.

“That’s not something you want your girlfriend to tell you.”

“You make me want to tell you everything, right here, right now,” I continue. “Every mistake I’ve made. Every secret. Every scar and bruise and thing that’s hurt me. Being with you . . . I didn’t know things could be like this. I am terrified of fucking it up. If I do tell you everything about me and my mistakes, I’m afraid that will fuck it up. But it’s not because I’m pining for Wes or he’s pining for me. Did you see how he was looking at Amanda giving her speech last week? That’s what he looks like when he’s pining.”

“He really needs to just ask her out,” Iris mutters.

“I know. She’s great.”

“How do you think she’d react to your living arrangement?” Iris asks, and God, she is sharp like a brand-new box cutter . . . the kind you have to assemble yourself and pray you don’t slice your fingers in the process.

“He’s my best friend,” I say.

“So you both have told me.”

“His dad sucks, Iris.”

“I know they don’t get along,” she says like it’s some offhand thing. “But—”

“No, Iris, listen,” I say slowly, staring at her, trying to convey the truth beyond my words, because if I use my words, I’m betraying him. “His dad sucks. Do you understand?”

Her head tilts, her ponytail swinging free of her shoulders at the movement.

The back door bangs open before she can tell me, and we both turn at the noise just in time to see Wes streaking across the scrubby lawn and cannonballing into the pool, splashing us both with water.

Iris shrieks and jumps to her feet, and I just sputter as he bobs up out of the water, delighted.

“Wes! This belt has eighty-year-old gelatin sequins! They gum up if they get wet.” Iris shakes her head, fanning her skirt in front of her to better dry it. “You’re so—” She glances up, and her voice dies right out when she sees them.

He took his shirt off before he jumped into the pool. He doesn’t take his shirt off in front of people. He doesn’t go swimming anymore unless he’s here with me and Lee. He’s been careful for a long time.

But he’s not careful right now, and Iris sits down hard on the yellow chaise cushions with a soft “oh.”

He has shorts on, thank God. And he’s splashing around in the water like a human-sized golden retriever, so he doesn’t see or hear or realize. My eyes are on Iris as her horrified gaze fixes to his shoulders, and there’s no way I can even begin to spin the truth into fiction when she finally tears herself free of the shock.