Where the Staircase Ends(46)

“Sunny, please. I’m your best friend. You can tell me anything. Whatever it is, I’ll help. But you have to tell me what happened, okay? I can’t help unless you talk to me.”

I squeezed her tighter, pressing my knees against the back of her legs and my face against her hair. She smelled like a hangover, a mix of last night’s cigarettes and beer.

“Come on, Sunny. Talk to me,” I pleaded. When that didn’t work I added, “If you don’t say something soon I’m going to assume it’s because you’ve gone lesbo and want me to spoon you all morning. Ooooo,” I said, my tone playful so she’d know I was kidding. “Maybe it wasn’t a guy you had in here last night. Maybe it was a chick with a really low voice. Are you playing for the other side now, Sunny? You better get up and look at me or I’m going to tell the whole school that you’ve joined the softball team.”

She let out a short laugh and sat up. I sat up too, looking at her red and swollen eyes straight on.

“What happened?” I asked again. Her bottom lip quivered and a single tear slid down her cheek, tracing the trail of wetness left behind by earlier tears. It freaked me out to see her that way.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she said, her voice small and unsure. “We were in here talking, and then suddenly we were kissing, and then … then … ” She looked down at her hands, studying the lines on her palms. “We’d had a lot to drink, and I should have stopped him. It all happened so fast. Please don’t be mad at me.”

When she looked back at me, her eyes were wide and wet, pleading with me. It was a look I recognized from the many apologies she’d given me throughout the years. The Sunny mantra: better to ask forgiveness than permission.

“Please,” she repeated. “Please don’t be mad at me. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was drunk and stupid and out of control. You have to believe me. You’re my best friend. I don’t want to lose you.” She reached out and took my hands, but I yanked them away.

“Who were you with last night?” I asked, my voice flat. The air in her bedroom had suddenly become thick and hot. The sunlight streaming in through the slats of her blinds warmed my skin to an almost unbearable temperature.

I thought back to the day when Logan had asked me out, to the drawing he’d done of me and the all-caps words scrawled on the bottom of the page asking me if I wanted to grab a bite sometime. I’d brought the note with me to history class to show Sunny, floating into the classroom as I held the picture out for her to see. She made a face, looking at it like it was a flaming baggy of dog poop.

“That doesn’t look anything like you,” she’d said, pushing it away.

I had looked down at the drawing, marveling at the way he’d made me look graceful, elegant. It may not have looked exactly like me, but I thought there were some similarities. And it didn’t matter if I really looked like that; what mattered was he saw me that way, and that made me feel pretty amazing. Beautiful, even.

Sunny laughed when I said the words out loud, making me wish I could have sucked them back inside my mouth. “It’s just a picture, Taylor. It’s not like he actually said you were beautiful. You’re not going to go out with him, are you?”

“He’s taking me out Friday.” My voice sounded small and inferior. She made a face at me again and shrugged.

“I suppose you could do worse,” she had said.

I thought about those words as I watched Sunny sitting on top of her white duvet, her bottom lip trembling as more tears threatened to spill down her cheeks. Even though I knew the answer, I wanted her to say it out loud.

“Who was in the room with you last night, Sunny?” My teeth were clenched, and my fingers were balled into tight fists.

“Please don’t make me say it, Taylor,” she whispered.

I took a deep breath and exhaled loudly through my nose. “Logan,” I answered for her. “You were in here with Logan last night.”

Her eyes darted around the room, looking everywhere except at my face. Finally she nodded and her face got red and puffy again as a new wave of tears broke free.

My thoughts were balls inside a pinball machine, knocking around inside of my brain. I thought about the way she looked at me when I first told her about Logan, the look of disgust that clouded her face, like she was too good for him and couldn’t believe I actually considered him dateable. Yet here she was, falling on her back faster than Tracey Allen at a frat party.

There were rules about that kind of thing, unspoken friendship laws that put boyfriends and ex-boyfriends completely off limits to friends. It’s like once you started dating someone an invisible fence sprung up around them, complete with barbed-wire reinforcements and razor-toothed rabid guard dogs. Technically Logan and I were still together; our relationship wasn’t even cold in the grave when Sunny did what she did, so I had every right to yell at her, scream at her, and slap her across her fat red puffy face.

Then I thought about Justin and the way it felt when we kissed. I thought about the things he said and the way we seemed to fit together, like two pieces carved from the same tree. Logan could draw a million pictures of me and I would never feel that way about him.

Normally I would have been angrier with Sunny, but the surprising thing was that I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be with Logan. I didn’t want to be within ten feet of Logan. If Sunny wanted him so bad, why not let her have him? It served her right.