The Meet-Cute Project

by Rhiannon Richardson

  We hang up, and I see that it’s already midnight. I figure I can put one more hour of work into my paper before calling it a night, but I stop when I hear movement on the other side of my wall. I go out into the hallway and stand in front of Sam’s closed door, listening. The only way to find out if she hates me, if she blames me, is to break our stalemate and ask. The more I hide and avoid talking about it, the more time I waste letting the not-knowing eat me up inside.

  I knock, listening closely. I think I hear covers being pushed back. Then I hear soft thuds on the floor, and I stand back. When she opens the door, I can’t tell from her blank stare if she was expecting it to be me or not. She’s not pulling me into a forgiving hug, but at least she’s not slamming her door in my face either.

  “Can we talk?” I ask.

  She moves aside to let me in.

  * * *

  Even though there’s more to talk about, Sam and I stick to discussing the bachelorette party. She admits she resented me a little, mainly because I missed the bridal shower and had to be forced to go out with her that weekend. She wishes I would just have more interest, and I admit that she’s right. Weddings aren’t really my thing, but I should be able to put that aside and be more excited for her. She doesn’t blame me for the fight. Her accusation just slipped out, a culmination of unrealistic worry. And once it was out, she couldn’t take it back, and she doesn’t know how to tell Geoffrey where it came from—which is why they haven’t completely made up. He says if it’s not a trust issue, then why would she jump to a conclusion like that? And how does she know she’ll never do it again if she can’t even figure out why she did it in the first place?

  “Don’t give up, Sam,” I say before heading out her door. “There’s definitely a way for you guys to make this right. We just have to figure it out.”

  “You think so?” Sam asks. There’s a hesitation and weariness to her voice that I never would have thought possible. I guess we all doubt ourselves sometimes.

  “Yes,” I say, and I mean it. “That’s what sisters are for.”

  * * *

  On Wednesday after school, I surprise Mom when I come into the kitchen, ready to go to the garden with her. I figure if Ritchie and I can fix the awkwardness between us, and if Sam and I can start talking again, then hopefully Gavin and I can too.

  When I walk into the greenhouse, I find Gavin crouched down inspecting a kale plant that has nearly doubled in size since the last time I was here.

  “So, you were right,” I say, thrusting my hands into my gardening gloves and grabbing a tiny rake from the back table. I swat the vine that slaps me in the face when I turn around, and I nearly drop the rake on my foot. He’s also installed hanging planters. “You were right. Everyone was right about Ben. He thinks I’m an idiot who can’t solve Taylor series, and he was only interested in seeing my sister’s big fancy wedding, not in getting to know me. He couldn’t even stand to talk to me about anything that wasn’t about him being amazing or good at math or him going to Vanderbilt, or him in general—UGH!”

  When Gavin doesn’t say anything, I reach into my coat pocket and pull out the list he made, the list that I found in my pocket the night of the bachelorette party when I was skating alone.

  “I’m saying I don’t want us to tiptoe around each other, because you were right, and I’m admitting it and saying sorry and that I can’t handle this being weird when everything else in my life is a mess.”

  Gavin is one of the few people I can talk to, and after chasing Ben, I feel it’s important to make things right with him. Why go after someone who doesn’t want to be your friend, when you have good friends right in front of you?

  He keeps staring at me, so I add, “So say something. Please. I mean, I’m here on a Wednesday. If that doesn’t show you how much I care, then I don’t know what will.”

  This makes him smile.

  “Well, I do know everything,” he says, “and I am always right.”

  “Shut up.” I laugh.

  “I thought you wanted me to talk,” he says, quirking his eyebrow, which makes me laugh harder.

  I want to say I missed him, but I feel like that would be weird. So I start telling him about the bachelorette party. He beckons me over to the kale, and as I relay every detail I can recall, he shows me how to check that the vegetables are doing well, and we start going from trough to trough. By the time I finish, the knees of my jeans are freezing from the damp dirt. Gavin also added a temperature control and timer to the irrigation system since I’ve been gone.

  I roll my hands up in the length of my scarf running down my chest, and I take a deep breath.

  “Have you thought about any possible way that Sam can fix things?” Gavin asks.

  “Yes and no,” I say, wringing my hands. “I think the hardest part is that he wants her to tell him why she immediately got so bent out of shape, but she doesn’t fully understand it herself.”

  Gavin considers this, pressing his lips together and running his fingers over his beard. It’s coming in fuller. Now it covers his entire jawline up to his ears. The Sherpa collar of his green corduroy jacket is popped up behind his neck and folded down where it would come around to cover his mouth. In a way, it frames his face. And with his brown eyes squinted, his pupils barely discernable, he looks focused.

  “Would he talk to you?” he asks, looking at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if you talk to him about what happened, maybe comment on it from an outside perspective, would he at least listen?”

  “I guess.… I mean, I don’t think he’s mad at me.” You know, unless Sam has secretly spent the last five years turning him against me in private.

  “Maybe it could help for you to be a messenger. Figure out if there’s something Sam wants to say or something she’s been trying to get him to understand, and maybe you can help him understand. And maybe he’ll be more willing to listen because it won’t be Sam talking.”

  “You make it sound simple,” I say, mulling over the idea. “Plus, it’s not like I can go talk to him. I’m still grounded for that whole Darth Vader fiasco.”

  Gavin nods. “I think if your parents catch you trying to save your sister’s wedding, they’ll understand.”

  I think it over some more, figuring saving the wedding might be the get-out-of-jail-free card I’ve been looking for to finally fix things with Sam.

  “Obviously,” Gavin adds, “you will need to tell me how it goes.”

  “Makes sense. You’d want to know if your idea blows up in my face,” I say jokingly.

  Gavin rolls his eyes and I unlock my phone and hand it to him. I watch his face as he enters his contact into my phone, his eyes illuminated by the light on my screen. Sloane was definitely onto something when she brought up how attractive he is. I can’t help but feel like I missed an opportunity, especially now that we’ve fixed the tension between us. I like that I can talk to Gavin, that he doesn’t judge me for my boy problems and wants me to talk about how I’m feeling. It doesn’t matter, though, because he already has a girlfriend.

  * * *

  Gavin’s advice comes to the forefront of my thoughts later when I can’t escape the sound of Sam on the phone with Brooke.

  “I don’t know,” she’s sobbing.

  I tried listening to my music, but Gavin’s idea made it hard to fall asleep. That, and Sam’s constant shuffling around. The sound of her walking around in her room is easy to confuse with the sound of someone walking in the hallway.

  “He still picks up, but he doesn’t talk to me. He’s not giving me clear signals about where his head is at.”

  I listen. Sam blows her snot into a tissue, probably listening to Brooke responding.

  “I tried, Brooke. I don’t know. I just don’t see it being over because of this.” Though, the thought makes Sam cry harder.

  More shuffling. I can picture her pacing at the foot of her bed, avoiding looking at herself in her full-length mirror every time she tur
ns around to walk toward her door.

  “Well, I don’t know, Brooke. At this point I don’t care about the wedding. I just want him to talk to me. I miss him!”

  I wonder if Geoffrey is still awake. He’s the type to go to bed at a reasonable time so that he can get up early, do some yoga stretches, and get in a good five-kilometer run before heading to work. But as I type out Hey, you up? part of me already knows the answer.

  Yes, he replies within seconds.

  How are you holding up?

  I see the typing bubble pop up and go away. I wonder if maybe he won’t respond, but then they come back and his message pops up: Honestly, not good.

  Are you doing anything tomorrow after 3?

  No.

  The period at the end seems off, oddly definitive, yet in some ways inviting.

  Can I stop by?

  As soon as I send it, I realize how weird it might be, to have your maybe-ex-fiancée’s little sister want to come over. It’s a little suspect, but at the same time I can easily see my dad wanting to go check on Geoffrey. The only reason he hasn’t is because he might be afraid that Sam would think he’s a traitor.

  I watch my screen. Should I make something up like, Sam gave me some of your things to drop off or I found X lying around and realized it was yours? But then he replies Sure, leaving me in the darkness of my room with the realization that now I have to figure out how I’m going to get them back together.

  * * *

  I’ve only been to Sam and Geoffrey’s place a few times. First was when both families came together to help them move. The second time was when Sam had me over for a movie night, which was really a living-on-her-own-with-her-boyfriend-was-daunting night. After that, I would stop by with Mom if she wanted to pop over with bagels, or if Mom wanted to bring Sam something she’d found while cleaning her room, like a knit hat or a pair of shoes buried in her closet, or if Mom got some of Sam’s still-not-routed mail. Nevertheless, every time I came over, their apartment was spotless. Sam and Geoffrey aren’t the type to eat junk food or fast food, so when I step over the threshold to follow Geoffrey toward the living room, and see their trash can overflowing with McDonald’s wrappers, Chick-fil-A bags, and a Burger King chicken fries box, I know he’s having as hard a time as Sam.

  When we sit down on the couch in the living room, facing their floor-to-ceiling window with a view of Lake Michigan, I notice Geoffrey’s yoga mat rolled up in the corner with a bowl propped on top. Geoffrey pushes a pair of folded socks off the coffee table and folds the blanket that was strewn across the couch, before finally sitting down next to me.

  “So,” I say, taking in the tornado aftermath that is the rest of the apartment. “How are you?”

  I set my book bag down on the floor and before I drop my phone into the front pocket I already see texts. Mom is probably wondering where I am since school ended almost forty minutes ago.

  “I don’t know,” he says, pressing his hands against his face. I notice a few blanket fuzzies among his naps.

  “Have you and Sam made any progress? Like, do you think the fight will end soon?”

  “She apologized. She said she was sorry.” Geoffrey focuses his gaze on the horizon out the window. A cynical smile takes over his lips. “I mean, saying she’s sorry doesn’t fix everything, and she knows that. It’s something we’ve talked about, how that phrase is meaningless without actions to back it up. Like, what has she done to show that she’s sorry?”

  I quickly jump to her defense. “She has been a mess all week. She’s been crying every night. She didn’t mean what she said at all—”

  “I don’t care if she meant it,” Geoffrey admits, looking at me. “Her reflex was to assume the worst about me. After five years, all of a sudden one picture makes her doubt my loyalty. Aren’t we farther along than that? Isn’t our bond stronger than that?”

  I want to say, No, because Sam has a way of testing the people she loves, usually unintentionally. But I know that’s not what Geoffrey wants to hear.

  I look away. I realize that the coasters on their coffee table are pictures of them on different rides at amusement parks.

  “Mia, I don’t expect you to answer that, by the way. And I’m sorry if I’m putting you in an uncomfortable position by talking about your sister like this.”

  “Trust me, on any given day at any time, if anybody comes to me and says ‘Let’s talk smack about Sam,’ I’m there.… But, I don’t know. This isn’t one of those times where I think—It’s not that I don’t think what she did was wrong, I just don’t—I guess—understand it either. It’s not like her at all, which you know.”

  We fall silent. Geoffrey offers to get me something to drink, and I tell him a glass of water will do, because I can see that he just wants to get up, to move instead of sitting in this weird space we’ve made. While he’s over in the kitchen, I check my phone and see one missed call from Mom. I know I can’t go home empty-handed, so when Geoffrey returns, I face him and wait for him to sit back down.

  “Sam doesn’t think you cheated on her,” I say. “I keep replaying the bachelorette party over and over in my head, that moment when everything just got out of control. If any one detail had played out differently… If Sam hadn’t had those last couple glasses of wine, if she hadn’t tried to make fun of me in front of her friends, if I hadn’t brought up your bachelor party to the girls and gotten them interested—”

  “Mia, this isn’t your fault,” Geoffrey says, bunching his eyebrows together in confusion. “Even if you’re the reason the girls got curious about what we were up to, Sam had her reaction all on her own.”

  “That’s not what I’m trying to say.” I take a deep breath, collecting my thoughts. I’m thinking about Sam and how, even with all the crazy things she’s done, she’s still my sister and I love her. I think about us decorating the Christmas tree together every year, when she showed me how to braid my hair, when she made brownies for my second-grade bake sale. “Sam doesn’t always process her emotions. When she gets insecure or scared, she starts to push away anything that reminds her of those feelings. Like, when she was freaking out about the flowers. I think both of us know that she couldn’t care less what kind of flowers she’s holding, as long as she’s holding them while walking down the aisle to you. It’s like the flowers were a token of this wedding, a symbol of this huge unpredictable unstructured change in her life. She freaked out about the venue because the venue is where it’s going to happen. She freaked out about me not going to her bridal shower because focusing on me not being there meant she didn’t have to focus on being a bride.

  “She loves you so, so much, and it’s the greatest thing in her life, and simultaneously it terrifies her. So the bachelorette party was another time when she wasn’t coping with her emotions and insecurities. She tried to deflect attention by talking about some of my embarrassing moments, and when things caught up to her, for the first time, she put her insecurities on you. She doesn’t think you cheated on her. This is her trying to push you, to test if you’re really going to hold, the way people test the planks on old bridges so that they know they aren’t going to fall through.

  “And I know that this close to the wedding, you shouldn’t have to prove yourself. But I mean, you aren’t. Not really. She loves you. She trusts you. I think the only reason she did it is because she knew it wasn’t true and that you would reassure her of that. Which you did, but what she wasn’t expecting was for you to also leave. You can’t be a broken plank, because if you are, then… I don’t think you deserve her.”

  I realize only as I’m saying this that Sam coming after me, getting me grounded, was her weird and twisted way of trying to pull me closer to her. She asked me to help with the wedding, to go to the fitting—just the two of us—to stay up late with her to plot and plan, and I’ve been pushing her off. I haven’t really given her a chance to talk for the past couple of months, and all she’s been doing is crying for help. And similarly, I’ve been talking to everyone but h
er about the one thing she understands better than my friends—and that’s how to begin and hold on to a good relationship. I’ve been scared that she would either revel in my failures—which I know isn’t true—or stress out if I came to her with my meet-cute problems. But I should’ve given her a chance to be there for me, just like I need to be there for her.

  I take a breath and keep going. “You guys were about to—and hopefully still will—make vows to stay together through thick and thin. I think this is one of those thin moments when you have a choice. I think she needs to grow with you and know that she can lean on you in times when she’s vulnerable. You’re her favorite person, and the hardest part about having jitters about this big huge life change is the fact that the change is you—so she hasn’t been able to talk to you about any of it. She’s feeling vulnerable about you.”

  “So, she should share that with me. She shouldn’t try to push me away—”

  “And you’re right,” I say quickly. “You’re absolutely right. So, talk to her. Call her! Just let her know that you’re here. Tell her she can’t push you away.”

  I realize that I want someone who wants me the way that Sam and Geoffrey want each other. For who I am, whether or not I answer every math question correctly, whether or not I win every swim meet, and whether or not I have some big lavish thing to give them.

  I’d rather go to Sam’s wedding by myself or be stuck with Jasper than go with someone like Ben, because even Jasper pays attention to me. Then again, he does have that girlfriend now…

  “Mia,” Geoffrey says.

  “Yeah?”

  “You don’t think it’s too late? You don’t think I’ve pushed her too far away?”

  “No,” I say, completely sure. “She still loves you; she still wants to marry you. She just needs to know you want the same—so that I can sleep tonight.”

  Geoffrey laughs a little, looking over toward the window. His gaze stops short, and I follow it to some more clothes in the other corner of the room. He starts looking around, as if he’s waking up from that bad dream he was living in where he didn’t clean his apartment for nearly a week and lived like a depressed single man.