by Megan Crane
“So do we,” I said, unnecessarily, since both Georgia and I were sweaty and in jeans.
“We all received the same invitation, I’m pretty sure,” Georgia said, her tone scathing. I looked at her, trying to communicate a gentler form of shut the hell up with my eyes. She only pursed her lips a little bit, but she didn’t say anything else.
Amy Lee let out a long-suffering sort of sigh, and turned away.
Thus began the truly awkward climb up the stairs to our adjoining rooms on the next floor. We all trudged along in a deeply uncomfortable silence broken only by Linus, who was panting happily. He seemed perfectly content to stay on his leash now, I noticed.
Outside our rooms, Georgia unlocked our door while Amy Lee unlocked hers. I stared at the carpet. Still, no one spoke. Georgia threw open the door and stormed inside. I followed her, and set about unfastening Linus’s leash. We could hear Amy Lee’s door slam, and then, once again, there was only silence.
“Well!” I said into the oppressive quiet before Georgia’s storm of temper. “That was awkward.”
“She has to be fucking kidding me!” Georgia exploded.
“She’s obviously still mad about whatever she’s mad about,” I said, trying to sound soothing. “So let her be mad. She’ll talk to us when she’s ready.”
It wasn’t that I wasn’t mad myself, not to mention hurt that one of my best friends was still acting like she hated me, but I was more concerned with damage control. This wasn’t an afternoon sleigh-ride party that we could all storm away from. This was a hotel out in the country and we’d all be staying the night. It was also a national holiday. I figured my hurt feelings took a distant second to keeping Georgia from throttling Amy Lee before the clock struck midnight.
“That stuck-up, self-righteous—”
Georgia couldn’t even finish, she just whirled around and stomped over to the door that joined our room to Amy Lee and Oscar’s. She balled her hands into fists and started pounding. She was no fragile flower, either, so she made quite a racket with all of her Amazon strength behind each blow.
“Could you please—” I rubbed at my temples. “What do you think this is going to do, exactly?”
“I think it’s going to open the door,” Georgia snapped. “And then I think me and Miss Holier-than-Thou are going to talk about this bullshit.”
“You’re trying to beat down the door so you can talk,” I pointed out, mildly. “Where have I heard that before? Oh, yes, from violent, crazed—”
“Either help me or shut up, Gus!” Georgia barked.
I chose the second option, and waited.
It didn’t take long before the door flew open and Amy Lee stood there, practically hyperventilating with rage.
“Have you lost your mind?” she hurled at Georgia.
“How dare you sit in judgment of me?” Georgia threw right back. “Whenever you needed a friend, I was there for you—I was always there for you! And in return for over ten years of friendship I get what? You telling me to fuck off in some random party? Have you lost your mind?”
“I held your hand through the first four hundred heartbreaks, Georgia,” Amy Lee snapped. “Which for a normal person would end sometime, like after the fifteenth identical situation—except not you. You just keep going and going—you’re like the Energizer Bunny of stupid, pointless relationships!”
I thought Georgia might actually faint from her fury, which I swore I could hear sizzle along her skin, and so bodily placed myself between the two of them.
“Everyone needs to calm down!” I announced—okay, it was closer to a shout.
“It must be pretty bad if Gus has to step in and be the adult,” Amy Lee said, with a little snort of extremely obnoxious laughter.
I reminded myself to take a deep breath. While I was doing so—and thus not throttling Amy Lee myself—-Georgia recovered enough to leap to my defense.
“Are you the model of adult behavior, Amy Lee?” Georgia demanded from behind me. “Because I think you’ll find that sniggering at people is usually frowned upon on the playground.”
“I should have known that the two of you would just gang together and wallow like it’s senior year of college again,” Amy Lee spat.
“Have I lost my mind?” I asked no one in particular. “Why the hell are we talking about college? The last I checked that ended when we graduated seven years ago!”
“Some of us graduated,” Amy Lee retorted.
“You see, Gus?” Georgia asked acidly. “Amy Lee is just better than we are. She works harder now, just as she did then, which is hard to imagine, I know, since she’s so fucking perfect. She’s just better.”
“I don’t know about better,” Amy Lee snapped. “But let’s see—I don’t lie about who I’m sleeping with, nor do I thrash around in my bed like some fucking opera heroine for whole days.”
“You condescending—”
“The two of you can’t even come to a New Year’s eve party without turning it into a circus!” Amy Lee continued, talking over Georgia.
“You really are full of yourself, Amy Lee,” I told her, because the hell with deep breaths, I wanted to slap her. “If we’re such a trial for you, I’m surprised you kept us around as your best friends in the entire world for over ten years. So I guess that makes you the real psycho here, doesn’t it?”
I wasn’t even yelling, or particularly snide. In fact I was the calmest voice in the room. And yet, it was like I’d slapped her the way I’d briefly imagined.
Amy Lee seemed to crumple in front of me. Her face sort of folded in on itself, and it took me a long, horrified moment to realize that she was crying.
Amy Lee never cried.
She didn’t cry when her heart was trampled by her high school love, when she broke her finger, or when her body betrayed her once a month. Or even at her own wedding. No tears for Amy Lee—that was the rule. She was all about stoicism and grim determination. Once, long ago, she’d gotten a little misty-eyed during a particularly intense conversation over tarot cards and cheap red wine, but we’d been all of nineteen then and she blamed the wine.
So it took me a while to realize that what she was doing was sobbing. I might have thought she was convulsing, except I saw the tears. I didn’t have to look over at Georgia to see that she was as floored by this as me—I could feel her hand digging into my arm, where she was holding on to me for dear life.
“I am not psycho!” Amy Lee said, between gulps of air and more floods of tears. “I just feel psycho!” She took both of her hands and placed them on her belly. “I’m fucking pregnant!”
If it was possible to get more still and more silent, we did. It was as if Georgia and I turned to stone right there in the doorway. Amy Lee sobbed some more and backed into her room, where she sat on the edge of the bed and held her face in her hands.
“Oh my God,” I said, hardly breathing. “Are you serious?”
“Like I would joke about the fact that I’m going to be someone’s parent,” Amy Lee snapped, obviously recovered. Sure enough, she sat up again and wiped her eyes. “Georgia still has issues with her mother and she’s about to turn thirty—”
“About to? Hello? In April, thanks, and let’s not rush it!” Georgia yelped. She let go of my arm when I glared at her. “Sorry, Gus.”
“And you know what?” Amy Lee asked, still somewhat emotional if her shaky voice was anything to go by. “I can’t believe neither one of you noticed! I told you Oscar and I were going to start trying!”
“You said it that one time,” I said, stung. “And then you never mentioned it again!”
“I haven’t touched alcohol in months!” Amy Lee cried. “Is there a bigger sign than that?”
“You told me you were taking on the designated-driver role to be fair to Oscar,” I reminded her. “I’m sorry that I took what you said at face value. And who cares, anyway?” I took a step into the room. “How far along are you?”
“And why didn’t you just tell us?” Georgia demanded
, finally roused from stone for a reason other than defending her age. “You’re a walking hormone bomb, for God’s sake. No wonder you wanted to kill us.”
We both inched into the room, and sank down on either side of her on the bed.
“Can I . . . ?” I asked in a whisper, and held out my hand. She wiped at her eyes again, and nodded, and I laid my palm across her belly, where there was a slight rounding. The sort of thing that would suggest a weekend with Toll House cookies on a figure like mine, but meant something else entirely on tiny little Amy Lee. I let out a breath, awed.
Georgia, wide-eyed, leaned in and placed her hand next to mine. Amy Lee took a ragged breath, and let it out into the sudden stillness of the room around us.
“I’m about three months along,” she said in a quiet voice. “You’re not supposed to say anything until then, because so many things can happen.”
“Nothing is happening to my godchild,” I declared, and I could feel my eyes begin to well up as I began to think of the ramifications of that. I had thought everything would change when Amy Lee got married, but Oscar had added to the life we were used to living together. I had no idea what a baby would do.
“Hi, baby,” Georgia whispered at Amy Lee’s belly, and then leaned over to place a soft kiss there.
We all laughed a little bit, and when Georgia sat up again she was glassy-eyed too.
“You’re going to set me off,” Amy Lee wailed.
“I’m already set off,” I replied, and sniffled.
“We don’t cry!” Amy Lee said. “I don’t cry!”
“I think we’re allowed to take a small break from being completely and totally kick-ass, here,” Georgia said, wiping at her nose. “It’s not every day we get to meet the next generation.”
We were all laughing and weeping, sometimes at once, when the door swung open, and Oscar appeared with bags on each arm.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said, looking alarmed. He dropped the bags where he stood. “What now?”
chapter twenty-two
Georgia and I had a little bit of time to whisper to each other as we got ready, but mostly we just made faces and shrugged as we tripped over ourselves and Linus to and from the bathroom. Amy Lee was pregnant. She and Oscar were going to be someone’s parents in just a few months. It was going to take a bit more time to process.
When we’d finally squeezed ourselves into our black-tie appropriate gowns (no royal blue taffeta, thank you), located our wraps, adjusted our control-top pantyhose (maybe that was just me—I swore by control top because it alone tamed the belly, even as I loathed it for that restricted, uncomfortable feeling), and lectured the dog on the importance of being quiet (again, that was probably just me), we assembled in the hallway. It was a very different group from the angry one we’d been before. For one thing, Oscar was there, looking very James Bond-ish in his tuxedo. Amy Lee smiled at me, I smiled back gratefully, and I felt more emotional about that than I thought I should as Amy Lee led the way downstairs.
There was something about wearing formal clothes that encouraged you to behave, I thought as we made our way down toward the lobby, where the other guests were beginning to converge. I was still concentrating on everything that had happened with Amy Lee—because while part of me felt giddy and a little bit weepy with relief that the worst was over, there was still a large part of me that simmered with unresolved anger. She had been horrible—unjustifiably so, I thought—but then, what was the point of talking about it? Hashing things out would only prolong the nastiness. It seemed that she wanted to use being pregnant as an all-purpose excuse for everything that had happened between the three of us, and though it went against the grain, I wanted to let her.
I remembered Minerva’s story about her fight with Dorcas then. It had seemed so foreign to me—the idea that you could move forward without a painful airing of grievances on both sides. But maybe Minerva had it right—maybe it wasn’t necessary to pick apart pain. Maybe some things just weren’t worth fighting about. Some friends weren’t friends anymore, but family—and there were different rules for family. It didn’t make sense to sit down with family and detail all the reasons they’d upset you—for many reasons, not least among them the fact that they could whip out a checklist of your transgressions themselves. And after you’d both picked apart the carcasses, why would you want to be friends again? Maybe the important thing was to recognize that everyone felt wronged and slighted—but the point worth concentrating on was that everyone loved each other. If we worked from that premise, we should be fine. Or anyway, I hoped we would.
“What’s that face about?” Georgia asked from beside me. She looked particularly regal with her hair in an updo. “You look entirely too pensive. Don’t tell me you’re already having the post-holiday blues. It’s not even midnight yet.”
“I’m not,” I said immediately.
“Every year right around your birthday you get depressed,” Georgia reminded me. “It’s like clockwork.”
“Okay, maybe I am, a little.” I shrugged. “Next weekend will be my first free weekend in a long time.”
“Next weekend I plan to lie on my couch and revel in the brand new year, enjoying the fact that you will be a decrepit thirty while I remain a young and vital twenty-nine,” Georgia said with a blinding smile. “I have it all planned.”
“Really? Because I plan to lie on my fabulous new couch and think about how, as the older and wiser one, I will choose to forgive you your transgressions even though you really don’t deserve it,” I said with the same smile. “You poor little lost soul.”
“Yikes,” Georgia muttered. “That’s horrifying.”
Forgiveness and acceptance, I thought as we found a spot near the largest tree in the lobby. Although I’d been kidding with Georgia, I was pretty sure those were the keys to relationships. Everything else was just ego and hurt feelings.
I had to remind myself of my commitment to adulthood—sternly—when I looked across the glittering lobby to see Nate, Helen, and Henry standing together near a selection of robust poinsettias. Nate and Helen were holding hands, exactly the way they had long ago at the party at Henry’s house. She was dressed to accentuate her fragility and big, sad eyes, and the only difference in my reaction was that this time I could see how skillfully she’d achieved her goal. It was still annoying.
Although—if I thought about it—not personally annoying. So. Progress.
Nate and Henry were both dressed in tuxedos, although all comparison ended there. I thought Nate looked like the surly sort of waiter you debated not tipping at all and then over-tipped because you were intimidated. Henry, meanwhile, looked divine. It was as if he’d been hiding his light underneath the bushel of regular clothes, and only now, in black tie, could his true glory shine forth upon the masses. And shine he did.
The thought that I might have ruined any chances of ever touching him again was a sudden, searing misery that threatened to drown me.
Oscar followed my gaze across the room and sighed.
“I had the most depressing conversation with Henry when I was checking in,” he said. “He claims his reputation as male slut was totally exaggerated. The guy was my hero, but he says it was all made up.”
“Mostly by me,” Georgia said happily, and raised her eyebrows at me. “If any girl strayed within a foot of him, I assumed they were sleeping together. I might have told every other living human being in Boston that they were, too. Mea culpa.” She didn’t sound in the least repentant.
“I think I might burst into tears,” Oscar said.
I had to take a moment to deal with the actual reality of Henry: force for good and no more of a floozy hound than anyone else. The inkling I’d had in the café with Georgia turned into more of a tidal wave.
“You’re not still staring at them?” Amy Lee demanded, shaking her head at me. She thought I was still tied in knots about Nate, I realized when I saw the look on her face. What a difference a few unpleasant weeks made.
“I am,” I
replied, meeting her eyes. Daring her. “But not for the reasons you think. I don’t really care what Nate and Helen do. I was more interested in ogling Henry.”
“But—” Amy Lee looked at Georgia.
Georgia waved a careless hand in the air. “Over it.”
Amy Lee opened her mouth, and then shut it again with a faint snapping sound.
“You should be free to ogle whoever you want,” Amy Lee said after a moment. Magnanimously. “It just might take me a few minutes to stop with the knee-jerk name-calling, that’s all.”
“I’m on record as always liking the guy,” Oscar reminded me. “Still do. Although he’s off the hero list.”
“I don’t see why we have to stop calling him names,” Georgia said with a sniff. “Just because Gus likes him now, forever breaking the heart of the nineteen-year-old girl I once was, that doesn’t change the fact that I think he’s bleeding-heart liberal scum.”
I didn’t have the chance to answer that as it deserved, because the doors to the banquet hall were opened and we all started to file inside for the cocktail portion of the evening. Henry moved away from Nate and Helen for a moment, and our eyes caught from across the lobby. I expected him to ignore me—and maybe it was time I learned to stop with the expectations, especially where Henry was concerned.
Because instead of ignoring me, his eyes grew a little bit more blue as he looked at me, and then he nodded his head. Just once.
It wasn’t exactly friendly, but it wasn’t a bitch slap, either.
It was as if the moment I’d stopped running after Nate, I’d finally realized I’d been running away from Henry the whole time. And I didn’t think I wanted to run any longer.
I wanted more than a nod.
“Wake up, space cadet!” Georgia ordered, grabbing me by the arm and steering me toward the nearest bar. “If you fall on your face because you’re daydreaming about my epic crush, I guarantee I won’t catch you.”