by Sorenna Wise
He was already there when Audrey arrived, and after she threw herself into my arms, she pulled me aside and whispered, “He is seriously so freaking handsome. I cannot believe you met him speed dating.”
“I know, right?” Over my shoulder, Christine laughed at something he’d said. “It was a miracle.”
“Good thing you have friends who make you do stuff like that,” she said, winking. “Really pretty, intelligent friends who love you to pieces.”
“Shut up,” I said. “You know you’re the best already. Why do I have to tell you?”
When dinner was over, we lingered in the sitting room for a little while, catching up. But I knew Audrey and Christine were both itching to know what I’d waited so long to tell them. They kept casting me pointed glances. Finally, goodbyes were said and we slipped out the door. I had warned Jake ahead of time that we were going to have a girls’ night; dutifully, he kissed me, waved to them, and headed toward his car. The moment he was out of earshot, they pounced on me.
“Are you going to make us wait until we get to your apartment?” Audrey said. “Because I’m going to be super real with you here—I don’t know if I can do that.”
I laughed and led them down the driveway. “I’ll give you a hint: it’s about when Jake and Alyson dated.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how crazy is it?”
I turned around to face them. “Twenty-five. I’m not even joking.”
I didn’t tell the tale as eloquently or with nearly as much power as Jake had. In his words, his relationship with Alyson was as powerful and sad as it was insane. In mine, it was very much a current girlfriend telling her friends about the antics of the ex. For their parts, Audrey and Christine did everything right; they made the appropriate scathing remarks, were outraged in all the right places. If I could have filmed my sister’s expressions, I would have, because they were golden. One of the perks of having a performer sibling? Reaction faces.
So it was all very theatrical, but still, in the end, there wasn’t much to say. Audrey and Christine sat silently for a long time when I was finished, just thinking about the stuff I had told them. Christine spoke first. “That’s really sad, Ari.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s like, I thought she was this awful person, and it turns out she’s actually really troubled.”
“But that doesn’t mean she’s right, though,” Audrey said. “You can’t just do those things and expect to get a pass because you have issues. She had medication, but she chose not to take it. That’s…what do you call it. Culpability? She’s responsible for that.”
“That’s true too,” Christine agreed. “There’s no one there who’s going to make sure she’s taking care of herself. She’s okay enough that she doesn’t need supervision, so she can’t pretend it’s somehow not her fault. “
“Then again,” Audrey added, “it’s Jake’s fault that he stayed for so long. Like, that’s crazy too. She was obviously not in a stable state, and she wasn’t getting better. He had to know she was going to go off her medicine again.”
“I told him that,” I said. “He didn’t argue.”
“Apparently he never argues,” Audrey replied. “You have to be careful that he doesn’t do the same thing to you as he did to her, letting things go instead of dealing with him like he should. I mean, yeah, you’re not going to act like she did, but still. Being too passive isn’t a good thing.”
“Do you guys fight?” Christine said. “That is, have you fought?”
I shook my head, and they gazed at me in wonder. “Never?” Audrey looked skeptical.
“Not really. We get along pretty well.” I glanced at them. “I’m serious. Maybe we disagree about stuff because we have different tastes, but it’s never gone beyond that.” I shrugged. “He doesn’t like chick flicks and he refuses to watch them with me.”
My sister and my best friend exchanged a look. “That’s honestly the extent of your disputes? My God,” Audrey remarked. “In sixty years, you’re going to be that adorable ancient couple making all the teenagers whine about how they’ll never find true love.”
“Maybe they’ll start matching,.” Christine said. She turned to me. “Please don’t. I can only take so much.”
“Need I remind you that we haven’t even had our one year anniversary?” I asked pointedly. I couldn’t deny that my faith in Jake and I was strong, though. It was the first time I’d ever felt even remotely comfortable thinking about a man in the long term. Settling down was a frightening prospect to me, but maybe with Jake, it wouldn’t be so bad.
“Oh, please. Like you’re not going to make it another month. He looks at you like he’s going to propose someday.” Audrey put her hand on my arm. “Ari, Blaise hurt you. He was a huge prick. But he doesn’t speak for the rest of the male human race.” She frowned. “Even if he did apologize.” I had tacked the story of the double date on to the Jake-Alyson saga, but Blaise’s confession seemed paltry in comparison to the whirlwind of drama that followed.
“Ew, can we talk about that?” Christine leaned back on her hands. “Every aspect of your life is crazy. Ari. Although I’m really not surprised.”
“I was surprised,” I said.
“Baby, I love you, but you’re always surprised. Not that you shouldn’t be about Jake, but Blaise? Why wouldn’t he still be in love with you? You gave him no reason to dump you. He just did it, and then he regretted it forever.”
“As he should have,” said Audrey.
“You guys are gonna be mad at me for saying this, but I think he’s different now. I might be inclined to be nicer because I’m over him, I don’t know. It seems like he really matured…somehow.”
“Probably because he realized he lost the best thing that ever happened to him.” Audrey shuddered. “I’m so glad you’re not with him anymore.”
“You know,” I reminded her, “you introduced me to him, too.”
“I did not!” She glared at me. “All I did was force you to go to that party with me. It’s not like I shoved you two into that corner together.” She paused. “I will, however, claim responsibility for Jake.”
“Of course.” Talking about Blaise made me think of him, and of whether or not he and Alyson still talked. “I wonder if they’re still together,” I mused out loud.
“She’s not going to like, come and find you now that Jake’s rejected her again, is she?” Audrey eyed me closely. “Not that it would be a problem. We could take her. Three on one.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I haven’t seen or heard from either of them since then. I bet she ran back home.” We all looked at each other. I shrugged. “So…I guess that’s it, then.”
Christine threw up her hands. “You’re free! Now you can focus on being with your actual boyfriend for once.”
“God, seriously,” Audrey said. She gave me an encouraging smile. “I know it’s been tough. You both brought some crazy stuff to the table, but you deserve to be happy more than anyone else. Jake is amazing; there is literally nothing about him not to like. Promise you won’t worry too much, okay?”
I had to laugh at how easily they read into my emotions. “I promise,” I said. They pulled me into a triple hug.
“This is going to be a new life for you,” Christine told me. “No more sadness, no more being lonely, no more eating ice cream by yourself on the couch while you watch soap opera reruns.”
“Listen,” I objected, “that only happened two or three times.”
She ignored me. “Even if you’re not thinking about getting married or moving in with him, it’s something to look forward to, eventually, right? And hey, if he’s an artist, maybe he can get you back into theater and you can stop waitressing.” A devilish gleam showed up in her eyes. “Or I can get him a job painting sets at the opera house and you two can come live in New York City.”
“Excuse you,” Audrey sniffed. “What if he’s rather paint portraits of fashion models? Then they can come be with me.”
Christine
raised an eyebrow. “Does that happen? They get portraits done of models?”
“Oh, I have no idea,” said Audrey. “But it could! You never know.”
My sister shoved her playfully. “Oh, you are so full of crap. She’s my sister. I get first dibs on invading her life.”
“Don’t you even pull that on me. You were doing it like three whole years before I was. I have a deficit to make up.”
I watched them arguing, perplexed and speechless, but also full of happiness. It felt like my whole life had come full circle. Here I was, spending the night with two of my favorite people in the world instead of all alone, talking about my wonderful boyfriend instead of my idiotic ex. For months before I’d broken up with Blaise, I had wondered what normal was, and whether or not I was living it. I wondered if my life was ever going to seem real, and not like an interminable loop of stasis. Now, I was beginning to know at last that Audrey was right—I deserved to be happy, to live like a whole person.
I’d like to say that was the end of things, that Jake and I lived happily ever after in our sleepy little seaside town in Southern California. While it’s true, thankfully, that our problems were largely over, it’s easy to forget that we weren’t the only ones involved. I mean, half the reason any of this even happened was because of Blaise, right? So how could he just drop out of the narrative at the end?
Well, as I’m about to tell you, he didn’t. Not quite.
CHAPTER 10
A month or two after Christine’s visit, right around the start of the New Year, I quit my job at the Pearl and took a job as a stagehand at the local theater. It wasn’t exactly the same thing I’d gone to school for, but I figured at least this way I was inside the correct building. Besides, I wasn’t really ready to be onstage again; it’s daunting if you’ve taken some time off.
I was on my break one afternoon when I got a call from a familiar number—Blaise’s. Like I said, I hadn’t heard from him since that infamous double date, so I was kind of surprised that he’d be calling me. Honestly, my first thought was that something had gone down between him and Alyson, and he needed someone to talk to. As it turns out, I was partially right, but I didn’t know the whole story. And I certainly didn’t know what he was going to say.
“Hey, what’s up?” I sat on the stone steps outside the theater entrance, twirling a lock of my hair. “How are you?”
“Uh, I’m good.” He sounded uneasy.
I furrowed my brow. “Are you okay? What’s the matter?” There was a beat, during which I could hear him take a deep breath.
“I need to ask you to do me a huge favor,” he said. “You’re not going to like it.”
“Oh, God, who did you kill?” It was mean, but the thing about Blaise is that he’s extremely easy to mess with. I just couldn’t help myself.
“What?” he said. Then, “Christ Ari, I didn’t kill anyone.”
“That’s good,” I answered. “I’m not much good at toting bodies.”
“Ha ha,” he said. His voice grew somber. “Seriously. It’s about Alyson.”
Though unsurprising, it was still strange to hear her name again after such a relatively long period of peace. “What about her?” I asked cautiously.
“Well…” He paused, obviously trying to choose his words carefully. “You probably know this already, but after Jake rejected her when we had that date, she was a total mess. She cried all the way back to her apartment, and then she wouldn’t let me walk her to the door. I didn’t hear from her for like, two weeks.”
“Damn,” I said. “Do you think she’s all right?”
“She finally called me saying she was going back home to be with her mother, and that she was sorry for everything she put me through. There was some mention of a hospital or treatment program, I’m not sure which.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Really.”
“Yeah, I was kind of surprised too. I mean, I don’t know very much about her…illnesses, but she always seemed to have everything more or less under control. Before that last night, that is.”
“Jake told me she…wasn’t always so calm and collected.”
He sighed. “That makes sense. “ I could tell the sorrow in his voice was genuine, and it made me wonder if he hadn’t developed some feelings for Alyson after all.
“So what do you need from me?” I asked.
“I wanted to know if you’d go and talk to her one more time.”
At first, I thought I’d heard him incorrectly, because in my mind, there was no way he’d ask me to do something like that. “What?”
“I said you were going to hate it,” he told me. “I’m not joking, though. I’m worried about her, but I don’t think I know her well enough to just show up at her parents’ house like, ‘Hey, your daughter and I fake-dated for a while so she could stalk Jake more effectively.’”
“And what am I supposed to say when I get there? ‘Hey, your daughter and I were mortal enemies for a while because I’m Jake’s new girlfriend?’” I thought for a second. “Also, why do you think you need to check up on her? You just said, all you did was pretend to date. That doesn’t obligate you to take care of her.”
“No, it doesn’t, but…listen Ari, she’s messed up. And it’s fine if you don’t like her, or if she doesn’t like you, but I think she’s suffering a lot, and I want to at least try to help her. She might’ve put me off when she was trying to get with Jake, but she did that because she was lonely and she didn’t have anyone else she felt like she could go to. I spent a lot of time with her while that was going on. You can’t tell me I’m not going to feel responsible for however she ends up.”
His turn of phrase caught my attention. “’However she ends up?’ Is she suicidal?” If she was, that changed everything. I knew I would do whatever I had to in order to keep something like that off of Jake’s conscience. And I knew, too, that there was no way Jake could go to her instead of me; if anything, that would only make her worse.
“I don’t know,” Blaise said. “Probably not, if she’s taking her medicine. If she isn’t, well…” He trailed off. The sentence didn’t need to be finished.
“Ugh,” I said. “I…you know what? Okay. I’ll go. If you think it’s that dire, I’ll go and talk to her. I can’t promise anything, though. She might not even agree to see me.”
“Thanks, Ari.” He sounded immensely relieved. “She left me her mom’s number. Do you want it?”
“Why don’t you just call her?” I asked.
This was apparently a question he had struggled with himself. “It’s stupid, I know. I should. I just…we never really had any kind of a relationship, you know? Not even as friends. I got the feeling that she made that call to me for courtesy purposes only. Just because it would have been rude to leave me hanging. At least with you…you were someone to her.”
“Not anyone good,” I grumbled. But I got what he was driving at. Maybe, through the force of her jealousy, there was actually more of a connection between her and I than there was between her and Blaise. Maybe she’d be more likely to open up to me, if only out of anger. The chance was there, however slim it might have been. I pulled the pad of paper I used to keep track of props out of my pocket and uncapped the pen in the binding. “Okay, what is it?”
He gave me the number, thanked me again, asked me to let him know how she was doing, and then he was gone. I sat out there staring at those numbers until my coworker popped his head out the door to tell me they needed me back inside. For the rst of my shift, any time I needed to write anything down, Mrs. Bridges’ phone number stared me in the face. I had made Blaise a promise, but the more I thought about it, the more questionable it seemed.
I was still mulling it over when I got home. It didn’t surprise me to find Jake there; as our relationship went on, it was like our separate apartments had evolved into two shared homes, either of which we could be at on any given day. We still hadn’t seriously discussed the prospect of living together, but it was only a matter of time. He looked up
from the sofa and smiled.
“Hey, gorgeous, how was work?” I went over and kissed him on the forehead.
“Would you believe that Blaise called me on my break?”
“Huh,” he said. “What did he want?” I pursed my lips, and he raised his eyebrows, much as I had earlier. “Uh oh.” I sat down and related the gist of our conversation. When I finished, he ran his fingers through his hair.
“I hate to say it, but he might be right.” I stared at him, confused. “Think about it. Alyson doesn’t really have friends, as far as I know. She hasn’t had a social circle since before we started dating. Everyone was alienated by her behavior after she went off her meds. I find it hard to believe she wasn’t still alone if she had to recruit a complete stranger to help her.” I hadn’t thought about that. Jake continued. “As bizarre as it sounds, she was fixated on you for so long, without actually confronting you, that you might be the closest thing to a friend she’s had in years.”
“Will it be weird for you if I go there?” I asked.
“Not unless it’s weird for you. She’s not a part of my life anymore, baby. I spent all the time I could caring about her. It’s time for me to care about other things.”
I looked down at my hands. “I guess you’re right. It’s just…I don’t even know if I can help her. What if she doesn’t want to see me? What if all she does is try to fight?”
“Then that’s a good enough indicator of how she is,” Jake said. “You can’t help everyone, Aria, no matter how much you want to. If she’s like that, then what you should do is leave and never look back. And if something unfortunate happens after you go, you just have to understand that you did as much as you could.”
“I thought you’d feel worse about that part,” I admitted, looking up at him.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “It’s awful, what happened to her. I do feel bad about it, and about the fact that nothing I did ever made any difference. But I finally learned that most of what befell Alyson, she did to herself. She’s like a machine whose only function is to self-destruct. How am I supposed to remedy that without reworking the entire thing?” He shrugged. “So I had to hope there was someone out there with the patience to pick her up and finish what I started. I still hope that. In a perfect world, someday she’ll be happy.”