Okay

by Danielle Pearl

  Maybe this needed to happen. Maybe Sam needed a reason to be angry with me. He needs to move on. It's the only way we can truly go back to our friendship. Eventually he'll get over whatever it is he still feels, and I can only hope that when that happens he can forgive me like he did Chelsea.

  But then I feel my pulse race as I nearly succumb to a surge of insecurity. I don't have the lifetime of friendship and family connection that Chelsea does, and Sam could easily choose to forget me instead of forgive me. After all, high school will be over in a matter of weeks, and New York is an enormous city full of people who can offer friendships a hell of a lot more appealing than I ever could. People without panic attacks and overreactions, violent stalkers and manipulative fathers.

  I remind myself that Sam not forgiving me is not the worse case scenario. Because at least then he would be safe. And though I won't give up my hope for our friendship—I can't—I accept that it's Sam's choice to make, and I'll let him. Whatever he decides, I will find a way to live with it. I have to.

  Chapter Eight

  My mother arrives home just before nine, and we have a silent, somber dinner, both accepting the excuse of our mutual exhaustion, before we both head upstairs to our respective bedrooms. She seems drained, and I can't help but feel responsible for my role in her weariness.

  Once back in my room, I stare blankly at my calculus textbook for about twenty minutes. Sam and I missed our tutoring session today, obviously preoccupied with other activities, and I suspect that after how they ended he won't be tutoring me anymore. The truth is I'm pretty up to date with the material, and with the final next week, there would have been no real reason to continue my tutoring anyway. But I'm sad to lose the excuse to have one on one time with him. Though he's probably relieved, after today.

  I slam the book closed and rub my eyes. My room feels strange and unfamiliar—completely transformed by the events of the afternoon. Truthfully it never really felt like my room, more like some temporary lodging—an extended stop on my way to college. My childhood bedroom will always be my room, but this place, it was neutral territory. But now…

  Now, despite the fact that I've changed the sheets, all I see is Sam's naked, heated body curled behind mine. The echoes of his soft, whispered wicked words still fill the room, and I swear the scent of his aftershave still clings to my skin, even after my shower. But it's the memory of the tinge of hurt around his eyes, the resignation in his last murmured words, that haunt me, and it's a damn good thing he made me get that nap in, because I know tonight will yield no rest.

  I power my phone on, pitifully allowing myself hope that maybe Sam tried reaching out, but deep down I know, before I even skim through the four missed texts, that Sam is not looking to speak to me. That this time, he's really pissed, and I don't even blame him for it.

  I sigh and open Carl's texts.

  You okay? Tuck said you weren't feeling well and Cap drove you home?

  Then there are two question marks, each spaced out about an hour after the previous text. I knew I'd have to give her an explanation, so I'm more or less prepared for this particular line of questioning.

  I'm fine. Was just exhausted. Haven't been sleeping.

  She knows this already of course. My perpetual exhaustion isn't exactly a secret, after all, it's practically written on my face—in the circles under my eyes and my constant yawning—and Carl is one of the few people who knows a little bit about my issues and how nightmares play into them.

  Hope you got a nap in. Tuck was over earlier. Ran out of here a couple hours ago. Something about having to pick up Cap. Said he sounded pretty upset...

  Great.

  We're not in the best place right now.

  It's the best I can do. I sure as hell am not giving her details. And I don't know what Sam has said to Tuck, but if he's finally decided I'm actually to blame for things I've long known to be my fault, then I can't begrudge him that. Especially since I've already decided it's the best way for him to move forward and for us to have a chance at salvaging our friendship in the long run.

  Carl texts me a sad-face emoticon, because she knows me well enough to know that if she wants more information, she's certainly not going to text it out of me.

  A full minute passes before she texts again.

  You sure you're okay? Want me to come over with FroYo? Not the fat-free kind, the good sugar-loaded stuff you love...

  I smile faintly down at my phone. Because while Carl is certainly attempting what she knows is likely to be a far more effective way to get her some details about why Sam and I suddenly aren't in a good place, I know that she really does care. This isn't about gossip. It's simply about support.

  Thanks kiddo, but I gotta hit the books now that my calc tutor is pissed at me :(

  I close out the conversation and click on the only other unread text, surprised to find that it's Kendall. She says she'll be home from Chicago next week and asks if I want to get coffee.

  If Sam and I hadn't just complicated everything all over again, I would probably accept her invitation without hesitation. In all honesty, she’s been nothing but nice to me. But now, I want to give Sam his space, and I worry he might get annoyed if I hijack yet another one of his friends. I decide to see how things go tomorrow after I see him in school, and reply to Kendall then.

  I spend the rest of the evening sifting through my Cam box. I never made it past the album from photography class the first time I opened it, and have only gotten through one item at a time the few times I've felt strong enough to return to it.

  But it isn't strength that leads me to it today, it's loss. I need a distraction from how things went down with Sam, and this box—this box is magic. It has given me back random, small-but-significant pieces of the source of the greatest loss of my life, and I don't know any natural force on this earth that can achieve something like that. Like I said, magic.

  I slip it out from its new home under my bed and take a deep, settling breath.

  I hate that I feel as if I'm somehow being disloyal to Sam. It's not rational, and it's not my own doing either.

  I was surprised by his reaction to my calling him a friend—I hadn't expected him to derive more hope from our intimate afternoon than there actually was. I thought he knew nothing had actually changed. But I understand it after the fact. I realize now that I'd led him on, confused everything, and that I hurt him all over again when I crushed that hope by calling him a good friend. I suspect he never would have hooked up with me if he knew I wasn't changing my mind about us. After all, he never even would have been here if I hadn't nearly fallen asleep behind the wheel.

  But his reaction to Cam's tee shirt still has me perplexed. I understood his jealousy when he thought there might still be something between Cam and me, but it doesn't make any sense now. Sam and me—we're not together, and that aside, he knows Cam is dead.

  And he knows what Cam meant to me. What he'll always mean to me. Even when Sam and I were still going to make a go of it, the night I told him about Cam's death, he seemed to understand. So why the sight of Cam's varsity shirt seemed to further flame Sam's anger with me, I just don't get.

  I'll never understand you, Rory.

  Yeah, well, that makes two of us. But why I would have my dead best friend's old shirt—that seems pretty self explanatory to me. As far as I go, it seems pretty normal. To want to hold on to this last piece of him.

  I guess there are parts of Sam I'll never understand either.

  But there was some sense of finality to those words. Because he didn't say he doesn't understand me, but that he never will, and maybe that means he's finally accepting that I'm not worth trying to understand.

  I peek down at the items that remain in the box, running my fingers over the few visible pieces of Cam that make up the top layer. I don't want to rush through the items that are left, nor am I emotionally strong enough to withstand the overload of memories all at once.

  I wish wholeheartedly that Sam wasn't at odds with
Cam's memory. Because as much as I love Sam, as much as I'm sure I'll always love him, I won't choose one love over another. I won't forsake one to appease the other. I've been there, and it's my deepest regret, and now that Cam is gone, I can't take it back. But I can learn from my poor choices and I can be sure never to repeat them. Because if the fates take pity on me and Sam does forgive me, I still won't apologize for cherishing my memories of my best friend, even if it means losing Sam all over again.

  I take out an envelope with photos from our childhood. Not an album, just a few random, loose photos in a wrinkled white envelope. There's Cam, Chip, and me down by the lake, still in our dirty little league uniforms from that morning's game, fishing off of the old wooden dock. There are few more like that—us digging for worms, me giving Chip bunny ears while Cam tries to pants him for the camera, the three of us looking like drowned rats after Cam pushed me in the lake and then they jumped in to join me on what I now remember was a particularly scorching spring day.

  Then there are a few from the game that must have taken place that morning. Cam, Chip, Nick, Perry and me sitting in batting order on our team's bench. There's even one of me sliding home—an action shot with my long, unkempt braid flying straight out, the angle showing exactly how those brown stains on the knees of my white baseball pants got there. My father must have taken it. We're only about eleven in them, and in those days he never missed a game.

  Everything was different back then, when the three of us were still a family—before we became little more than three separate entities, all coming and going within the same house. Before my father took the Assistant District Attorney position, and then proceeded on to DA, and my mother threw herself into extra long hours at the Public Defender's office in what, in retrospect, seemed like an attempt to make up for my father's selling out to The Man. Before he cared more about networking and politics, and golfing with Mayor Forbes than either my mother or me. Before I hit puberty, and it became more and more difficult for him to deny that I was, in fact, a girl, after all. Before he began to openly resent me for it, whether he intended it to be obvious or not. Before I counted myself lucky if he spoke more than a single sentence to me in a given day, and later, a week.

  Life would've been so much easier if I could have just been born a boy. It's a thought I've had many times, even in my childhood, and even more often over this past year.

  I put the photos back, and pull out the item I know I'll find stuffed in the right hand corner of my Cam box. I saw it the second time I opened the box, but couldn't bring myself to take it out.

  The Vermont Teddy Bear I bought Cam for his sixteenth birthday.

  We rarely got each other serious gifts, or anything of any real value. It was either something silly or sentimental, and this gift was no different.

  Cam started dating Missy Potter the year before, though she took him a lot more seriously than he did her. She bought him a football-themed teddy bear for Christmas, complete with a varsity jacket with Cam's jersey number. He broke things off with her the next day. Well actually, that's not true. He continued to hook up with her at his leisure for years, but not until after he'd made it clear they were not a couple, and if she was looking for a boyfriend she should look somewhere else.

  I remember feeling bad for her, but mostly I felt guilty over the fact that Cam and I made endless fun of her over that stupid gift. Cam may have played football, and been great at it, but that's only because he was great at everything he did. That wasn't who he was, and if someone was going to give him a themed teddy bear, getting one with a stuffed pigskin sewed to its paw just shows how little they really knew him.

  So for his sixteenth birthday I decided to rectify it. I brush my fingers over the soft synthetic fur, over the faux leather jacket. I smile down at the cheap plastic of the lens-less glasses, the pencil, and the material of the open book. I trace the embroidery. Writer Cam & Rory girl, BFF.

  I laugh at the ridiculousness of it. Only I would think to get an embroidered, themed teddy bear as a gift for a sixteen-year-old guy. But Cam laughed for hours over that thing, and he gave it pride of place on his bed for weeks, and then made it's permanent home, appropriately, on his writing desk.

  I blink back the tears that threaten to spoil the happy memories and run my fingers over the letters again. Even the acronym BFF holds significance in a memory. It was our fifth grade Valentine's Day. All of the girls—except for me—brought in those little cards to give out to the entire class, but they wrote "BFF" on the ones for their group of girl friends. It was one of the first times I actually felt a little left out. Boys didn't do things like that. They didn't write each other little notes or call each other "BFFs". I got cards, of course, the whole class did, only mine were generic, with whatever pre-written message existed when the cards were purchased. No personalized note, no BFF.

  I pretended not to care, but Cam noticed I was down. I never could hide anything from him. Sam is so like him in that way. In so many ways, really. But Cam, he had a lifetime of experience in reading my moods, and that day was no different.

  "What's buggin' you, Rory girl?"

  I shook my head. There was no point in trying to convince him everything was fine, I'd just bite my lip and give myself up anyway, but I felt stupid for caring about something so silly. I had friends. Real friends. So why I was suddenly jealous of a bunch of girls I had nothing in common with, I didn't even understand myself.

  Cam eyed me with suspicion throughout class until he could corner me at recess, at which time he used tickle-torture—a tactic he'd been known to use on me on the rare occasions I withheld information from my primary confidante—and got the admission he'd been after.

  I'd expected him to make fun of me. Instead he was completely confused.

  "What are you talking about, Ror? What the hell am I? Chopped freakin' liver?"

  I smiled. He always made me smile. "You're not my BFF. You're my Cam."

  That only confused him more, but it made perfect sense to me. I knew that BFF stood for best friends forever, but that wasn't really what it meant. These girls were not best friends the way Cam and I were. They fought, talked badly about one another behind each other's backs, competed, and changed who their closest friend was with the season. Why I wanted that for myself that day, I can't say. Maybe I just wanted to be a normal girl for once. Maybe I just wanted a stupid note on my damned card.

  "Of course you have BFF's, Rory girl. We're just not douchey enough to call each other that. We're literate enough not to have to speak in acronyms. We don't say OMG or LOL either," Cam reminded me, and of course, he was right. It wasn’t about the label, it was about the substance. Cam was always right.

  Even Chip was always a better friend to me than Lacey and her girls ever were to one another, right down until I left town.

  I can't help but wonder what he's up to now. Where he's going to school next year. I feel a fresh surge of guilt for boxing him out of my life along with everyone else. He lost Cam too. But he's also part of the town that hates me. And though he supported me through everything with Robin, he's also still friends with my tormentors, and I don't know if I'm more fearful that he would choose them over me, or that he would alienate himself from everyone he knows just to have my back. I suspect it may very well be the latter, and tell myself it's better this way. I know how it feels to have everyone hate you, and I would never want that for Chip.

  I smile at the stupid teddy bear. It seems so silly now, but I'm grateful I have it. I push my Cam box back under my bed and curl up with my Cam bear. I reach over to my nightstand for the varsity tee shirt that affected Sam so strangely and pull it over the bear's head. It's way too big, of course, so I tie the hem in the back, cuddle the thing to my chest, and go to bed. Not to sleep, mind you, though eventually, many hours later, sleep does pull me under, and I awaken in the early morning in tears, with no recollection of the night's dream.

  ****

  I know as soon as I walk into homeroom the next morning
that everything has changed. It's in the atmosphere, and I'm not the only one feeling it. The air grows ever warmer, more humid, as May slowly fades, and with it, the sense of normalcy and routine that has guided each of us since we started kindergarten. Every day we slip closer to more lasts, and the entire school is charged with a potent mix of excitement and anxiety.

  Everyone is looking forward to their future. Everyone is terrified of their future. Including me. And it's not lost on me that the first sense of normalcy I've felt in a long time is credited to the growing anxiety of my peers.

  But this morning brings other changes, subtle to those around me, but glaringly bright to me.

  Sam does not wait in the hallway for me to arrive. In fact, he's not even in the classroom when I walk in. I make my way to my seat in the back and Carl whooshes in just as I sit. I fake a weak smile, and she returns it in sympathy.

  Sam stalks in just before the bell rings, and doesn't so much as glance in my direction. It's enough to tell me everything I need to know.

  When lunch rolls around, I rush around the outside of the building and am not surprised to find Carl and Tina alone by Carl's car. Carl repeats her sympathetic half-smile and confirms that the boys went for pizza today.

  It isn't out of the ordinary; we usually only have lunch together at the diner a few times a week. Other days the boys go for pizza, or we go for frozen yogurt or something equally girly. If yesterday didn't happen, I wouldn't give it a second thought. But I know Sam's avoiding me, and I can't blame him for it either.

  I don't see him again for the rest of the day, not even in the main hall where we usually pass each other after seventh period, and when I watch the taillights of his Escalade as he pulls out of the lot at the end of the day, I feel a strange wave of grief and acceptance. Because I don't know if Sam is acting this way to punish me or simply out of self-preservation, but I realize it's not something that will be resolved anytime soon. There's no quick fix for our issues, only time and understanding, and I've no choice but to give him both.