by Laura Hankin
Then Beth’s own phone began to ring.
“Weird. Your mom’s calling me now. What if it’s an emergency? I should probably pick up.”
“Just ignore it. Ignore it—” Ally started to say, but Beth had already picked up the phone.
“Hi, Marsha!” she said. She hadn’t spoken to Ally’s mom in years. But Marsha’s voice was the same as it had always been.
“Beth! Radiant, intelligent young woman, I simply cannot believe it has been so long! How are you?”
“I’m fine—”
“Is my daughter there with you?”
“Yes, she is. I’m sitting right across the table from her.” Ally was making frantic, hand-me-the-phone gestures, but Marsha was talking a mile a minute. Beth held up one finger and mouthed, One second. She smiled at Ally. Then she actually tuned in to what Marsha was saying.
“I’m so terribly sorry to be stealing her away from you, but my fiancé and I just arrived in New York and we’re wondering what time we can expect to see her tomorrow. I know her flight gets in around eleven. Oh! And aren’t you going to congratulate me on my engagement?”
SEVENTEEN
Across the table, Ally watched Beth’s face change. She had just been thinking that Drunk Beth had an agreeable looseness to her. But now something hard stole in and replaced the glow. Ally gave up on trying to steal the phone away before Marsha could ruin everything, realizing that she already had.
“Congratulations,” Beth said into the phone, her voice suddenly sounding very hollow. “Tomorrow?” She paused, then said, “Here she is,” and handed the phone to Ally.
“Mom, I’m going to call you right back,” Ally said, and hung up, not bothering to listen to her mother’s protestations. She had been floating pleasantly in a sea of alcohol, and now she tried to tread water as the tide changed. Without her mother’s voice on the phone, silence permeated the kitchen.
“So when were you planning on telling me that you were leaving tomorrow? As you were walking out the door?” Beth asked. Her voice was quiet, and her eyes were downcast, staring down at the table.
“Beth, Beth, no,” Ally said.
“No what? No, you weren’t planning on telling me at all? You were just going to disappear?”
“I probably wasn’t going to go.”
“Probably?” Beth looked up, her eyes boring straight into Ally’s, and the anger Ally saw there startled her. “Right. Of course. You had a plane ticket, but you were probably just going to let it go to waste.”
“I didn’t buy it! They just bought it for me, without asking me.”
“Oh yeah, they. Some fiancé you didn’t bother to tell me about.” Suddenly, Beth gasped. “Oh. Oh! And when you said Tom was coming back to New York soon, and that you were going to see him . . . That’s why you’re going back too, isn’t it?”
Ally had no good explanation, no way to deny it.
“Well . . .” she said instead, “well, I don’t see how you can be that mad at me for leaving when you’re the one who is going away forever. You’re choosing to leave me permanently. Sure, I was going to leave a couple days early, but you’re the one who’s really jumping ship on this friendship.”
“Oh, I’m jumping ship on the friendship? You want to talk abandonment? You abandoned me first!”
Ally had no idea what Beth was saying. “What are you talking about? I’m not going a million miles away. I didn’t ignore all your e-mails.”
“First of all, Haiti is less than two thousand miles away from New York, not a million.”
“Oh my God.”
“But you’re the one who made it very clear that I wasn’t your person anymore.”
“My person?” Ally said.
“The person who’s most important to you. The person you’ll be there for, no matter what. The person you love most. Don’t worry, I got the message. You did a great job of letting me know that Tom had kicked me out of that spot.”
“You mean when I didn’t come to Britton Hills that summer? Beth, I asked you if that was okay, and you said yes.”
“Yeah, because it was obvious what you really wanted to do, and I didn’t want to force you into hanging out with me when you’d rather be elsewhere. ‘Oh, Beth, you know how much I love you and Britton Hills, but this is the only time that works for both me and Tom. I totally won’t go if you don’t want me to, though.’ What is that? How is anyone supposed to say no to that?”
Ally bristled. “You aren’t supposed to say no to that. You’re supposed to realize that a best friend doesn’t necessarily stay your person forever. She stays a person, an important person, but she also gets boyfriends and spends time with them. It’s not that big a deal, it happens. It could just as easily have been you. It’s not my fault that you didn’t have a serious boyfriend and I did.”
“I know that.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me you were angry, instead of going off to Haiti?”
“I didn’t go off to Haiti because of you.”
“So why the fuck did you go? And why didn’t you answer any of my e-mails? I needed you. I was such a sad mess. I literally begged you to write me back, and heard nothing from you until suddenly you asked me to come up here with you. I thought maybe you were dead, until I realized that if you had died, at least I would have heard about it. And you know what? I’m mad at you. I’m really mad at you about that.” Hah! Ally thought. So there, Beth. You are the one who’s at fault here. She had staked the moral high ground. Game, set, and match.
“I stopped answering your e-mails because I couldn’t help a little boy, a sick little boy, and he died, and you hung up on me when I called you about it so you could be with Tom.”
The floor disappeared from underneath Ally. “What?”
“Yeah. That’s right. You hung up on me, and I had to deal with the fact that I just ran away from trying to help that boy all by myself. And then you never even apologized! You never even asked me about it, you just had to keep talking about Tom and oh no, how life was so terrible for you.”
All of a sudden, Ally remembered: picking up the phone because it had kept ringing, and wanting, needing to hang up once she’d realized it was only Beth on the other end.
“Hey,” Ally said, trying to reach for Beth’s hand across the table. But Beth got up and went to the window. “Hey, I had no idea.”
“But I told you!” Beth said. “I said it on the phone!”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did.” She turned her back to Ally, putting up her wall again.
“Then I didn’t hear you. I was really distracted. I’m sorry.” Beth was silent, so Ally went up to her and put her hand on her back. She could feel Beth flinching under her touch. Her back had hardened into steel beneath Ally’s hand. “Tell me what happened, please.”
“I don’t want to talk about it with you now.”
“Is that why you feel like you have to go back? I’m so sorry, if I had known—”
Beth whipped around. “But you didn’t know, because you didn’t listen and you didn’t ask, and that’s because you’re selfish. You’re selfish, Ally.”
Ally recoiled. “I don’t think that’s fair. It wasn’t like Tom and I were just hanging out when you called; we were about to break up, and then that kind of took precedence in my mind over everything else for a while.” Tears started to prick at her eyes, and she silently pleaded with them to go away. She hated being the one who had to cry, while Beth got to stand there, composed and unmoving. “And I’m not really that selfish, am I? I mean, I’m here helping Grandma Stella.”
“Right, and going off and flirting with a married man for hours.”
“What? You mean Nick?”
“Yes, I mean Nick. Ugh, the sexual tension between the two of you is so thick I almost choked on it.”
“That’s not true.”
“He looked like he wanted to rip your clothes off the entire time we were there, and you were doing everything you could to encourage him.”
A little part of her kindled with the pleasure of being wanted, even as she launched into her protest. “Like what? What was I doing?”
“Everything! Shaking your butt when you walked, touching him, smiling up at him like he was Superman.”
“I was not.” She took a big gulp of her whiskey, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “You’re jealous. You were jealous about Tom. And now that you won’t let yourself just do what you want to do with Owen, you’re so sexually repressed that you’re pushing all your frustration onto me.”
Beth laughed, a mean laugh. “Go ahead and tell yourself that if it makes you feel better. Just like it makes you feel better to tell me that the reason you’re going back to New York is because your mom bought you a ticket, when really it’s that you want to go throw yourself at Tom as soon as possible even though he doesn’t want to be with you. The plane ticket excuse is just bull.”
And that was when Ally snapped. She banged her glass down on the table so hard that Beth jumped. “Say bullshit, Beth. Can you just fucking say the word bullshit? Refusing to swear like you’re some holy angel actually just makes you sound like a little girl.”
“Fine. Fine. You want me to swear?” Beth paused, then said quietly, “You’re a fucking bitch.”
“Maybe I am a fucking bitch. Boo-hoo. How sad. I wish I could be as good and pure and kind as you. Perfect you, Saint Beth, the savior of the world. Give me a break. You’re such a sanctimonious asshole. Telling me that I’m a bad person doesn’t make you a better person. I’m sorry not all of us want to give up everything that makes us happy. I’m sorry some of us want to be normal. You cut me out of your life for a mistake I didn’t even know I’d made. That’s not exactly perfect-person behavior. You’re overpunishing me, just like you’re overpunishing yourself right now with this ridiculous idea that you have to go live in Haiti forever. That’s not going to change whatever happened with that little boy. You’re just wallowing in your guilt, and some weird twisted part of you likes it.”
Beth’s pale face whitened more than Ally had thought possible. Maybe it wasn’t too late to turn things around, but Ally couldn’t stop. “If I met you now,” she insisted, “I’d never become friends with you.”
“I feel the same way,” Beth whispered.
“Fine. Then why don’t we stop pretending?”
“Fine. Go back to New York and go hook up with Tom. That’s probably what you’ve been wanting the whole time you’ve been up here anyway.”
“I will. And you can go save the world and neglect all the people who actually care about you.”
“I’m getting out of here.” Beth downed the rest of her scotch and walked toward the front door. “I’m going for a walk.”
“I’m going to be gone when you get back,” Ally said.
They stared at each other for a second. Ally knew she was memorizing Beth for the future, and she wished it were some other version of Beth she was looking at, not this hateful, blotched, drunk girl.
As Beth walked out the door, Ally ran to the bedroom and threw her clothes into her suitcase, then grabbed her toiletries from the bathroom. She crammed everything into her bag, not bothering to fold her sundresses or separate her shoes or even to fully zip the suitcase’s multiple pockets. Then she said good-bye to the house, furtively, quietly. She went through each room, except for Grandma Stella’s bedroom, and tried to take mental snapshots. Everything felt discolored, overexposed. But it didn’t matter. She knew these images wouldn’t last her long. She was no good at paying attention to details.
It wasn’t the house that really mattered, anyway, but the fact that Grandma Stella had made a place for her in it. But the prospect of waking her up and explaining everything felt insurmountably difficult. Ally sat on the edge of the bed she and Beth had shared and tore a page out of her notebook.
Dear Grandma Stella,
I’m so sorry I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye, but I had to go back to New York unexpectedly. I love you so much. Thank you for everything. You are the best surrogate grandmother I could ever ask for. I know your party is going to be the highlight of the year for everyone in town. Good luck with the move. Please let’s talk soon?
Love,
Ally
She walked quietly to Grandma Stella’s bedroom door and slid the note beneath it. Then she pulled out her phone. It had gotten late, but the person she was calling picked up anyway.
“I have to go back to New York now. Can you take me to the airport?” she asked.
“I’ll be right there,” Nick said.
EIGHTEEN
Beth crunched down the road on foot, barreling through the dark, heading away from Ally more than toward anything else. She couldn’t quite believe what had just happened—the venomous things she’d said, and what Ally had said back to her. Some thoughts were meant to hide away in a part of your mind, acknowledged by you but no one else. Some thoughts just shouldn’t be spoken aloud, because once they were, they changed everything.
And then, as that last shot of whiskey she’d downed kicked in, she decided on her destination. Her body knew it more than her mind did.
• • •
SHE stood outside the house where Owen lived and tried to figure out if it was too late to ring the doorbell. She didn’t have his cell phone number: ridiculous, she knew, when she spent so much time thinking about him. A light was on in one of the front rooms, so she decided to chance waking his parents up and knocked on the door quietly. The harder she stared at the crisp, painted wood of the door, the more it wobbled.
After a minute, Owen appeared at the door. He was wearing glasses, and she liked what they did to him, how they made him a little nerdier, a little more vulnerable. His face when he saw her took on a beautiful mixture of befuddlement and happiness.
“Beth? What are you doing here?”
“Heeeeyyy,” she said, the word slurring itself out longer than she’d intended. “I have a proposition for you.” She wasn’t sure if that was right. “No, I want to proposition you. No, the first one. I have a proposition for you.”
He closed the door behind him and stepped out onto the porch. She liked the way he closed the door too, decisively but gently. She liked pretty much everything about him. She threw herself at him, into a kiss. She wanted him to blot out everything that had just happened with Ally. He was warm and that was nice, but this kiss had nothing on their previous ones. It felt fuzzy, like static on a television screen. He kissed her back for few seconds, then removed her hand from his butt.
“Whoa there. Hello.” He shook his head a little bit and breathed out. “So, uh, what’s your proposition?”
“Oh. Right. I propose that you have sex with me now. So I guess it’s both actually, noun and verb.”
“Um, right now?”
She sat down on the wooden slats of the porch and started to take her shoes off. Removing them was a necessary first step. She would take off her shoes, and then they would have sex, and then the rest of this night wouldn’t matter anymore. “Yes. Nobody else is around.”
“Beth, no.”
“Come on,” she said, and grabbed his hand, pulling him down onto the floor with her. “I want you to have sex with me.” Half of her brain screamed THIS IS MOMENTOUS AND RIGHT and the other half yelled WHOOOA WHAT IS HAPPENING? She kissed his neck, and he let out a little moan, leaning into her. Then he pulled away.
“You’re really drunk right now. I think this is a bad idea.”
“Schmad idea.” She started to unbutton her shorts. She saw him look at her, then very deliberately look away.
“Come back tomorrow, sober, and I will be very, very happy to have sex with you, but this, right now? No.”
“Fine, then.” He was ruin
ing everything. She didn’t want him tomorrow. Or rather, she did, but she wouldn’t be able to have him without the excuse of drunkenness. She stood up and held on to the wall for balance as she crammed her foot back into her sneaker. “You’ve lost your chance, then. One-time offer.” She nearly fell down the steps as she walked away, and Owen ran after her.
“Hey. Beth. Stop. Let me give you a ride back to your grandma’s.”
“No, thank you.”
“Come on. I want to make sure you get home safe.”
“I’ll be safe. I’m an excellent walker. I don’t need your help.” She didn’t need anyone’s help, not his, not Ally’s. People needed her help. This role reversal did not fit her comfortably. She kept walking. He grabbed her hand and pulled her back.
“Let go of me!”
“What is going on with you? Why are you drunkenly wandering the streets of Britton Hills at ten P.M.? Where’s Ally?”
“Ally’s gone! Back to New York.”
“Why? Is she okay?”
“Yes, she’s fine. She’s dandy. Hunky-dory. Although if you ask her, probably the whole world is falling apart and everything is terrible and she’ll never be okay again. Because did you know that’s what happened when her boyfriend broke up with her? The whole world ended. She didn’t run away from a dying kid like I did, but her life was the worst ever.”
When she finished her speech, all that was left was bone-deep exhaustion. Owen watched her, looking really sad. “Please,” he said. “As a favor to me, let me give you a ride home.”
He looked so sincere and serious that, grudgingly, she let him lead her to his car. Her stomach wobbled as they drove, and she put her head in her hands, trying to make things stay still. Eventually she rolled down the window and let the wind wash over her. Owen pulled up to Grandma Stella’s house and parked the car in the driveway. She put her hand on the car door handle but let it rest there without opening it. She could feel him watching her like he was trying to decide whether to say something.