Getting Over Garrett Delaney

by McDonald, Abby

  I want to grab the nearest porch post and beat them all to death.

  “Garrett.” I take hold of his arm, desperately trying to keep his focus on me as the guys jostle around us. “You want to get out of here? We could go back to my place, and —”

  “It’s OK.” Garrett sighs in defeat. “I said this probably wasn’t the place.”

  “But this is our last night. . . .” I trail off uselessly as a couple of the guys playfully punch him in the stomach. Garrett laughs and punches them back.

  “We’ll talk later!” he calls as they hustle him away from me, and I’m left on the porch, alone.

  Later. Does that mean “give me ten minute to lose these clowns” later? Or “after the party when I’m driving you home” later? I wait on the porch another twenty minutes just to be sure, then drift aimlessly back into the house.

  “Hey, Kris, have you seen Garrett?” I stop one of Garrett’s classmates by the dance area, but he, too, is entranced by the sight of Jaycee’s gyrations — now into the table dancing portion of the night. “Kris!”

  “What? Oh, yeah, I don’t know. A bunch of guys went to get pizza.” He shrugs and turns back to the show. “Maybe he went with them.”

  “Thanks.” I sigh. Thanks for nothing, that is. Garrett wouldn’t just ditch me like that, but after a half hour, three unanswered texts, and another three loops of the house, I have to wonder if Kris could have been right. Garrett is nowhere to be found.

  I settle on the front steps out front and send my fourth where r u? text. This time, Garrett replies.

  Sorry, went for food w/ the guys. Back soon!

  I slump lower on the steps, my excitement vaporizing in an instant. It’s eleven p.m. already; my curfew is eleven thirty. There’s no way Garrett could get back, escape the marauding senior guys, seduce me under the moonlight, and have me back home in time to keep my mom from grounding me. Sure, I would happily risk never leaving the house for the rest of the summer if it meant a few sweet moments in his arms, but I can tell the moment has passed.

  Boy, has it passed.

  I stay sitting there, idly tossing handfuls of gravel farther up the driveway as I ponder the painful “almost” of tonight. I was so close! To having him for my own, to finally bridging that hateful space between girl and friend for good. To —

  “Ow!”

  A body jumps back, out of gravel-hurling range. I look up. It’s Kayla, pulling on her jacket.

  “Sorry!” I say quickly. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “No problem.” She gives me this bland smile, but my inner pain must show on my face, because she draws closer. “Are you OK?”

  I quickly pull myself together. “Sure! I’m fine. Great!”

  “Right.” She doesn’t look convinced, but doesn’t ask again, either. “We’re just heading out.” There’s a pause, then she offers, “Do you need a ride?”

  “Um, would you mind?” I haven’t had a real conversation with Kayla in a long while, but right now she’s offering the very thing I need most.

  “Not at all.” She shrugs. “There’s a ton of room in Blake’s truck. Once, he fit half the basketball team in there, like something out of one of those French mime movies.”

  “The clowns in the car,” I say, smiling slightly. Garrett has a whole bunch of those movies, black-and-white scratchy things from the ’40s.

  Garrett.

  I let out a wistful sigh.

  “Ready, babe?” Blake saunters out. He’s wearing low-slung jeans and a faded gray athletic shirt, his hair gelled into a mussed peak, the way all the jocks seem to be doing this year.

  “Sure.” Kayla beams and slips her hand into his. “OK if we drop off Sadie, too?”

  “No probs.” Blake gives me a nod. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing much,” I reply, following them to where Blake’s shiny blue pickup truck is parked askew, crushing half a bed of flowers. “You?”

  “Same old.” Blake shrugs.

  “Cool.”

  I gaze absently out of the back window for all of the short ride home, pressing my forehead against the cool glass while Blake and Kayla murmur their babes and honeys up front. They seem so easy together, as in sync as Garrett and I have always been — except for all the making out, of course.

  And all that could have changed, tonight, if only —

  “Here you go.” Blake drums his fingers on the steering wheel, snapping me back to reality. We’re home.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I tell him, and quickly climb out. Kayla kisses him for a long moment before hopping down. She waves happily as he drives away, and then we’re left alone on the dark street.

  “So . . .” I say. “Any fun summer plans?”

  Kayla makes a face. “Find a job, I guess. I don’t know where yet.”

  “I spent last summer working at the Dough Hole,” I tell her.

  “That donut place on Third?”

  “Yup. Never again.” I shudder at the memory. “My hair smelled like fryer grease way into October.”

  “Ouch.” She laughs. “I’ll stay away from there — thanks. What about you? Any summer plans?”

  “I have no idea.” I sigh. “I was planning on going to this literary camp thing. But that fell through.”

  “Shame. Well, I better get back.” She sighs. “Curfew. You remember what my mom’s like.”

  “Right. Me too.”

  Kayla gives me a little wave and heads back across the street to her house, a rambling brick place with ivy and wisteria crawling up the front. We used to play for hours in her attic, me bringing my My Little Ponies to trade for the contraband Barbies her mom had no qualms about buying her (mine banned them on the grounds that they’d damage my body image and crush my unique spirit). We never knew it at the time, how easy those days were — before love came crashing into our lives and everything else ceased to have meaning or purpose.

  I let myself in. Mom is curled up in the living room with another of her motivational videos — some deep-voiced man talking about “the spark of change.”

  “Did you have fun, honey?” She pauses the DVD, beaming over at me expectantly. What can I tell her? No, my evening was ruined by a jealous ex-girlfriend, a future frat boy with a seemingly limitless amount of vomit, and a midnight pizza run?

  “Sure,” I tell her, mustering a smile. “But I’m tired now. I’m just going to head to bed.”

  “OK, sweetie, see you in the morning.”

  I close my bedroom door tight behind me and settle at my computer. Sure, I’m tired, but there’s one thing I have to do first, the only thing that will lift my spirits in these desperate times. With a few quick clicks, I access the database and pick my search parameters.

  Search: long-distance love.

  I hit ENTER, and just like that, the results start scrolling. John and Abigail Adams, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West . . . A reassuring litany of couples who bridged the great geographical divide.

  See? All is not lost.

  I look at the list and feel my disappointment ease. It always does. The database is my own personal testament to Great Love, a secret catalog of romantic success. It was after I met Garrett that I realized that those Top Ten lists I’d made were wholly inadequate; Great Love couldn’t be contained to a mere ten couples. It shouldn’t! If my soul mate could stroll into the coffeehouse one unremarkable August afternoon, then there were hundreds, thousands, of other such matches out there to be recorded. No, I needed a better system for tracking my romantic heroes and heroines, one that spanned the breadth and depth of devotion.

  And thus the website was born. Love affairs from history, literature, theater; every culture, any gender; cross-referenced by genre, type, lasting historical impact . . . What started as a small tribute has swelled to a mammoth database, and now I spend more time uploading everyone else’s suggestions than posting new ideas of my own. I click through to my e-mail and skim the new messages. Three more quotes to add to the Elizabeth and Darcy page, a plea to
allow noncanonical fan-fiction couplings. I have a user in the Philippines obsessed with chronicling every couple on Days of Our Lives, and a women’s studies professor at Oxford intent on expanding the nonheterosexual listings with pages for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

  Garrett doesn’t know about the website; nobody I know does. It’s my own private corner of the world, filled with hope and promise for my own glorious future. And on a night like this, with Garrett so close but already so far away, I’ll take all the hope I can get.

  After the party, Garrett’s parents sweep him into a whirl of camp prep–related activities, so he doesn’t have more than five minutes to spare before leaving — barely long enough to hug me good-bye, let alone pledge his eternal and undying devotion. And just like that, he’s gone.

  He might have had second thoughts about confessing his feelings, I decide, or wanted to wait until we could actually be together — not just kiss and run. Either way, I’m still left in limbo. The hours pass without so much as a call or text, and I sink into a listless haze of longing with nothing to do except watch An Affair to Remember and Casablanca and every other tearjerker black-and-white movie that features doomed love. In other words, all of them. At least I’m in good company for my spiral of dejection; all I need is some perfect matte red lipstick and a gray fitted suit, and I, too, could be the tragic heroine on that steam-billowed train platform, watching the center of my universe be carried off to war and certain death. . . .

  OK, so Garrett took the Greyhound up to a summer camp in the woods, but still — I’m left here alone. Even his promise for frequent text and phone updates has thus far failed to materialize: I haven’t heard a single word since he left. Two whole days ago! Is it any wonder I don’t want to get out of bed? But despite my perfectly reasonable grounds for despair, Mom bursts into my room first thing Monday morning and yanks my curtains back.

  “Mm-hm,” I mutter from underneath the covers. “Go away!”

  “It’s ten thirty,” she tells me, pulling my comforter aside. “Time to get up!”

  “Mom!” I bury my head under my pillow. “It’s summer vacation!”

  “Which means there are tons of exciting things for you to do.” She bustles around the room, straightening things up. “I’ve let you mope around long enough. It’s time for you to get that A into G.”

  “I’m not moping. I’m mourning.”

  “Looks the same from where I’m standing.”

  “Moping is self-indulgent teen angst,” I inform her icily. “Mourning is the totally justified grief that comes from being separated from the love of your life!” I roll away.

  “Come on, sweetie,” Mom says, her voice hatefully perky. “I’ve made lists of possible jobs and activities. I thought today would be a great day to work on your ambition chart!”

  I yawn. “Of course you did.”

  “Sadie Elisabeth Allen. Out of bed. Now!”

  “Five more minutes,” I tell her, closing my eyes again. Before I was so rudely interrupted, I’d been drifting in a delicious daydream involving me and Garrett, strolling the cobbled backstreets of Paris, hand in —

  Splash!

  I leap up. “What the —?” I cry, cold water dripping down my face. Mom stands over me, wearing a smug look and holding an empty water glass in her hand. “You didn’t!” I gasp.

  “I did.” The water-spiller has no shame. “Now, I’m heading into town in twenty minutes, and you’re coming, too.”

  “But —”

  “No buts. You’re going to get out of those gross sweatpants, put real clothes on, and go and find a job.” She sighs, softening. “I don’t like seeing you like this, sweetie. You need some direction.”

  “I have direction.”

  “Toward your cell phone, to see if Garrett has texted you.” She rolls her eyes. “It’s like I always tell my clients: you’ll feel better with some activity. And we can even go to the library,” she adds brightly, as if it’s some kind of bribe. Which, to be honest, it kind of is. I’m completely out of new reading material, and everything on my shelves just reminds me of Garrett: the books he’s given me, the books we’ve read together, the books I got because he recommended them. . . .

  “Fine,” I tell her. “But for the last time: I am not making, nor will I ever make, an ambition chart.”

  “But I got —”

  “Not even with the gold stars!”

  Mom drops me at the library with strict instructions to canvas the town for babysitting and other such high-profile, fun-filled summer jobs.

  “And snap out of this!” she orders through the car window. “Cheer up!”

  I browse the fiction shelves, still suffused in my cloud of suffering. Why should I cheer up? Melancholy is a perfectly legitimate state of mind — artists have thrived on it for centuries. War and Peace — there, that wasn’t exactly written in a fit of bright, purposeful energy, was it, now? And Anna Karenina. Tolstoy wasn’t leaping around with happiness every hour of the day, and he still managed to achieve something.

  Maybe I should move to Russia; they clearly appreciate inner torment there.

  “Sadie? Your library card?”

  I look up to find Ms. Billings, the librarian, waiting patiently behind the circulation desk. In the grand tradition of librarian clichés, she’s wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a preppy little blouse with a tweed skirt, but she actually looks pretty stylish — kind of that British schoolteacher look. She seems stern enough to hush a crowd with a single glance, but she’s a softy really — she’s the one who slipped me a copy of Forever by Judy Blume when I’d read every pony, babysitting, and boarding-school book in the middle-school section.

  That’s public service, right there.

  “Sorry,” I apologize quickly, handing my card over. She scans the stack of novels, raising her eyebrows slightly as she notices the theme: long, bleak, Russian. “I’m embracing my inner pain,” I tell her.

  She smiles sympathetically. “Bad day?”

  “More like bad year.” I sigh. “Do you ever feel like fate is playing a cruel joke on you?”

  Ms. Billings pauses a moment. “In that case . . .” She looks around, then takes a book from the recently returned stack and shows it to me surreptitiously as if we’re covert spies or something. “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Never fails to cheer me up. You look as though you could use it.”

  I turn the slim volume over in my hands. “Thanks,” I tell her, and add it to the stack. “I’ll take everything I can get. Wait,” I add, suddenly hopeful. “You don’t need anyone working here this summer, do you?” A job at the library would be the least painful of all possible options.

  She shakes her head. “Sorry. There used to be a part-time gig, but with the funding cuts . . . Volunteer positions only these days.”

  “Oh, OK.” I sigh. Volunteering might keep my mom quiet, and look good on college applications, but it won’t get me any closer to that distant dream of my own car. “Thanks, anyway.”

  All over town, I hear the same story again and again: the summer jobs were snapped up weeks ago by enterprising students who didn’t have their hearts set on literary camp. Even the HELP WANTED sign at the Dough Hole is out of date — there apparently being no end of willing candidates ready to risk death-by-deep-fat-fryer on a daily basis for the sake of minimum wage.

  I slink into Totally Wired and look over at our usual table with a sigh. Without Garrett around, it’s not ours anymore; it’s just mine.

  “What can I get you?” LuAnn asks at the counter.Today’s vintage dress is a blue gingham print, open low enough at the neck to show a scrolling tattoo across her collarbone, with text I can’t quite read. It’s a Wizard of Oz–meets–prison-yard look.

  “Coffee. Please. Black.” Like my heart, I add silently.

  “Sure thing.” She grins and pushes sweaty strands of red hair back from her forehead. “And a double espresso, right? For your boyfriend?”

  I blink.

  “Tall, cute, join
ed to you at the hip?”

  “Oh. No.” I blush. “He’s not . . . I mean, he’s not my boyfriend, and he’s not coming. So, just the one coffee.”

  “Whoops.” LuAnn grimaces, already reaching for the machine. “Bad breakup? Sorry. I have foot-in-mouth disease — can’t help it.”

  She bustles off to make my order, leaving me with a fresh pang of loneliness. See? Even complete strangers think that Garrett and I belong together.

  I linger at the back table all afternoon, watching the buzz of activity as morning Mommy & Me groups shift to a stream of junior-high gigglers in search of ice-blended sugar hits. I start and then discard half a dozen letters to Garrett — from the simple What’s up at camp? to I love you I love you I love you, but none of them seems right. What am I supposed to do now? Sure, he said he’d call when he’s settled in, but how long does it take to throw five T-shirts in a drawer and line up his volumes of Proust?

  I slump lower in my seat. He’s probably off having the most fun of his life, while I’m stuck exactly where I have been for years. Not moving at all.

  “You have got to be kidding me!”

  I — and everyone in the place — look up. One of the waitresses, an angular blonde in a plaid shirt and skinny jeans, is staring outside, where a skeezy hipster dude is smoking a cigarette — and flirting with a couple of sophomore girls. They twist their hair and giggle while he leans in close, playing it up.

  The waitress turns an interesting shade of pink and dumps the tray of dirty dishes on the nearest table — right next to some poor businessman’s half-eaten BLT.

  “Hey!” he cries, but she ignores him, already stalking toward the doors. The sophomores see her and flee.

  I watch, fascinated. Through the window, their yells are muffled, but she’s gesturing angrily, and he’s shrugging, sullen. It’s a knock-down, drag-out fight, right in the middle of Main Street for everyone to see — the most excitement this town has seen since Becca Larsen had an “accidental” wardrobe malfunction in the middle of the Founders’ Day parade (which earned her the few dozen extra votes necessary to clinch the homecoming crown. Coincidence?)