Lucid

by Gabrielle Castania

  “Don’t pretend that was a selfless thing, like you were doing me a favor by dragging me out with you that night, because if you remember, I tried to decline your generous invitation and you refused to let me,” I sneered. “You always wanted to go on double-dates and gossip about boys, and I wasn’t following the script you’d written for us, so you had to do something about it. You can’t ever just let things happen; you insist on going out and making them happen.”

  “Because that is how the world works, Ashley,” she told me with intense inflection. “Life isn’t like the books on your shelf at home – you can’t just sit around, moping about the hand you’ve been dealt, and waiting for Prince Charming to come give you the kiss that makes everything okay. If you want things to happen, you have to make them happen, or else, they won’t. needed something to spark you back to life, so I introduced you to Joey.”

  “Gee,” I snorted, “thanks for assuming I needed a boy to fix me.”

  She didn’t react to my comment, though, continuing her rant. “Nothing was ever actually supposed to come of that night. I figured he was so far out of your league that he’d indulge you for a night because he’s nice and then be done with it. He was just supposed to be the catalyst for you acting like a normal teenager for once, like someone who leaves her house every now and again, who has fun from time to time, who interacts with more people than she can count on one hand. I didn’t think anything would come of it, but obviously, I was wrong. I tried to be happy for you, but I should have known you were vulnerable enough to fall victim to the life he lives. It’s too big for you, Ashley, and it’s eating you alive, but you’re too broken and naïve to even realize that.”

  “So let me get this straight,” I paused her to ask. “You wanted me to make friends, but now that I have friends, you’re upset about it? Am I following along here, or is there something I’m missing?”

  “I wanted you to have real friends. I wanted you to have friends like me, like Yosuke, like Sam, who care about you as a person. I wanted you to find people who liked you for you, not for who you’re dating.”

  “Oh, would you come off this high horse already?” I shrieked at her, not a fan of what she had to say. “You want me to be happy, but not happier than you. Well, guess what, Ellie – you don’t run my life. I’m not your fucking Barbie doll; you can’t just pose me and dress me however you want, however will best suit you and the story you’ve come up with for me and play my life like a game. I can tell you’re angry that it worked out like this, but you set all of this in motion and have nobody to thank but yourself. Had you not forced me to go on that date so you could feel good about yourself for being a hero, for helping poor little Ashley to see the light, none of this ever would have happened. You’re the one who set up these dominoes, and now, you’re having a hard time watching them fall.”

  Red in the face, she snapped, losing her calm façade and actually yelling at me for the first time in all the years we’d known each other, “I might have forced you to go out with Joey, but I did not force you to be a bitch!” The surprise of it stunned me into silence, and my lack of immediate comeback gave her a chance to elaborate. “Since his friends got involved in all of this, you’ve lost hold of yourself. You were lonely enough to forgive them their trespasses and let them all in just to appease your boyfriend, and Ashley, that is pathetic. Even when all those people hated you because you weren’t cookie-cutter like them, I liked you, because, if nothing else, you stayed true to who you were. Now, you’re nothing but a little girl, lost in someone else’s big, confusing world full of things you’ve never known. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t know Joey, and, to those people, if it weren’t for Joey, you would still be nothing.”

  There wasn’t a single thing I could think of to say that would even begin to counteract her slew of accusations, because she was right. My whirlwind journey to this bizarre place in my life had robbed me of Danny, Ellie was disappearing before my eyes, and Yosuke’s face said all the words he didn’t need to say. Josh was never my friend to begin with, and if Ellie and Yosuke were checking out of my life, Sam would likely be going with them. I wanted to tell my other friends what was going on with me, what the inside of my head looked like when they weren’t around, but I think that, wherever she was deep down inside of me, the girl I used to be before all of this knew that they wouldn’t really care.

  I dropped my eyes to the floor, too overcome with emotion to look at either of them, to stand up for myself. Thankfully enough, a car horn blared outside, and Yosuke got up to check the window. He reported, “Joey’s here.”

  Ellie snickered dryly. “Of course Joey’s here. He’s always around to save Ashley when Ashley can’t be bothered to save herself.” As I rose to my feet, her voice was quiet, an eerie calm seeping into her tone as she kept her poker face strong. “I’m sorry that so many good years of friendship have to end like this, but unless you have something to say for yourself, maybe it’s best you just go.”

  As I nodded my head solemnly and dropped my eyes to my sneakers once again, I turned my back on two of the only friends I’d ever known, walking out of the bedroom without once looking back.

  Concern swept over Joey’s face the moment I walked out of the house, and the inquisition began as soon as I shut the car door. “I’m going to guess that her ‘raging’ got a little intense?”

  I didn’t bother to look at him, my eyes out the window, focused on nothing. “Joey, I don’t think Ellie and I are friends anymore.”

  “Well, why don’t I get out of her driveway, and you can tell me what happened on the way to my house?” he suggested as he put the car in reverse, taking off down the road.

  Really, I wasn’t sure what to tell him. It wouldn’t go over well if I explained that Ellie was basically upset that I’d let our relationship and the things that came with it change me as a person. I didn’t much feel like the girl he’d fallen in love with when we first met, and I could only hope that he still felt the same about the person I’d accidentally become.

  I decided to go with, “Josh broke up with her today, and I think it set her off.”

  Joey let out a laugh, flipping his sunglasses down out of his hair, tousled by the wind from driving with the windows down. “Give me a second to pretend I’m surprised. Last I talked to him, he said he was going to wait out the school year.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s pretty broken up about it.”

  “For the life of me, I can’t imagine why,” he unknowingly agreed with me, taking my side in an argument he didn’t know had taken place. “I mean, I don’t even know how they lasted this long. I mean, the night we met, Ellie was hitting on Yosuke right in front of Josh, and Josh didn’t mind because he was too busy flirting with the girl at the other end of our table to notice.”

  I tried to think back to the day Ellie had brought up, when she and I were lying in my bed together after school, chatting about our prom plans with our boyfriends, and her words came flooding back to my subconscious mind all at once. “When they first got together, everything was fun, but something happened that she couldn’t explain and things just weren’t as good anymore. When they first started dating, they were just like you and I, but now, there’s not much there. Since I’ve been with you a lot, she’s been with him, and she started to feel like they were figuring things out. She was starting to like him again.”

  “I’m flattered that we’re part of her awful-to-awesome scale,” Joey smiled, turning to look at me as he stopped at a red light. “I’m not sure how ending her relationship with Josh correlated to ending her relationship with you, though.”

  I shook my head, trying hard to fight back my tears. I wasn’t sure if I was mourning the loss of Ellie or the painfully clear loss of myself but all I knew was that the absence of something was killing me. “We wound up fighting because I didn’t get why she was upset, and she just unleashed on me.” He looked a bit confused on what she could have had to say, so I elaborated. “She said she set us up just
to give me a taste of what it’s like to live a little. She didn’t expect us to get together – she thought you’d just kind of hang out for the night and move onto the next one. She figured, once I’d gotten a taste of what life could be like if I stopped hiding all the time, I’d be hungry for more and act like a normal teenager.”

  “Well, I’m so sorry that I deviated from her creepy master plan by not being a gross high school stereotype.” He snorted in disgust. “You know, I like Ellie well enough, but the one thing that rubbed me the wrong way about her from the start is that she always thinks she knows what’s best for everyone. Don’t get me wrong – I’m thrilled she introduced us, because I love you to the moon and back and words do not describe how glad I am that you’re in my life – but color me offended that she thought of me as just a pawn in the weird game she’s playing with your life, and also that she was playing with you at all.”

  “I get that she was trying to help, but she’s really mad that I’m friends with your friends. She said I’ve changed too much since we got together, and she doesn’t like who I’ve become. Your friends pay me a lot of attention now, and I’ve been so busy indulging them that I’ve kind of been neglecting her. She was my only friend when nobody else wanted to be, and I thanked her for it by pushing her away the second I had more than one option to choose from. And Yosuke seemed to agree with her, and if he’s out, then Sam is, too, and I feel like I’m just losing a lot today. Even when I was alone, I didn’t feel as lonely as I do right now.”

  By the time I finished rambling, we were in his driveway, so he stepped from the car and urged me to do the same. A wave of security washed over me the moment he wrapped me in his arms and just held me tightly to him. Having him offer me so much of himself in all the times I felt like I had nothing never ceased to overwhelm me with emotion, and it was enough to make me stop fighting off the tears. I liked to think that Joey acted like a human shield, buffering out all the bad parts of my life so I could focus on the good, even if the only good I had at that moment was the comfort of his embrace, the almost spicy smell of his skin as I buried my face into him, and the pleasure of having someone to cling to who I knew without a doubt loved me boundlessly.

  He gave me a few moments to sob into his v-neck t-shirt before pulling away just enough so he could see me, tilting my chin up so that I had no choice but to look him in the eye. With a sympathetic smile, he told me gently, “Try to forget about her for right now. She’s probably just mad that she’s been dumped, and misery loves company. Forget about Ellie, about Yosuke, about Sam, and about the people she thinks you left her for. Regardless of any of that, you are and always will be the apple of my eye, and nothing in this world is going to change that. I love you, Ash, and even if Ellie is throwing a hissyfit and flipping the board because the game isn’t going her way, you still have me.”

  Through my cascading tears, I managed a feeble smile as I pressed my lips tenderly against his, savoring the sensation of having him there for just a moment longer. “You’re the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me,” I told him through a sniffle, nuzzling back into him again.

  He rested his head against mine and gave me a final squeeze before letting me go, only to slip his hand into mine. “I don’t care what anybody has to say about you, or who you were before we met, or your choices, or whatever. You could be green and have three heads, and I’d still love you just as much as I do now.”

  I snickered as he pushed the front door open. “Well, luckily enough for both of us, I’m not a massive freak, if only in that regard, so I think my relative normality is a win for us both.”

  He tossed his keys onto the table in the entryway and looked to me with a soft smile. “I know it’s the night before prom and we’re supposed to be getting ready, but what’s say we just laze around tonight? I feel like you could use some time to just relax and shut the world off for a while. Besides, we don’t need all the bells and whistles for tomorrow to be awesome – you’ll be there with me, and I’ll be there with you, and that’s my only criteria for a fantastic night.” He grabbed me around the waist and pulled me back into him. “You could show up in a trash bag and still be the belle of the ball in my eyes. Besides, Julian got someone in to fix the hot tub last night, and the fridge is full of new desserts Rosetta wants to add to the summer menu at The Bistro. What do you say?”

  So, that was what we did – soaked in the hot tub and ate pastries, ignoring the stressors in our lives and just enjoying one another. That night, nothing mattered to me – not Ellie, not my other friends, not Danny, and not anything going on in the world outside of that house. I sat there with Joey, cherishing every moment I had with him, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of having it any other way.

  Given the alarming lack of people left in my life, it’s not like I had much of a choice if I wanted one, anyway.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Come on, Ashley,” Katie chided with a smirk, pulling one of her assorted makeup brushes away from my face, giving me a moment to blink powder fallout from my eyeball. “You said you wanted a soft cut crease, winged liner, and a mauve nude lipstick, and I’ll be damned if that isn’t what you get from me. I’m not sending you to prom with raccoon eyes.”

  Truth be told, “saying I wanted those sayings” was when I pointed to a photo in a small lineup of potential looks she’d showed me earlier in the week during art class. Katie’s makeup was always really nice, and I trusted her to do mine for the evening. My knowledge of it was limited to eyeliner, mascara, and the cover-up cream I used for days I woke up with spots on my face, but Katie knew her stuff. She rubbed the brush around in a pan of product within a pallet of what looked like more eye shadow than I would wear in my entire lifetime, and I trusted her enough to shut my eyes and try this again.

  In the guest room at her house, we had gathered with Jenna to get ready for prom together. Our mothers were downstairs socializing with one another, but only Katie’s dad made an appearance. Jenna’s was out of state on business, and I hadn’t seen Roger in days, maybe even a couple weeks. If anybody knew where he was, they weren’t telling me, and I wasn’t asking. No matter where he stumbled off to, he was out of my hair for one of the biggest nights of my high school career, and I’d be lying if I said I was worrying about where he’d gone.

  Being at Katie’s that night delighted Mum in ways I couldn’t quite describe. Now that her cancer was slinking back into remission again after another round of chemo, she was finding herself able to do more. I wasn’t expecting marathons anytime soon, but she was doing well. She was planning to just drop me off, but Katie and Jenna’s mothers insisted she stay. I couldn’t remember the last time she sat down with women her own age to drink coffee and chat, and I don’t think Mrs. Cedar and Mrs. Thornton knew what it meant to her to be included in something for once.

  Finally, it came time to slip into our gowns once our hair and makeup was out of the way. We helped each other with laces and bodices, and once we were situated with our shoes and various accessories, we stood together in the full-length mirror hung on the back of the door to admire ourselves for a moment before going downstairs to show off.

  Maybe it was because I was biased, but I thought I looked the best out of the three of us. My hair curled down my back in elegant spirals, my simple jeweled necklace emphasized the elegance of my black floor-length dress, and, thanks to Katie, my makeup was flawless. The other two girls were naturally beautiful, the kind of model teens that strut down runways and play mean girls in high school dramas, but their choices did them a huge disservice. Katie’s dress was a bit frumpy, and she’d gone with a rose pattern on a white background that looked more like a grandmother’s tablecloth than a prom dress. Jenna had chosen a light blue cocktail dress over a gown, and it was both too tight and too covered in gaudy sequins to be appropriate for such an occasion.

  Of course, I didn’t say that to them, though. Despite their choices not being flattering, I had to be, because they were my friends and it was o
ur special night. Everyone deserved to feel like a million bucks at prom, so I told them they were stunning with a selling smile on my face, and they ate up every word I said.

  Sure, our mothers taking photos of us together had been fun, but the most scintillating moment for me was when the guys pulled up in the limo we’d all pitched in to rent for the night, because I couldn’t wait much longer to see Joey all done up. Just the first look he gave me when he stepped from the back seat was enough to steal my breath. We’d agreed to err more on the casually classy side than glitzy or glamorous, and god, did he pull it off. He was only wearing a regular three-piece suit, entirely black save for the white button-down he wore beneath it, but he looked more handsome than ever.

  He looked me up and down time and time again, a smile playing temptingly on his lips, and I felt my cheeks flush as I tucked my bangs out of my face. He grabbed my hands into his, and I found myself looking him in the eye with a smile of my own. “Oddio, Stellina,” he breathed. “You look incredible.”

  I chuckled, pulling my way toward him so I could give him a kiss. “You don’t look so bad yourself,” I replied, almost missing the collection call from our parents to gather together for group photos.

  After what felt like a million different groupings – all of us together, the couples, the girls, the guys, individually, serious poses, goofy poses, scenarios, and a list that goes on and on – we were finally ready to head to the hotel in the city where prom was being held. The walk from the entrance to the event space off the main lobby was studded with people I recognized, all of whom shouted greetings and compliments as we made our way into the actual ballroom.