Friends Like Us

by Lauren Fox

  Jane unfolds herself from her tent and comes over to me, smiling. “What was that all about?” She means the fierce rain.

  “Yeah.” I’m stunned, dizzy, flung away from myself and snapped back. I grab her hand. There is a reeking public bathroom a few hundred yards away, and we head for it. As we walk, water from the trees drips onto our heads. Halfway up the stony trail I let go of Jane’s hand. “I think Declan just broke up with me,” I tell her. The words come out of my mouth, and just like that, they’re true.

  “What?” Jane whispers. “What the? Just now?” As if the timing of it were the unforgivable sin. She stops to hug me, and I let her. Her sharp chin digs sweetly into my shoulder. “I never liked him,” she whispers. “Especially after he killed your puppy.” It’s our running gag, what we say to each other after the demise of every relationship, the first Band-Aid on the wound of every failed date. I never liked him, especially after he tried to poison those babies … especially after he stole your nana’s wheelchair … after he had sex with that donkey. Usually it makes me feel better. Now it just makes me feel hopeless.

  She’s still hugging me in the middle of the path on the way to the outhouse when something nearby moves, scrabbles, a sound like newspapers rustling, and in the dim light of the moon, a hulking shape emerges from the brush, squat and huffing, red eyes flashing. For one weird second I think that it’s Declan. Jane grabs my elbow and screams. Then I do, too.

  We stand there for a few seconds, petrified, all three of us. Jane is still screaming, and I might be, too, and the thing is staring at us with its demonic eyes, and then I close my mouth and I’m thinking, That fat badger is going to kill us. Although I don’t know if it’s a badger. It could be a sloth or a possum. Or an opossum. I wonder, briefly, what the difference is between a possum and an opossum. Is an opossum Irish?

  Jane, finally finished screaming, clutches my elbow and tries to pull me away, back in the direction of the tents, but I’m rooted, so she lets go and skitters a few feet to the left, and then she stops, and the warthog stares and seems to contemplate its next move, and then we are a silent triangle of scared animals.

  In what feels like ten minutes but is probably less than ten seconds, Ben is rushing up the path, Declan behind him. “What is it?” Ben yells. “What’s wrong?”

  “Fuckit!”

  Someone takes my arm; it’s Ben, pulling me away, pushing me aside; he waves his arms wildly and yells, “Go away! Get out of here!” in a low and menacing voice to the hippopotamus, who snorts and snuffles and then turns around and nonchalantly strolls back into the brush, as if that was all he was waiting for, someone to tell him what to do, and he didn’t want to come to our party anyway.

  “Fuckit,” Declan says again, hopping over to us, clutching his foot. “I stubbed my fucking toe on a fucking rock.”

  I look at him: tall, useless, too late. Especially after he didn’t quite love me. “That was some big bunny!” I say. My hands are shaking. My knees feel like water.

  Ben hurries over to Jane. “Hey,” he says, breathing hard, half laughing. “Honey. You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Jane’s voice scares me. It’s brittle, hard as the fucking rock Declan stubbed his fucking toe on. She shoves past Ben and walks fast up the path, toward the bathroom, away from us all, and in a flash it’s clear to me. Yes, Ben saved the day, hero in the epic battle against a benign and lazy raccoon, but he saved my day first; Jane was wide open and he left her there, vulnerable. I’m the one he took care of.

  Ben stares after her. “What?” he says. “What just happened?”

  That night at the campground, nobody sleeps. Declan, insensitive enough to casually break up with me on a camping trip in a tent in the woods in the rain, is sensitive enough to stay on his side of the sleeping bag, leaving as much space between us as he can in this cramped hothouse of mildew. Throughout the night, he tosses and turns, sighs and grunts and occasionally whispers to himself. Oh, he mutters, ohhhhh, and Christ, this is insane, and What was I thinking? And I’m awake to hear it all, to wonder if he’s full of regret or just trying to get comfortable while a rock digs into his kidneys. I lie rigid on top of the damp sleeping bag in my jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt, tensed against another invasion, animal or human.

  There is murmuring from Ben and Jane’s tent and then silence. It’s only the next morning, when I crawl out and see them sitting at the picnic table, that I know we were all awake to our demons in the night. Jane’s dark hair is matted like a nest, as if the babies of that nocturnal creature found a place to sleep after their mother wandered off. Her eyes look sunken, the skin around them puffy. Ben, across from her, elbows on the table and head in his hands, looks like a digitally age-progressed image of himself.

  “Oof,” I say.

  “Ugh,” Jane says back.

  “Glarg.” Ben gives a little wave and yawns.

  I pour myself a cup of weak, cold coffee from a Bugs Bunny thermos of indeterminate origin. “Whose idea was this, anyway?”

  “Yours, I think,” Ben says. “Definitely not mine.”

  Declan emerges from the tent after I do, rubbing his face. “This is worse than the morning after that piss-up in Glasgow in ninety-seven.” He might as well be speaking another language. And, boom! What was delightful yesterday is revolting today. I decide to take this as a good indicator of my mental health. He straightens his spine slowly, his hands clutching his lower back, and he looks at me, sees me smiling to myself, and smiles back. And … I’m over him. I can’t wait to tell Ben and Jane.

  If there is a Ben and Jane. My heart sinks, or leaps, I can’t tell, as everything clicks into place, Ben and Jane sitting across from each other looking ruined, looking like an Edward Albee play. This is the end of things, and the beginning. This is perfect timing. This is fate. This is the way things are supposed to be. Now we can all move forward. The morning is bright and cinematic, sunlight lacing through the branches, touching down, light and shadow shifting with the breeze.

  “We have something to tell you,” Ben says, not looking at me. His tired face betrays nothing. I sit down next to Jane, close, ready. Declan slurps his coffee loudly.

  “We’ve decided,” Jane says, playing with her cup, “we’ve decided …”

  “We’re not getting married next fall,” Ben says, and there’s my heart again, punching against my chest.

  “We don’t want to wait.”

  I turn to Jane, confused, and she’s gazing at Ben, and she’s smiling, her face crinkling with happiness, and Ben, who still hasn’t met my eyes yet—why won’t he meet my eyes?—reaches across the picnic table for Jane’s hand; she elbows her cup of coffee out of the way, and some of it sloshes onto the table, some of it splashes onto me.

  “Hey,” I say. “Ow!” Indignant, even though it’s yesterday’s cold coffee.

  “We’re going to have the wedding next month,” Ben says, still gazing only at Jane. “Smaller.”

  “Sooner,” Jane says.

  “More intimate.” Ben rolls his eyes, mocking himself for his own sincerity.

  Jane nods. “More us.” She slips her hand out of Ben’s. A squirrel chitters in the tree above us. “We were just thinking. About my parents’ situation. We can’t afford a big wedding, and anyway, the truth is, we never really wanted one.” She scratches her head, twirls a strand of hair. She does this when she’s nervous, fiddles with her ear, rubs her neck, twists her curls. “We’d rather have a small gathering, just family and a few friends.”

  “If we’re gonna do it,” Ben says, “let’s do it.”

  Declan holds up his little plastic cup of coffee. “Congrats, you two. Cheers.” If he’s aware of the inherent discomfort of the situation, of him breaking up with me while Ben and Jane decide to add just a little more time to their eternity together, he’s not acknowledging it. But he won’t look at me, either.

  “Next month!” I stretch my mouth wide to imitate Jane’s big grin. “Wow!”

  “Willa,” Jane say
s, suddenly serious. “Will you serenade us with a love song at our wedding?” I’m known for my singing voice, which is so off-key and unpleasant that our snarky downstairs neighbor James once asked me if we’d gotten a new dog, and could we please train it not to howl so horribly.

  “Yes,” I say, with an exaggerated nod. “Yes, I will. If you will accompany me on the ukulele.”

  Declan laughs and pours more coffee into everyone’s cups. I glare at him.

  Ben gets up abruptly and walks over to his tent, starts yanking the pegs out of the ground. Jane bustles at the picnic table, crumpling the empty marshmallow bag, and Declan heads back into our tent.

  My stomach growls. I’m ravenous, suddenly, hungry in a way that feels gaping and sad. I make my way toward Ben. He’s humming to himself tunelessly. He used to do that in high school when he was particularly absorbed in a task, sometimes during tests and quizzes. It didn’t add to his social standing.

  “Nice song,” I say, and I accidentally step on a tent peg, jabbing the soft side of my foot. “Shit!”

  “Careful,” he says, waving a mosquito away from his face. “You really ought to be more attentive.” He looks at me, finally, and raises his eyebrows. “A-tent-tive.” He pulls at the loop around the last stake as the yellow tent falls in, deflating slowly, like a parachute.

  “Yes, I get it.” I grab one of the pegs from the pile and hold it up to him. “I hope marrying Jane isn’t a mis-stake.” And immediately I cringe. Like so many things, this started in my brain as a sort-of joke, then took a wrong turn on its way out of my mouth.

  Now Ben stops what he’s doing and straightens.

  “I didn’t mean … you know I didn’t … I’m sorry.” I hug my arms around myself and laugh, Huh huh, huh.

  But Ben doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me. His jaw is tight. His wavy hair stands up in peaks, like whipped cream. There is a rip near the bottom of his T-shirt that threatens to colonize the whole shirt; I have the strange urge to reach out and yank it.

  “Easier coming down than going up!” Declan calls, as he dismantles our tent. Jane, twenty feet away, is shoving puffy sleeping bags into their tiny nylon bags, punching them down.

  And Ben just stands there, his hands in his pockets. It’s just the two of us right here and the sun and the birds and the clean smell of damp earth, and maybe I’m wrong, but I think I see a dare in his eyes, a challenge: Tell me, am I? Am I making a mis-stake? The years of our friendship telescope in front of me. The warm spring day when we cut school and went to the beach, but still, straight-arrows that we were, spent the day studying; the Thanksgiving after Fran and Stan separated when Ben begged out of his own family’s celebration and ate turkey sandwiches with us at Ma Krugman’s All-Day/All-Nite Diner. I think, now, in his familiar brown eyes, that Ben is offering himself up to me, that he is asking me: Willa, are you brave?

  And I don’t know. Am I brave?

  Ben’s hike is the only thing standing between me and the end of this emotional disaster. “It’s okay, Will,” he says to me quietly, as we load the car. “We don’t have to hike.”

  Jane wanders over. “Really,” she whispers. “Let’s just get you out of here.”

  But I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to be the sobbing drama queen who forces her friends to leave the party early. I bend and retie my sneaker. “Are you kidding?” I ask. “I’ve been dying to meet that beaver family.”

  Declan zips the fully disassembled tent into its bag: shocking, in a way, that last night’s shelter is this morning’s backpack. “You three go,” he says. “I’m going to stay behind and read my book,” and I nod, grateful for this small kindness.

  When we finally make it home, after the hike and the long drive, it’s almost dark. Declan helps lug my backpack and sleeping bag up the stairs to the apartment. He stops at the door, leans toward me, his fingers lightly circling my wrist. “Can I stay tonight?” he asks. His voice is low and hoarse. “Please?” And despite an off-the-charts reading on my bad-idea-o-meter and a raised eyebrow from Jane, I nod. Because in spite of it all, he’s still Declan: the man who cheats at Scrabble so that I can win, who smiles at me when we’re alone like he wishes he could rent a room in my head. So I say yes; I let him.

  We unpack and shower and fall into bed. I don’t know what I’m doing; I feel like a rag doll, limp and defenseless. My skin is cool from the shower, but the night is hot, the air in my room an entity, close and still. A car outside honks; someone yells. This is all practically a memory even as it’s happening, a cautionary tale I will tell myself about the time I slept with that Irish guy the day after he dumped me: I said yes, but oh, boy, I should have said no.

  Under just a sheet, Declan sidles up close and slings an arm around my waist. His knees knock into mine. I realize that I’m holding my breath and exhale slowly.

  And then, to my surprise: nothing. He sighs, his breath near my face a slow, swishing whisper. He doesn’t make a move. His arm just stays where it is, heavy around my waist. He doesn’t even try for breakup sex, that ramped-up cliché, the head-on collision of misplaced emotions. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, “I’m sorry,” and I think, Thief of my happiness, and I laugh to myself and blink hard.

  “You suck,” I say.

  “You’re great,” he says, and my heart congeals into a giant blob of blood pudding.

  The next morning he clears his few possessions—a pair of jeans, a toothbrush, two shirts, his iPod—out of the apartment and hugs me good-bye.

  Jane finds me a few minutes later standing in the middle of the living room, unsure about what to do next. She leads me to the couch and makes me tea; Ben brings me a huge blueberry muffin from the bakery. Jane sits next to me and rests her head on my shoulder and we watch mindless TV for a while: a sitcom from the nineties about a gorgeous but quarrelsome group of friends who are all teachers at the same high school; another one about a gorgeous but quarrelsome group of friends who own a restaurant together. Everyone assumes the headwaiter is gay, but he’s not!

  Ben and Jane are careful and quiet with me all day, gentle, as if I have the flu, but their kindness can’t hide the giddy energy that buzzes around them. The two of them. Their plans. They think I’m mourning this breakup, but it’s something more than that. I look at them, and suddenly all I can see is a big hole in the middle of my own life. Every time they touch each other I feel itchy. I think I caught a case of poison envy in the woods, I would say, if I could admit it to them, which I can’t.

  Two days later, Jane’s mother calls.

  “Willa, how are you?” Mrs. Weston asks. Five minutes later I’m still talking.

  “And then he broke up with me,” I say. “In the tent. In the middle of a storm. With another day of camping ahead of us.”

  “Oh, honey,” she says, her maternal voice a blanket of sympathy. “You’ll be all right. You’re a gorgeous girl. You’ll be fine.”

  “Mrs. Weston,” I say, “when Jane and Ben get married, will you come be my roommate?” I sort of mean it. It makes my stomach hurt to think about Jane moving out, moving in to a new place with Ben.

  She laughs, and it sounds like a yelp, as if she’s just burned herself on a hot stove, and I recognize it as the sound a person makes when she’s bumped up against someone else’s insatiable need. “Oh, honey,” she says again. In the background, water rushes, dishes clink. I imagine her standing at her kitchen sink in a green apron patterned with those geese. “Say, Willa, do you remember Dougie Tyler? Janey’s friend?” I tell her that I do. Vaguely. “He mentioned to me that he’s going to be in Milwaukee tomorrow on a sales call, and he wondered if he should surprise Janey with a visit. And I thought, Wouldn’t that be nice for her? Shall I tell him to stop by?”

  And I hear myself saying yes. I find that I can’t say no.

  “Dougie! What are you doing here?”

  The next afternoon Dougie Tyler peers at me from underneath his baseball cap and grins. “I was in the neighborhood,” he says. �
�Passing through on my way to the Midwestern Annual Fishing Rod Convention. In Oostburg!”

  I step aside and usher him into the apartment. “I thought it was the North American Turnip Enthusiasts Conference in Crivitz.” I plant my hands on my hips. “Or, no, was it the … Summer Yodeling Festival in New Glarus?”

  “Ha, ha! I’m on my way to the …” He pulls his cap down and gazes behind me at the living room. “The People Who Have Living Rooms … Meeting.” He looks back at me. I have the urge to scratch him behind his ears.

  “Janey’s not here,” I say. “She’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Dougie’s blond hair peeks out like hay from the back band of his cap. A floral overnight bag that I hope his mother lent him is slung over his shoulder. “It’s awesome to see you, Willa,” he says. He nods. I nod.

  I point to his suitcase. “Did you get that for your bar mitzvah?” He looks at me and tilts his head, probably thinking, Jerk. Probably thinking, Piss-poor substitute for the real thing.

  I bring him a glass of water, and we sit, we wait, because it’s Jane he’s come to see, his old friend, his old flame, his ex-girlfriend, the one who’s getting married next month, the one he kissed just a few weeks ago in a bar in Marcy. I smile at Dougie, conscious of the way my lips pull, my cheeks shift: how an insincere smile is really just a squint.

  In the awkward moments, as he sips his water and I try to avoid eye contact by pretending fascination with objects around the living room—the worn blue-and-green rug, a candlestick, my feet—I begin to have the strange sense that Dougie is a mirage. I think that he may be a fuzzy hallucination, and not just of himself but of all the men who have wandered through my life: Declan; Ben; Ed-who-dated-Jane-and-then-me-and-then-wrote-a-poem-about-us; Ryan Cox, fantasy boyfriend; even my father; even Seth. He’s sitting across from me, the real Dougie Tyler, a hazy stand-in for all those boys, those guys, those men. If I reach out and poke him, I believe my finger would go right through to the other side, to the back of the couch he’s sitting on.