“I know, Owen. I messed up. I know.”
“Well, I hope Josie understands because I don’t think Luke ever will.”
I started to walk out the door, but Owen called me back. “And Emily?”
I stopped and turned around. “Yeah?”
“Luke apologized to Josie, just like you asked him to.”
Lucy was just the first stop, sort of a warm-up on my groveling road show. Only it didn’t occur to me until I was face-to-face with the script H on the Holden’s black gate that I’d actually have to be let in to see Josie. Thankfully, once I announced myself, Mrs. Holden buzzed me in. Either those meditation classes were making her incredibly Zen or Josie hadn’t told her what happened.
“What are you doing down here?” I asked when I found Josie in the stable with Ginger and Pinecone.
Josie whipped around to face me. “Who let you in?”
“Your mom.”
She turned her back to me and continued brushing Ginger. Or maybe it was Pinecone, I couldn’t tell the difference. “I thought the gate was supposed to keep out the undesirables.”
Josie obviously wasn’t planning to make this easy for me.
I decided to just get it over with before she had a chance to set off that CIA-endorsed security system and have me taken away in handcuffs for trespassing or something.
“Josie, I’m so sorry.” I stepped toward her, but she backed away.
“Is that supposed to make it better?”
“I know it doesn’t make it any better, but I mean it. I really am sorry. I made a huge mistake.”
“You let me go on and on about how maybe Luke and I would get back together, and the entire time you knew that wasn’t going to happen. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“Horrible.”
“Good guess.” Josie put down the brush. “You made me feel like an idiot, like my feelings didn’t matter.”
“They matter, Josie. Of course they matter,” I told her.
“Do you know what makes this so bad?”
I shook my head, even though I had a feeling I knew.
“Luke was just a guy, Emily. But you were my best friend. I expected more from you. You should have told me as soon as you knew, or at least tried to stop.”
“I never did it to hurt you, Josie.”
“I don’t know that I believe you, Emily. You were so hell-bent on not being the nice girl, you forgot that she was the person we liked. She was my best friend. I don’t even know the girl who slept with Luke.”
“It was me,” I blurted out, and then quickly added, “I mean, I’m the same person I was, Josie. I’m still your best friend. That hasn’t changed.”
“And what about Luke?”
“Look, I never meant for this to happen. I never intended to really like Luke.”
“So, you really do like him?”
I nodded.
“A lot?”
“Yeah, a lot,” I admitted, practically closing my eyes as I waited for Josie to start yelling at me.
Instead, she just asked, “Are you in love with him?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I guess I have my answer.”
“How I feel about Luke has nothing to do with you.”
“It has everything to do with me, Emily. It’s almost like you didn’t want to believe me when I told you maybe Luke and I should get back together. Like you couldn’t believe that I’d actually like someone for real.”
“I didn’t plan to hurt you, Josie.”
“I want to believe you, Emily. I really do.”
“Then believe me.”
“Did you know that Luke apologized to me for the whole e-mail episode?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I’m assuming you had something to do with that?” Josie absent-mindedly stroked Ginger’s—or Pinecone’s—mane.
I nodded again and hoped I was right. “I thought you didn’t like the horses.”
“They’re not so bad, I guess. But I’m still never going to be some superstar equestrian like my mom wants.”
“That’s okay,” I told her, thinking that I was never going to be the type of person who could hurt her friends and not care.
“I was afraid of losing you and Lucy if I told you the truth,” I admitted. “I was afraid you’d hate me.”
“I don’t hate you, Emily.” She actually seemed like she meant it. “I could never hate you.”
I so wanted to believe her.
Josie shook her head at me. “I’m just not sure I can forget what you did.”
“I’m not asking you to forget, just maybe forgive.”
“Here.” Josie tossed me another brush. “I could use some help.”
“Is this Pinecone or Ginger?” I asked, rubbing the brush against the horse’s neck in the same circular motion as Josie.
“You know what?” she confided, and for the first time since I arrived she cracked a small smile. “I have no idea.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Guy’s Guide Tip #105:
We’re not perfect. If we can admit it,
why can’t you?
“Josie called while you were out,” my mom told me when I came through the kitchen door.
“But I was just at her house.” It didn’t make any sense for Josie to call me fifteen minutes after I left her.
My mom shrugged. “She just said that you should go to Friendly’s. Somebody’s there waiting for you.”
“Who?” I asked.
“I think his name was Eliza Doolittle.”
I found Luke in a booth toward the back of the restaurant, sitting all by himself. He didn’t notice me at first, and when I sat down across from him, he looked so startled I almost wondered if Josie hadn’t told him I was coming.
“Why are you here?” I asked, sliding along the vinyl seat.
“You tell me. Josie called and told me to meet you here. She said you had something to say to me.”
I did? I guess I did.
“I’m sorry.”
Before Luke could say anything, a waitress appeared at our table. “Are you ready to order now?”
I watched Luke before I answered. There was no way I was going to order something before I knew if he planned on staying. But then I changed my mind. I wasn’t going to wait for Luke’s response to gauge what I should say. I already knew what I wanted.
“I’ll have a strawberry Fribble, please,” I ordered.
Luke hesitated and I found myself crossing my fingers for good luck. “I guess I’ll have a Fribble, too. Strawberry.”
Once the waitress collected our menus, we were alone again. Unfortunately, it was going to take more than an extrathick milkshake to make Luke forget about everything that had happened.
“I never meant for the guide to go as far as it did,” I tried to explain. “It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.”
Luke shook his head and tore the corner off the paper napkin sitting in front of him. “How was it supposed to turn out, Emily? Because as far as I can tell, you had plenty of chances to end this long before it got this far. But you didn’t.”
“If I’d told you about the guide you would have hated me.”
He continued tearing the napkin into pieces until there was nothing left except a pile of odd little shapes.
Finally, he looked up at me. “And how would that have been different from the way I feel now?” he asked.
“You don’t hate me,” I told him, and hoped I’d be able to convince him it was true. “You can’t just hate me overnight.”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore. I don’t know when you’re telling me the truth or when you’re just pretending.”
“I’m not pretending, I swear.” My voice cracked and I could feel a lump growing inside my throat. I swallowed hard and hoped it would dissolve. “I couldn’t fake the way I feel about you.”
Luke silently considered my answer, but he wasn’t offering any immediate forgiveness. And so I watched as
he reached for the napkin dispenser, pulled another white sheet, and added to the growing mound in front of him.
“Did you really think I was so bad that you had to change me?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I didn’t even really know you,” I admitted. “I guess I wanted to think so.”
And that was the truth. It was so much easier to believe that Luke was some bad guy who needed to learn how to be good. Or to think of my dad as the one who was wrong. Or even to look at Sean and see somebody who’d intentionally hurt me. It was so much simpler than trying to understand that sometimes people do things and say things and make decisions that aren’t always right—just like I did with Luke. It doesn’t necessarily make them bad. It just makes them human.
“They’re hiring, you know.” Luke pointed to a red sign hanging in the front window. “Maybe they’d let you bring your own apron.”
“Maybe.” I tried not to smile, but it didn’t work.
“Why didn’t you just tell Lucy and Josie about us? Or tell them that you didn’t want to do the guide anymore?”
“I don’t know,” I told him, hating my answer even before I said it out loud. “I guess because I didn’t want to admit I’d made a mistake.”
“Is that what I was, a mistake?” he asked.
I shook my head and wanted so badly to take his hand, only I was afraid he wouldn’t let me. “I made a lot of mistakes—lying to you and then lying to Josie and Lucy. But how I feel about you isn’t one of them.”
Luke reached for the salt shaker and held it in his hand while he thought. “You know why I sent you that valentine in sixth grade?”
“Because your mom made you?”
“No,” he answered, and then broke out into a grin. “Well, maybe a little. But I could have sent it to anyone. I sent it to you because I thought you were nice.”
“I was. I still am.”
Luke sat back against his seat as the waitress placed our Fribbles on the table. “Anything else?” she asked, laying down two straws.
“How about an order of fries,” I suggested.
She started to write on her pad of paper and then stopped. “Just one?”
“Yeah,” I told her. “We’re going to share.”
Luke smiled and bumped knees with me under the table. Instead of moving my leg, instead of saying “excuse me” and politely giving Luke room, I kept it there pressed against him. And instead of feeling wrong, it felt absolutely right.
I’ll never have any idea why Luke and I ended up together. We probably seemed like two of the most unlikely people to wind up making sense. Even now, looking back at how Josie and Lucy and I had changed, how our friendship would be different but not necessarily worse, I had a feeling we’d be all right. I guess relationships are just funny like that. It’s impossible to figure out why some work out and others don’t. Why someone can be so imperfect and still be the perfect person for you. Maybe, in the end, it’s not about changing the person you care about. Maybe it’s about learning what you can live with. Or maybe it’s really about learning what you can’t live without.
In ten years the Heywood Academy class of 1016 will open our time capsule and find some crusty old lip gloss, a few discolored magazines, and other remnants of our senior year. They’ll think they know all about us—what we liked and disliked and what we thought was important. But they’ll never know how over the course of four months so much happened and yet we all managed to survive—me, Lucy, Josie, Sean, TJ, my mom and dad, even Luke. They’ll have no idea that I’d left behind a boyfriend and two best friends and come close to losing two best friends and a boyfriend. They’ll have no clue that hiding how you really feel and trying to make everyone happy doesn’t make you nice, it just makes you a liar.
They’ll never know why there’s nothing in the capsule from three girls on the senior class list, and probably just think that someone made a mistake.
And I did. I made several, actually. But you know what? Sitting there with Luke sipping my strawberry Fribble, I wouldn’t change a thing.
The Book of Luke Page 25