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“Maybe one day.” I swirl the dregs of my coffee. “Did you get my email about the fundraiser I wanna plan?”
“I did. That kid really made an impression, huh?”
“He’s an excellent player.”
“I know. There was some camp footage a couple of days back. The interview was a smart move.”
“Amber and Vi think so, and I guess if I wanna get moving on other projects, I need positive publicity.”
My dad smiles and nods. “I’ve already started talking to some of the coaches for the minors to see if they have players who might want to be involved. Whatever you need, I’m here for you—and not just for business stuff, either.”
“I know, Dad. It’s just easier for me to focus on the fundraiser right now.”
He doesn’t push it, which is one of the great things about my dad. He’ll offer his help, but he won’t force it on me. We spend the next hour compiling a list of contacts and players we think will want to be involved in the exhibition game. If I want this to happen, I need to work fast so we can set it all up before training starts in a little over a month. It’ll be a lot of work, but I need something to fill my time, so I’m ready.***Over the next week or so Violet stops by often to help me work on setting up the fundraiser. She maintains that things are okay with Alex, and I trust her to tell me if it’s not. Also, she’s a seriously sucky liar.
“Soooo . . . I was talking to Daisy yesterday,” she says, faux casually on Wednesday.
I don’t look away from my laptop screen. “Oh, yeah?” I don’t want to care about what’s going on with Sunny, but I do. I can’t stop thinking about her. I’m obsessive about visiting her social media feeds. The only thing she’s posted is an inspirational quote about karma. I haven’t called her back, and now that it’s been more than a week, I don’t even know what I’d say.
“She says Sunny’s still moping.”
“You said that’s normal for girls.”
“She won’t even do spa days with Daisy when she has time off. And she’s not eating.”
“None of that sounds good.” Since the family intervention, I’ve been going to the gym daily, and I’m back on my preseason diet. It means eating nothing I enjoy and being exhausted at the end of every day. But that makes it easier to sleep. It also means I’m completely unavailable to go out at night with Lance and the other guys. I’m not drinking, so the bars aren’t fun. I’ve also deleted all the honeys on my contact list. Regardless of whether Sunny and I get back together, I’m not going back to that.
“It isn’t good for the people who have to live with her every day, but for you it is,” Vi explains. “The stages of relationship mourning are complex for women. We have phases. The moping part means she’s not happy about the choice she made. No spa days means she’s punishing herself for not talking things out—or whatever she needs to punish herself for. The not eating is something some girls do when they’re sad.”
“You don’t not eat.” When Vi and Waters broke up earlier this year, she was all over the dairy treats, even though she can’t actually tolerate them.
Vi flips her ponytail over her shoulder. “That’s where the complex part comes in. Not all girls stop eating. Some of us do the opposite. Like me. I eat ice cream because it tastes good and it makes me feel like crap on the inside. It gives me the moops, so it’s like punishment, and it ensures I won’t gain the post-breakup ten pounds because it all comes out the other end anyway.”
“That’s seriously messed up, Vi.”
“Maybe, but it serves its purpose.”
“You were eating ice cream earlier this week.”
“I was sympathy eating. Sometimes I pick fights with Alex so I have an excuse to eat dairy. Don’t you ever tell him that, or I’ll wax a spot on the top of your head so you look like you’re losing your hair.” She makes a circle over her skull.
She’s always threatening to wax and/or shave parts of my body. She has yet to actually follow through, so I’m not worried. “Why would you pick a fight with him?”
“Not like a real fight. Just, like, you know, leaving the dishes out of the dishwasher, or the cap off the toothpaste, or forgetting to buy new lube so we can’t have marathon sex—that kind of thing.”
I give her the eye. “Sometimes it’s like you’ve been my sister my entire life, and then you have to go and overshare and ruin it all.”
“Isn’t that what makes our relationship awesome? Can you imagine if you’d had a crush on me when our parents first got married? That would’ve been wicked messed, eh? We’d probably have our own reality TV show.”
