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I slid onto the kitchen stool next to J.P.’s and asked eagerly, “Do you have to do something that scares you every day, too?”
“Uh,” J.P. said. “No. I’m supposed to do FEWER scary things every day, actually.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling vaguely disappointed. “Well. Is it working?”
“Lately,” J.P. said. He took a sip of his root beer. “Lately it’s been working great. Do you want one of these?”
I shook my head. “How long did it take?” I asked. This was amazing. I couldn’t believe I was actually talking to someone who’d been through—was going through—the same thing I was. Or something similar, anyway. “I mean, before you started feeling better? Before it started working?”
J.P. looked at me with a funny smile on his face. It took me a minute before I realized it was pitying. He felt sorry for me.
“That bad, huh?” he asked. Not in a mean way. Like he genuinely felt bad for me.
But that’s not what I want. I don’t want anyone to feel bad for me. It’s stupid I even feel so awful about everything, when, in general, I have a fantastic life. I mean, look at what Lana has to put up with—a mother who sold her beloved pony without even telling her, and a threat that if she doesn’t get into an Ivy League college she can kiss her parents’ financial support good-bye. I’m a PRINCESS, for crying out loud. I can do whatever I want. I can buy whatever I want. Well, within reason. The one thing—the one thing I don’t have—is the man I love.
And it’s my own stupid fault that I lost him in the first place.
“I’ve just been a little down,” I said quickly. I didn’t mention the part about not wanting to get out of bed all week.
“Michael?” J.P. asked. Not without compassion.
I nodded. I didn’t think I could have spoken if I had wanted to. This big lump had formed in my throat, the way it always does when I hear—when I even think—his name.
But it turned out I didn’t have to speak. J.P. let go of the root beer bottle and put his hand on mine, instead.
I sort of wish he hadn’t, though. Because that just made me feel more like crying than ever. Because I couldn’t help comparing his hand—which was large and guylike, but not quite as large and guylike—to someone else’s.
“Hey,” he said softly, giving my fingers a squeeze. “It gets better. I promise.”
“Really?” I asked. It was too late now. The tears were coming. I tried to choke them back as best I could. “It’s not just…just Michael, you know,” I heard myself assuring him. Because I didn’t want anyone to think I was depressed just because of a boy. Even if that really was the truth. “I mean, there’s the whole thing with Lilly. I can’t believe she really thinks you and I—that you and I would ever—”
“Hey,” J.P. said, looking a little alarmed, I think at how fast my tears were coming. “Hey.”
And the next thing I knew, he had wrapped me in his big bearlike embrace, and I was weeping onto the front of his sweater. Which smelled like dry-cleaning fluid.
A fact that actually just made me weep harder, when I remembered that I would never again get to smell the one thing that I miss and love more than any other…Michael’s neck.
Which definitely does not smell of dry-cleaning fluid.
“Shhh,” J.P. said, patting me on the back while I cried. “It’s going to be okay. It really is.”
“I don’t see how,” I sobbed. “Lilly hates me! She won’t even look at me!”
“Well, maybe that should tell you something,” J.P. said.
“Tell me what?” I hiccupped against his chest. “That she hates me? I already know that.”
“No,” J.P. said. “That maybe she’s not as great a friend as you’ve always thought she was.”
This actually caused me to stop crying and sit back and blink at him tearfully.
“Wh-what do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, just that if she really was as good a friend as you seem to think,” J.P. said, “she wouldn’t believe that there’s anything going on between you and me. Because she’d know you aren’t capable of something like that. She certainly wouldn’t be mad at you for something you didn’t even do—despite maybe a little evidence to the contrary. I mean, did she even bother asking you if that thing in the Post about us was true?”
I dabbed at the corners of my eyes with a napkin J.P. pulled out of a nearby holder and handed to me.
“No,” I said.
