I drop my hands, and the smile slides off my face so fucking fast that I physically feel the frown.
A color of the —
A color of therainbow.
My brain — slow, hungover, unable to form a thought — actually tries, for one absurd moment, to picture a rainbow. The full thing. Red, orange, yellow, green — I tilt my head, vaguely, and stare out the window and think.If the sky is blue, does the rainbow have blue in it? Or does the blue cancel out somehow?
Then I catch up with what she just said. She said it in front of Penelope. Absolutely no one can know the truth about Blue Golding. For the love of everything on this earth, Mila better keep her mouth shut. Because Blue Golding is a closed file. I have decided that I cannot do this with him anymore. I made myself a promise after I went to his house last week. The cocoon I have been keeping him in has to crack open. The butterfly has to come out. I have to lift my hand and watch the thing fly away and not chase it. I’m done. I amdone.
I widen my eyes at Mila, in that small, sharp,do notway. I try to keep it subtle, so Penelope doesn’t catch it.
Penelope takes a small sip of her water and doesn’t acknowledge the thing Mila just put in the room with us. Rainbow? Really?
“I really hope I didn’t say anything else stupid,” I mutter, dragging the conversation back to safer ground. “Because Chase didn’t have much to drink last night. He’ll remember everything.”
“Chase,” Mila says, “is obsessed with you, Melly. He will forgive and forget anything you do. You could have projectile vomited all inside of his truck last night, and he would have forgiven you by dawn.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“You know I’m right.”
I know she is. Chase loves me with a steady, uncomplicated, infuriating constancy that I do not deserve and have not earned, and the worst part of that love is how easyit makes everything. He will forgive me for just about anything. Mila is right.
Penelope looks at me from across the counter. Her head is tilted, just slightly. “You’re quite the catch, Melly.”
I turn pink, then red, then almost certainly purple.She thinks I’m a catch.
“He’s never going to let you go,” Mila says forcibly, “unless you walk away.”
“I can’t just walk away.”
“Why?”
“Because — I —”
“Why?” Mila says again. “Because you have history? Because you’ve already given him two years? Because you’d rather waste another two than admit the first two were a mistake? Do you remember the first thing you ever told me when you started dating him?”
Don’t say it.
Mila, please don’t say it.
“You told me,” she says, “that he was the perfect boy to get over you-know-who.”
My whole body flinches. I remember saying it. Three months, I’d told her. I gave her a timeframe for when I’d break up with Chase. I was convinced it was what I needed. I had been so hurt. The boy I had chased for years and years went to Camden U without a backward glance. He never texted me back. He didn’t talk to me after graduation. I had lost a big piece of myself that summer, so when I met Chase, I clung to him. And Chase was the perfect boy. That’s not the part I cannot say out loud. He healed a part of me that I couldn’t do myself.
Mila shakes her head. “We’re not going to talk about that right now,” she says quietly. “We’re not. That’s a different conversation, but as for Chase, Melly — it’s not fair. You let it go on for too long. It was supposed to be like a three-month thing. You said.”
She’s right. And I start spiraling in my head. I knew I should have come to Camden right away. I shouldn’t have done the community college first.
“Fine,” I say. I exhale. I look up at her. “You’re right. I just —”
“I don’t want to be right, Melly.” Her voice cracks, just a little. Just enough that I look at her properly. “I want you to stick up for yourself. That’s all. I want you to stop going with the flow. I want you to stop letting your life happen to you. I want you to decide what you want and then go and get it.” She gestures, almost angrily, at the air between us. “Last night you were drunk, and you wanted nothing to do with your own boyfriend. Nothing. You wouldn’t even look at him for the last hour. You don’t see it because you live inside it, but I was watching it. We were all watching it. You don’t want him.”
I nod. I have nothing left to argue with.
Mila exhales. She waves the tension in the air away with one hand. “You’re going to figure it out,” she says. “Sooner or later. You will. Look —” she gestures at the kitchen, at the apartment, at the soft music coming in from the next room, and Penelope’s calm presence at the counter. “Look how much has changed in a week, Melly. A week. Look at it.” She’s looking at me with an enormous amount of love.
“We’re the kind of friends,” she says, “you’ve needed these last two years.”
