“I wasn’t saying it as a bad thing,” Mila says. “Just an observation.”
I shake my head. “No. You’re right. How do I tone that down?” Now I’m desperate for an answer. I don’t want to live in this fantasyland anymore. I want to see things for what they are.
She shrugs. “Maybe stop analyzing every little thing.”
I shrug a little to myself. “Yeah.” She’s right.
For a quiet moment, I’m left to my thoughts. I drink my milkshake and realize what we’re doing right now. I look at Mila over the rim of my milkshake. Right now, in this diner, I’m finally at Camden U. My midterms are done. I’m single for the first time in two years. I’m eating a burger and a milkshake with my best friend on a Saturday afternoon in October. And I’m thinking — the thought has just arrived, unsponsored, fully formed — that life can’t get better than this.
This is exactly what I dreamed of for years.
The problem is that I am already, in real time, romanticizing it.
Mila stirs her milkshake with the straw and watches me. “Shouldn’t you feel relief, though?”
I put my milkshake down. Back to the real conversation, and it doesn’t feel as hard anymore.
“I mean —” She isn’t pressing. “You knew it wasn’t going to be forever. You knew it before you transferred. You said it to me in May. You said it again in September. You were planning thehow, not theif. And then you did it. So I’m just — I’m asking. Why don’t you feel relieved?”
We sit with it for a second. The waitress passes our table refilling a coffee at the booth behind us and calls somebodyhon.
“I feel —” I grab a fry. I look at it and don’t eat it. “I feel guilty for holding on for so long. Almost embarrassed. Like — it wasn’t fair to him, what I did. I knew. And I stayed anyway.”
“So you’re not even that upset about the breakup. You just feel guilty.”
I nod. “Yeah.”
I pick the cherry off the milkshake and eat it.
“You’re right, though,” I say. “It was time.”
She nods.
By five o’clock, my apartment is a war zone of girls.
Gianna and Lucy have come over because there’s more room here than at their place. My four-poster princess bed is now covered in a layer of clothing thick enough to lose a small dog in. Mara is on the phone in the bathroom, doing the loud part of a conversation I can’t make out the other half of. Penelope is at her drafting table near the window with a mascara wand in one hand and her laptop open on the desk to what I am almost certain is a thesis draft she is editing on her break from getting ready.
I’m in the kitchen, making little Halloween treats for the party because Mila insists that we don’t show up empty-handed. Ihave, lacking the bandwidth to argue, agreed to make something Halloween-themed. Pretzel ghosts. White chocolate dipped. Mini chocolate chip eyes. Lined up on parchment paper and thrown in the freezer.
They look — okay. They look like pretzels dipped in white chocolate.
“Melly,” Gianna says from the doorway. She’s in jeans and an old Camden U hoodie with a full face of makeup. She has a glass of wine in her hand. “Pen says you have a curling iron.”
I nod. “Bathroom cabinet under the sink.”
“Thanks.”
She disappears. Ten seconds later, she’s back. “What’re you making?”
“Pretzel ghosts.”
She looks down at the parchment. “That’s so cute. Can I try one?”
I nod.
She bites into one. She nods. She walks back to the bedroom with the pretzel in her hand.
Mila is sitting on the kitchen island next to my pretzel station with the most fun Tupperware of Jell-O shots I have ever seen. Black. Orange. Red. Three colors. Forty-eight cubes. She made them last night while I was crying about something I’m not currently willing to revisit. I helped a little with the mixing and the pouring.
