Nami sniffs, indignant, and crosses her arms across her chest and turns away from me. I can see the anger flare across her perfect, poreless face in the three-way mirror.
“Well, as long as we’re being honest,” she says, and whirls to face me, red-faced. “Have you looked at Marley’s social media lately?”
What? Why is she on Marley’s social media?
“Why are you following him?” I’d “un”-ed Marley (un-friended, un-followed, un-whatever-ed) on every platform a long time ago.
“I just never stopped.”
This feels like a betrayal. “You’re following my ex-husband online? What the hell, Nami?” She’s scrolling through her phone. I think she’s going to show me something I don’t want to see.
“I wasn’t going to show you this… but…” She hands me the phone. I know I shouldn’t take it. I shouldn’t look.
But curiosity gets the better of me. It’s a sad fact that if I were a cat, I’d be dead nine times over because curiosity would’ve run me flat over, stabbed me multiple times, or tossed me off a high-rise balcony.
The first thing I see is a photo of Marley and Lululemon. They’re both grinning like morons, looking too damn happy for people who subsist on a diet of kale and kombucha. Plus, Marley has busted out his Pharrell Williams hat, which is a terrible look on him.
Lululemon is grinning, which looks unnatural on her because in the grocery store, all I saw was a puckered face of disapproval. So I dig deeper into the photo, telling myself it’s just so I can mercilessly poke fun. They’re facing each other,holding a paper cutout of red hearts—three of them between them. I scroll down to the caption, and it reads,We’re so excited to say… Our Little Valentine is on the way!
Our Little Valentine?Then I notice Marley has his scrawny, clammy palm on Lululemon’s nonexistent stomach. What the… mother-effing… what?
I feel suddenly nauseous.
Oh, God. Marley and Lululemon will have a spawn.
I glance at Nami. “How long have you known about this?” I ask.
“Since Valentine’s Day. I didn’t want to be the one to tell you.”
I don’t know what makes me angrier: that she still follows Marley or that she refused to be a good spy for me. I feel a whole bunch of feelings rising up in me, none of them good. I’m right back in that place right after college where I peed on a stick and there were two lines instead of one, when Marley accused me of lying to him about being on the pill and then he stomped out of the apartment. It hadn’t been an Instagram moment with freakin’ rose filters and cutout hearts.
Then I look at the photo again. I know what I’m looking for, and I find it: Marley’s grandmother’s solitaire on Lululemon’s perfectly manicured left ring finger, the one I’d once worn.
Eighteen
SORA
Who does marriage really benefit anyway? Men. All the studies show that men live longer and healthier if they’re married. Women, however, live the same amount of time, with or without a man. So why do we think we need one so badly?
—SOLO FEBRUARY CHALLENGE
I’m not sure what’s worse: that Marley and Lululemon will have a baby and get married, or that I care. I should be far, far and away done with Marley—who even cares what he does with his life? But, I realize, I do. I do care. Because he stood up before a hundred strangers at city hall and told me he’d legally be my husband. Never mind that it had been a pregnancy that got him there. I hate, too, that I don’t get to call Jack about it, because I’m respecting his desire to steer clear of me until I can get a little bit of my shit together.
My nextSolo Februarypost is dark and dire.
I got the worst news—my ex-husband is getting remarried. And his fiancée is pregnant. And they look stupidly happy. And, confession time, I had a miscarriage that I’ve never really gotten over. There, I said it. This has dredged up all kinds of feelings in me, all kinds of bad feelings, when I was trying so hard to be positive. To work on myself. But now, I wonder if, no matter what I do, I’m just always going to end up sad and alone.
Is there any point to anything?
The darkness that came over me after the miscarriage feels as if it’s edging closer to me again, that pitch-black nothingness. It feels suffocating.
Then, my laptop pings with the first comment to my new article. And then another. And another.
Hang in there, sister.
We all got dark days.
Just like you told us… Keep on doing this for you!
