“What?” Laurel says when I stop short, aware that my next words will sound melodramatic to her.
“It’s worth saving,” I say.
Laurel, to my horror, scoffs.
In that moment, I know it’s not my former best friend sitting in front of me. It’s someone I can’t reach. I’ve been fighting for a friendship she might not even want anymore.
I stand up, rifling in my purse for Everett’s keys.
“Where are you going?” Laurel says behind me.
“I still have to find Everett,” I say.
“Why do you care so much?” she asks. She waves a hand toward the party. “What about Cooper? You have this perfectly great guy following you around all night, achefwith a kid and a house who wants to be with you, and you’re still chasing after someone you’ve been mad at for years now. It’s like you want to be disappointed sometimes, I swear. Why can’t you just be happy?”
It’s almost as if I don’t have room in my brain for anythingmore, can feel her words circling, but taking a while to settle. She’s not wrong. Cooper is great. Maybe I should be trying to find him, should have paid him more attention this week. But if being happy is the point, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world: It isn’t Cooper that would make me happy, wonderful as he may be.
“I can be happy,” I say to her, a vivid image, or maybe a memory, crystalizing in front of me. A cold pier, and warm hands, and hopes shared out loud. My life, but better. What I already have shared with someone who I can’t find right now. “Everett’s still missing,” I tell Laurel.
“He’s a grown man,” she says, lounging back in her seat. “He’ll come back when he wants to.”
“Everett never disappears,” I say.
“Who cares,” she mutters, sending a new flare of disbelief through me.
“Laurel,” I say. “Everett is our friend, whether you want him to be or not.”
“Yeah, for now.”
I should go, I know, give her space, let her enjoy her party, but I take a step closer. I don’t know this person, this Laurel, at all. “What does that mean?”
“What do you think it means?” she asks. “Everyone disappoints you. You used to agree with me about that.”
“No,youused to agree withmeabout that.”
“Same thing,” Laurel says.
“No, it isn’t,” I say. “Because I don’t believe that anymore.” It seems odd, to have this be the moment that fully clicks into place for me, when Laurel has just told me our friendship means nothing to her, that the funeral or whatever it is she’s thrown for herself tonight was also a funeral for our friendship. But I mean it. I’m tired of thinking that way, in such black-and-whiteterms, tired of not leaving any room for not only everyone else to be human, but also for myself.
There are a million ways I know I’ve worked myself into the corners I have. I’ve been stingy with second chances and I’ve expected the people I love to be superhuman, to never make mistakes, but for some reason, all of that feels foggy now. I don’t want Cooper, who hasn’t disappointed me once this week, who would probably do so many things perfectly until I got close enough to him to discover the crack in his immaculate veneer. I want Everett, who I’ve hurt, who has hurt me, whose flawed, human pieces I know, and have only made me love him more.
I wait for Laurel to say something, anything, to be the friend I used to know so well, but I can’t find any of it there. “Well, then, you’re the one who taught me,” Laurel says. “Everyone disappoints you.”
I feel it like she reached out and slapped me, heat radiating from the spot. I stare at her until she stands with a fed-up expression, swiping her hands on the skirt of her dress and starting to march past me.
“Well, I’m going,” I say before she’s out of earshot. She stops in her tracks, turns back to look at me. “And I give a shit about saving us, the people you called when you needed support. Not any of your internet friends, or all the people you hang out with in LA and Paris and Tokyo. Not your actual fucking sister. Us. And no matter how badly any of us have acted this week or in the past five years, we’re worth saving.”
I brush past her, headed in the direction of the door, Everett’s keys jangling in my hand.
“Don’t be so naive,” Laurel calls after me. I pause, not looking back at her. “We’ll never talk to each other again after this week.”
I frown to keep my chin from shaking. When I look backat her she’s watching me, artfully disheveled in her white dress, framed on all sides by her party, like even when she’s saying things like this, she can somehow still maintain perfection. She’s never felt more like a stranger to me than she does right now.
“If I find Everett, we’re leaving in the morning,” I say.
I walk away without another glance backward.
thirty-one
