Page 30 of Given Our History

My phone vibrates as I’m unlocking the front door. I fish it out of the pocket of my skinny jeans—a fashion blunder that Reagan keeps insisting on rectifying, because apparently flares and mom jeans are back in. Izzy’s smiling face has taken over my phone screen.

I slide to answer and lift the phone to my ear.

“I’m so sorry it’s taken me so long to call back.” She’s talking before I have the chance to say anything, rattling the words off quickly and a little breathless. Probably walking to her car, or at the gym climbing the StairMaster, or out running errands—Izzy’s largest issue with the phone is that she can’t sit still, so on the rare occasions that she does make a phone call, it’s usually when she’s in the middle of doing some sort of physical activity that doesn’t require too much focus. “Things have been completely bananas the last few months. Work is chaos and I had to renew my residence permit last month. Total nightmare.”

I smile even though she can’t see me. She accepted a TESOL position teaching schoolchildren in Lisbon five years ago and never left, so I imagine chaos to mean Portuguese kids learning how to curse in English. “I know the feeling. Well, not the residence thing, but life has been…” I trail off. I’m not sure I want to announce my application for tenure until I’ve secured it—it feels premature, somehow. “Interesting.”

“Good interesting, or bad interesting?” comes her eager voice.

I move into the kitchen, where I deposit the plastic Subway bag and reach into the overhead cupboard for a glass. Reagan steals her sandwich out of the bag and disappears down the hall, where the door to her bedroom closes with a snap. Apparently, we’re not eating together. Works for me, since I’ll probably be on the phone for a while, but Reagan has a special talent for making me feel less like an older sister and more like a parent to a hormonal teenager. “Just interesting.”

Izzy sighs. “Tell me about it. You’ll never believe who added me on Facebook.”

I pour myself some water from the Brita and settle onto one of the barstools at the kitchen counter. Light streams in through the curtainless window above the sink, tinged gold by the changing leaves of the old maple. “Brandi?” I guess.

“Mohammad Darvish.”

I pause in the middle of unwrapping my cold cut sandwich. There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while, but she managed to say it with as much ire as when we were teenagers. “He’s aware that no one uses Facebook anymore, right?” I ask.

“You updated your profile picture like last week.”

“I’m old and uncool, as Reagan likes to remind me. Isn’t Darvish supposed to be some big tech guy or something?” Last I heard, he was working in Silicon Valley, but that was years ago, now.

“He’s a programmer for some dating app because he obviously can’t get a date the old-fashioned way,” she rattles off. “But that’s not important. We got to messaging. He mentioned something about Teddy accepting a temporary teaching position at a school in Maryland.”

I slow my chewing. We’ve avoided talking about Teddy ever since the falling-out happened, because an argument with Izzy had followed not long after—nothing on the same scale, but when I’d called her to complain that he was ignoring my calls, she’d told me that I deserved to have them ignored after turning him away the way I did. Cold-hearted, I believe were her exact words. I resented her for it at the time, but it was the truth.

“Is that true?” she demands.

“Yes,” I admit.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I hesitate. I’m not sure why I didn’t tell her—I told myself it was because I didn’t want to bother her, but that’s maybe not the whole truth.

Izzy and I were never meant to be best friends. She had a whole number of friends away from camp, and I had Teddy. Izzy’s wonderful, and I love her with all my heart, but we don’t have all that much in common. She thinks my history books are horribly boring and my taste in music is garbage. I think she’s flighty and occasionally too honest for her own good. We can recognize those things about each other, but it doesn’t mean we love each other any less. It just means we’re not each other’s person, and that’s okay.

But over the years, it’s like I’ve defaulted to her, and she’s accepted it sort of like one accepts a stray cat. It starts with setting kibble on the porch to make sure the poor thing doesn’t starve, and then suddenly there’s cat hair all over your pillow and you’re scooping out a litter box on your hands and knees.

“It didn’t seem like the sort of thing I should bother you about,” I say. “I don’t know, Iz. It’s just…” I trail off, munching on a potato chip. “It’s complicated, you know?”

“Is it?” she challenges.

I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to say to that. In her mind, it’s probably not all that complicated. I’m the lost cat on the found flyer and this is her opportunity to shove me back into Teddy’s waiting arms, except it’s not, because I can’t just take back the things I said. I’m about to explain as much when Reagan enters the kitchen, combat boots clopping on the tile. My eyes narrow as they sweep over her outfit, taking in the cropped tee and pleather shorts. I hold the phone away from my face. “Where are you going?”

“What?” asks Izzy’s faraway voice.

Reagan grabs one of her Diet Cokes out of the fridge, shrugging. “A party.”

“What party?” I press.

“It’s just this thing with Kappa Sig. Nothing too wild.”

“Is that Reagan?” Izzy shouts into the phone, loud enough that we can both hear her. “Tell her I haven’t forgotten about my flat iron.”

I ignore the flat iron in favor of more pressing issues. “Will there be alcohol?”

“It’s a frat party, what do you think?” Reagan pops the tab on her Coke and takes a sip as she backs toward the door. “Even I know you’re not that out of touch.”