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She doesn’t acknowledge my question, even though I don’t mean it in a negative way. “Do you realize that neither of you really talk about when you were friends?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Not really. What, five years? And I dated him last year. Itcould have come up at any time during our relationship, but it barely did. It was almost like I was the one who introduced you two.”
“You kind of were.” Holden and I have only had one class together, way back in sophomore year, and spoke about two words the entire semester, neither of them particularly friendly. He met Corrine at the thrift shop last year on his search for cameras and they started flirting, and I was like “Oh yeah, Holden, we were friends before middle school,” and that was about it. I wasn’t going to wax poetic about how we were annoyingly inseparable best friends until the bottle pointed to me and he refused to kiss me. It’s kind of a weird thing to throw into your friend’s face when she’s falling in love with the guy. I let her have her moment; what’s so wrong with that?
She offers a sympathetic smile. “I know I’m not, like, the poster child for talking about feelings because it makes me itchy, but... I don’t know. I feel like he didn’t exist before I knew him.” She scrunches her face. “Does that make sense?”
“Yeah. Like he wasn’t, I don’t know, fully fleshed out.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
I think of how his family didn’t even know he had a girlfriend. How there wasn’t even a whisper that his parents divorced. “I guess that’s just who he is now. He’s whoever the people around him need him to be and nothing more.” I bite my lip. “He didn’t used to be like that.”
So, what happened?
A silence falls over us as the band finishes sound check.
“What’s next?” she asks. “Are you almost finished filming?”
It’s the question I have been dreading answering, even if she never got around to asking. Because of course I have to tell her. It doesn’t matter that they broke up, that he didn’t cheat and I said I wouldn’t lie, and that means no hiding things or not telling her things—especially when I know she’d want to know and would feel hurt for not knowing if she did eventually find out. But I hadn’t figured out a way to casually be like “So, yeah, I’m going to New York with Holden and we’re going to stay in the same hotel room, but it’s cool because we’ll have separate beds.”
Because, after thinking about it more and more, it’s not cool. It doesn’t matter how far apart the beds are, or why we’re going, because Corrine isn’t comfortable with me working with Holden no matter what she says or who she starts to date. This is the uncomfortable eighth-grade “I bought this shirt after Corrine showed me hers and now she’s mad, but saying she’s not” experience all over, but with a person she knows intimately instead of a shirt we can both own and regret purchasing a year later.
“We should be wrapping soon, actually.” I reach for my necklace. My hand drops. “The final event is this weekend.”
She turns in her seat toward me. “What happens at this one?”
“It’s a huge obstacle course designed likeFantastic Lorenzo’s Planet.” I don’t wait to see if the name registers for her because we played the game in middle school at sleepovers. “It should be pretty cool. Five players go in and one comes out.”
“So it’s like the Hunger Games?”
“No. I just mean only one person wins.”
She nods. “Where is it? Maybe I’ll go with you to keep you company. Help you film.”
My gut clenches. “It’s at the Javits Center, in New York.”
Her face falls. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
The city is three to four hours away depending on mode of travel and traffic and, if you’re taking the train like Holden and I will be, how many stops along the way. We could do the train rides and the event in one day if the event weren’t starting at eight o’clock at night on Saturday. The last train leaving Penn Station for Harrisburg leaves during what will be the equivalent of exit interviews with the Vice and Virtual web series team.
Hence, staying the night.
“The event starts at eight o’clock. In the evening.” Maybe if I lay this out piece by piece, she can assume the rest and I won’t have to say it. “We’re taking a train up on Saturday and then coming home Sunday morning.”
Her eyes flick to mine for a brief second. “So, is the event, like, all night?” She’s jumping through hoops to not be right, just like I’m jumping through hoops to not tell her.
“No, it’s only a few hours for everything. His mom got a hotel room so we don’t have to be out all night.”
“Oh, so she’s going?”
“No.” Guilt fizzles in my stomach. I could throw up.Where’s Juniper?Let’s go back to getting her to break up with Devon Miles Smith. “It’ll just be the two of us. At one point, I was told Taj was going, but he’s not.”
Corrine stares at me for a second. Blinks once. Twice. “One hotel room?”
