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We’re both quiet for a long beat as I work to get my breath under control. I’m not going to break in front of this girl who has made my life so uncomfortable for so long.
“I think you should go,” I say.
Her chin drops, and she nods, defeat slumping her shoulders.
“Will you just…” she starts, resting her hand on the doorknob. “Will you at least tell Edie I came by?”
I blink up at her.
“Why?”
She shrugs. “She’s my best friend—my sister now—and she won’t talk to me. Neither of them will.” She rubs her toe into the carpet and tugs at the hem of her sweater. “She’s my only—they’re all I have.”
“That’s not true. The other girls—”
“The other girls are Edie’s friends. They only ever tolerated me because they love her.”
I take a deep breath. I’ve never wanted her to be miserable, only to stop making me unhappy. Part of me thinks I should relish this, revel in the victory of the moment. But there’s nothing victorious about this moment. Liza is at the lowest point in her life, truly alone, and I can’t bring myself to gloat.
“Yeah. I’ll tell her.”
Her eyes widen with something that looks remarkably like hope, an unfamiliar expression on her face.
“Thanks,” she says. “And I am sorry.”
I nod, and she lets herself out.
I sit with her words and the darkness for I don’t know how long. Then I open my phone and stare at the notification for six new unread messages from Zeke. My thumb hovers over the screen, and just as I’m about to open them and read his words, I remember what he said.
“I can’t just not talk to attractive women to make you more comfortable.”
Even if there’s a nugget of truth to his words, they still make my stomach ache. I swipe across the screen to delete his messages, and then toss my phone across the bed.
50
faye
It’s been a long week.I spent most of it in pajamas reading library books about bird migration, hair unwashed, blackheads camping out on my chin. On Wednesday, Edie took me for a facial and a haircut. She thought I didn’t notice her tucking away the gossip magazines when I arrived. I’d seen a text from a college friend who’d seen a certain unflattering photo of me leaving Edie’s wedding, puffy-eyed and at an unflattering angle. Of course the photo of him was amazing, and just so happened to be from when he wasarrivingat the wedding and featured a sexy-looking Liza in the background. I read this article on my phone while I sat under a space-age looking hair dryer and chugged cheap chardonnay.
When I emerged from the salon, smelling like chamomile tea and fresh starts, she frowned.
“Don’t you like it?” She fluffed the ends of my hair just kissing my shoulders in what my stylist called a ‘fun and flirty look at thirty.’
I didn’t tell her I’m still six years away from that. She drove me home where I went back to bed and my stack of bird books.
“What’s in these anyway?” Mom asked, holding up Sibley’s bird guide.
“Haven’t you ever wondered where all the birds will go when the ice caps melt?” I asked, not lifting my eyes.
“No, I haven’t.”
“They’re going nowhere. There’s nowhere to go. Nowhere to land. Their brains are going to overload from a lack of sleep because they’ll fly for so long and there won’t be anywhere for them to land. Just water. And Kevin Costner. They’re all just… going to die…”
“Hmm.”
She left me to my reading. Later, I overheard her on the phone with Teddy, her psychotherapist.
I read a scholarly paper from Cornell about the effects of climate change on migratory birds. For as long as I’d been in Portland, people had complained about how the weather was changing. I wondered if the swifts would someday fail to return to the chimney at Chapman Elementary, and if kids would stop sledding on cardboard and men would stop taking women there on dates.
