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u/alfredlover
I don’t know you guys, I’m starting to feel weird about stuff. After that blind item that said no woman measures up to his last girlfriend and that’s why he’s never dating now, and those weird rumors about the memoir and then that picture on the mountain when he just looked gutted… what does it all mean?
I meanIdon’t think we went too far with the theories but a lot of people are turning on the theories and getting on her side and saying mistakes were made. Maybe he did like her? I mean she wasn’t that bad. She was really nice to them girls who were upset about him being sad.
She didn’t even get all up herself about the idea. She said they were wrong, that it had to be something else—then she said to send him a nice fan mail when his memoir comes out so he can feel good about his writing!
That’s pretty lovely of her considering the theory that said they broke up because he realized she was hideous and awful.
So I dunno.
Were we the baddies??
One Year Later
There were twenty-seven reasons to not go to the party.
She listed them all in a notebook she’d been saving, because it was too beautiful to actually use. You know, just to really underline how massively important these points were. They were fancy-paper-you-don’t-want-to-write-on important. And they definitely looked it, too, once they were all laid out. In fact, most of them were just general rules she’d abided by all her life, like:It’s a bad idea to spend time with a lot of posh people.
And the rest were, if anything, even more vital.
Because they were practically a handbook on how to avoid embarrassment.
Even though most of them were just variations onAlfie will be there.
He will see you with his eyes, she’d written as her number-three reason to not go. Then underneath it, in lettering that looked just a little bit more wobbly but no less thickly and firmly written:and he doesn’t want that, he doesn’t want it, if he did he would have texted you sometime in the last year.
But that was the thing, wasn’t it:
He hadn’t.
Last she’d heard, he had been on extended vacation. Someone had taken a selfie with him on some mountain in New Zealand, of all places. Them beaming and astonished in the best hiking getup she’d ever seen, him in just his old duffel coat—which she’d long suspected he’d had since school—looking like… well. Not as angry as she had predicted when she’d clicked on the story.
In fact, if anything he’d seemed strangely calm, or neutral, or something else that she couldn’t really understand but could sort of put a name to all the same. It seemed like his eyes were reaching for something, just a little bit.
Solitude, her mind supplied.
Some relief from your constant squawking and trying to persuade him to do things.
And that felt right. It felt really right. It made all the sense in the world.
So she wrote it down as number twelve on her list of reasons to not attend his book launch. Then she added:All you did was annoy the shit out of him. Which pained her a little more than she expected it to, after all this time. But in the end it felt better to do it. It felt bracing, like plunging into an icy ocean.
And she came out on the other side feeling stronger.
More resolved, it seemed like, to her.
So it was a real kick in the teeth to get a message from Beck, about ten minutes after she’d decided. Because the thing about Beck was—he had a real talent for talking her into things she didn’t think she could do. Like when he’d suggested she could absolutely write a novel about her recent experiences. That in fact, they were very interested in a Cinderella story like that, with the kind of happy ending real life never had. And especially as she had a little fan base now.
Then when she’d still been skeptical, he’d wielded Alfie against her, like a lethal weapon.He said that you would doubt yourself. But that you only did because you are so afraid of everything turning out terrible, even though it never possibly could when it was anything to do with you, Beck had told her. Then she’d had to spend the next five hours trying not to cry in between hashing out a proposal for him with her agent. A proposal for a novel that he had then contracted.
And that she was now writing.
As if maybe thingscouldturn out okay.
It was all right, sometimes, to have some hope.
Which was what she was thinking as he texted her:Why,you not coming to this would be like me not going to my own birthday party.So it was pretty much a lost cause at that point. And doubly so when she texted Connie about it. Because Connie had been furious about the whole thing ever since Mabel confessed. First at Mabel for not telling her about everything while it was happening. Then when Mabel had apologized and explained exactly why she had felt she couldn’t tell her, at Alfie for clearly being responsible for all the things that went wrong.
