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“You want to go together?”
She nods.
I flip my keys in my hand and glance down at the bandage. “You’ll need to change that bandage every day. I can bring you new antibiotic ointment. Your parents’ tube was...”
“Ancient,” she says. “I can get some. Don’t worry.”
“Yeah.”
“You can pick me up,” she says, like it’s that easy. Like she’s that sure. I might not be sure of myself, but she helps.
“I’ll pick you up.”
Chapter Eight
Lulu
When my mother is stressed, she cleans and cooks. My father had to go into the hospital for a minor surgery when I was in undergrad and the house was spotless, the freezer filled with enough precooked frozen meals to feed them for the rest of the year. When my father is stressed, he shuts himself in his office to work. One of my first memories as a child was coming downstairs for a glass of water and finding him already dressed, reading on the couch at four in the morning, when he was up for tenure.
When I’m stressed I try to commit to their nervous tics, but end up failing at both. Thirteen minutes before Jesse is supposed to pick me up, my bathroom smells faintly of bleach but the shower stall isn’t clean and three books sit precariously stacked on the edge of my bed, having been taken down from the shelf but left unread.
Clothes surround me on the floor, piles of shorts and sundresses that I’ve pulled out of bins under my bed from last summer. When I’m on a date, I just have to impress one person, but when I’m part of a friendship study, suddenly I have to dress to impress any and all potential new pals.
A new email dings as I pace back and forth in my underwear, shaking out my hands. Before I even open my laptop, I just know. Yet, I open it anyway. It’s better than panicking half-naked, I guess.
Lu,
I’m starting this letter the same way I’ve started all the rest. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wish I could come up with something a little less banal and clichéd as “I have made a terrible mistake,” but I have.
As I’m sure you’ve already heard, we’ve broken up.
I had, in fact, not heard. “Contrary to your delusions of grandeur, I donotkeep tabs on the people who broke my heart,” I say primly. Which isn’t even true. I had to talk my mom through how to block them on all social media platforms for me, so I’d stop stalking them when I was lying in bed at three in the morning in nothing but an undershirt and a fine layer of cheeze-dust.
There are so many things I wish I’d done differently. Especially the way I left things—
Any continued self-flagellation is interrupted by a text message. I send the email to the trash and slam the laptop shut.
Jesse: omw. Be there in like 15 min?
“Crumbs.” I look down at my mostly naked self.
Jesse: It’s Jesse by the way.
Cute. In the end, I wear none of the clothes I’d laid out for myself, opting for jeans so I can play with dogs who might have jumping habits or claws in need of a trim. I feel nervous in a way I haven’t felt in a long time. Nervous but excited; this study is like being graded on friendship. And while I’ve not been successful at friendship in a while, I’ve always excelled at being graded.
Want to see lower cortisol levels, Dr. Cardiologist? A+.
Participants should be self-actualized by the end of the study, Dr. Psychologist? Gold star.
And yet, I still convulse in a full-body cringe when I walk down my driveway later and my mother calls, “Lu? Lulu?” She stops on the front steps of their house. “What are you doing, dear?”
I shield my eyes against the sun and yell, “A friend is picking me up. Cally.” I haven’t spoken to Cally since our lunch. I should probably text her. “She has a sports car so I’m going to meet her at the top of the drive.”
I’m thirty and I’m lying to my mom about where I’m going and who I’m with like a teenager about to make a really bad decision. The worst part is, it wouldn’t be difficult for my mother to tip over this poorly constructed house of cards. All she’d have to do is get her hair done at Cally’s mom’s salon in town.
So, I get an F in lying, I guess.
Mom comes down one more step. “Well, let me drive you to the road.” A habit we picked up in middle school, when the walk to the bus that stopped at the end of the drive seemed treacherous or just too cold in the middle of winter.
