5. Bea
5
Bea
Of course, Charlie would pull out his laptop. He’s the biggest workaholic I know, and heaven forbid anything stand in his way of getting work done.
Seems like nothing’s changed. Charlie’s still the supersmart, super-dedicated nerd, despite growing up to be superhot.
Living next door to each other meant that I’d seen Charlie nearly every day for years. We’re the same age, so it was no surprise when we were often in class together, and then we started walking to school together, playing together, studying together...
I knew Charlie was smarter than me from day one, when I was trying to figure out how to get my swing untangled and Charlie helped me. It was a convoluted twist for a six-year-old to manage, but Charlie could figure it out. I thought it was magic.
By the time I was fifteen, we’d grown so close. Looking back, it seemed inevitable that we’d get together. What better person to fall in love with than your best friend?
I would give my left boob to have a best friend to fall in love with now.
We had five years of being each other’s firsts—first kiss, first date, first boyfriend/girlfriend, and a bunch of naughty NSFW firsts that I am not going to think about sitting in the car with Charlie. Even the summer he spent living with his grandma in Pithole, Pennsylvania (which, by the way, is named appropriately), wasn’t enough to tear us apart.
But Charlie’s education was.
By senior year, he hardly took any of the same classes I did. He was on the AP track and taking dual-credit courses at the local community college. I was a middling student who almost failed my tenth-grade science class.
I can admit my own faults, and I’m glad that at eighteen, I understood that my parents’ middle-class standing meant that they couldn’t afford to send four kids to college. Charlie understood it too, but he is so damn smart, he worked his ass off to get a full scholarship to Stanford.
Which left me behind in Mobile.
We’re driving along the Hudson and it’s full-on dark now. My grip on the steering wheel is tight, and I take a deep breath and loosen my fingers.
“Need me to take a turn driving?” Charlie asks.
“Nope.”
This is why I hate the holidays. Seeing Charlie for a week every December dregs up all kinds of memories that I spend the rest of the year blissfully ignoring.
Like the memories of constantly trying to coordinate schedules between the two of us just for a chance to talk on the phone Charlie’s freshman year of college, when we were trying to make the long-distance thing work.
Or the sheer frustration of not being able to catch up with bills and finding adulting to be so difficult, even though I had a full-time job as an office admin. I’d made the stupid mistake of buying a car that was too nice for me and then getting in a fender bender that ate up all of my savings when I’d almost had enough to fly out to California and see Charlie.
And now Charlie lives in the same city as I do. At least it’s a huge city, and the chances that I’ll run into him are slim. He might as well still live in San Francisco.
Next to me, Charlie closes his laptop and turns his face to the window. My phone tells me to exit and we pull away from the river and into the interior of the state.
I wonder what Charlie was working on. I asked Miles for an update about the sensor-data-targeting advertising issue that was brought up at the meeting, but they’re still experimenting.
Would Charlie do something unethical, maybe even illegal, to get ahead? I’m not sure. Ten years ago I would have said no. But what do I really know about Charlie now?
I startle a bit when Charlie speaks. “Are you glad we aren’t going to Pithole this year?”
“Yeah. Pithole was...” I struggle to think of the right word without offending Charlie. We always went to Pithole because that’s where his grandma had lived. It was a dying town, but when his grandma was alive, the Dunskys had, every December 22, packed up their son and Christmas presents and drove to Pithole to spend Christmas with his grandma.
When she died during our junior year of high school, the Dunskys invited my family to join them.
“It was a pit hole; you can say it.”
I wince, though pit hole is a much nicer word than I would use. In fact, it’s a much nicer word than what I used back then. My sisters and I, being catty teenagers who already thought anything to do with our family was uncool, had verbally roasted the place when we first saw it until, furious, my dad had dragged us aside and told us that ungrateful girls get their Christmas presents donated to charity.
“It was a pit hole,” I allow, “but it was our pit hole.”
“True. I guess we’ll have to find a new pit hole.” The way he says it is a little cheeky, and I bite my tongue before a that’s-what-she-said joke slips out. “Have you been upstate before?”
Psht. With my job, I travel for work, and not the other way around. Nash and I travel the world for our work, so there’s no way I have time to travel for fun. I barely have time to date. “No.”
“Me neither.”
There’s a moment of quiet while the streetlights flash past us. I don’t want to admit it, but I am excited to visit Here. There was very little to enjoy about Pithole and nothing to do outside the house (except join my mom on her walking expeditions or my dad on his five-times-a-day grocery store visits), and one week is plenty of time to build alliances and backstab over several Monopoly games, so we often got a serious case of cabin fever.
This year, there’s shopping, dining, skiing—no ice-skating, so I’ll have to rely on Tinder to help me discover a small-town romance instead—and the house we are renting is a significant upgrade from the cabin we would stay at in Pithole.
All that being said, our parents love the trips up north for the winter.
“I wonder why we’re not going back,” I muse.
Charlie turns to me, resting an elbow on the car door. “It might have been because the infamous Marinara Stain of 2022 was still present on the couch in 2023. I thought your mom was going to give herself a heart attack while disinfecting the house.”
I smile. She’d bought, like, eight different bottles of cleaning supplies and said that if a rental place is choosing to flip the couch cushions over instead of cleaning them, then who knows what else they skimp on. “My mom? Your dad was the one who went on and on about the fact that they charged us for damages and clearly they’d taken the money and run.”
There’s a flash of white teeth as Charlie smiles too. “He hates wasting money. Remember that one year after the ShopRite in Pithole had closed and Dad had wanted to stop at the Giant on the way in so that he could save gas?”
“Oh my god, yes. I couldn’t believe your mom put her foot down.” Charlie’s mom, Susan, is a pretty carefree, go-with-the-flow lady. But after an overnight drive, the last thing any of us wanted to do was shop for a week’s worth of food for nine people. “It makes it even more bizarre that we’re renting such a nice place in Here. It’s such an upgrade. I’m surprised our parents wanted to spend the money.”
There’s a beat of silence and I mentally kick myself. Long ago, our parents agreed to split the rental costs per person so the Dunskys aren’t footing a disproportionate bill. Money has always been a sore spot for the Dunskys, and I shouldn’t judge how they want to spend it. I don’t know how to recover from my faux pas, so I say nothing.
Charlie turns his face away from me and looks out the window again.