Chapter 19
I spent the next few days feeling horrible. I masturbated sadly and took naps. At night, I stayed up, staring out my window at the moon and thinking grandiose thoughts about my loneliness.
Margaret had never really been mad at me before.
I’d been mad at her, and she’d been irritable with me.
She’d canceled our plans and taken too long to text me back and hung out with other people, but her resistance to outright conflict meant she’d never quite accused me of doing anything wrong.
She’d certainly never accused me of an outright breach of our friendship.
The presence of her name in my phone moved gradually lower in the queue of my text messages, neither of us saying anything.
A hard pebble of dread knocked around in my stomach.
Eleanor didn’t say much either. She appeared to be experiencing a vulnerability hangover from having communicated so much to me at the fair and, as was her by-then established habit, she withdrew.
She claimed in the group chat to be very busy with tennis practice.
Was the purpose of this message to remind me that somewhere within a five-mile radius of my house she was then wearing pastel-colored miniskirts and shouting violently whenever she stroked a forehand into the corner?
Regardless of intent, the message had this effect.
As a result, I was at home on Thursday morning and available to be tricked by my mother into running an errand with her.
I’d already agreed to escort her to the bakery to buy sandwiches for lunch because if I asked her to bring me back a cookie, she’d remind me that a person should only have one dessert a day and decline, but if I went to the bakery with her, then I could order the cookie at the counter myself.
My mom respected driving anywhere as a reason to buy dessert. So, she had me in the car.
“Why are we here?” I asked in the parking lot of the pharmacy we’d just turned in to unannounced.
She said my dad had a prescription that needed picking up.
I couldn’t stay in the car, because its seats were black, the lot had no shade, and the sun beat down with relentless enthusiasm.
When the automatic glass doors of the store parted, its refrigerated air breathed onto my neck and made me shiver.
I wanted to get home as soon as possible.
Out in public, I felt exposed. I could run into Margaret or Eleanor or their mothers or one of my mother’s acquaintances or anyone at any minute, and I felt a vehement fear of being perceived or having to account for myself.
“Why are we doing this now, though?” I asked. “You could have come back later.” Later, when I wasn’t in the middle of an ongoing crisis, whenever and if ever that would be.
“Would you have preferred to leave the house twice?” my mom asked while she shook a red plastic shopping basket loose from its stack.
“No, you could have come back by yourself,” I said.
I knew this was a mean, fundamentally illogical, petulant, childish thing to say and that I’d definitely say more similar things if I didn’t remove myself from my mother’s presence that minute, so I stalked into the hair-care aisle and began examining labels.
Pharmacies are ugly, I purposefully thought to myself about the white metal aisles and fluorescent lighting.
In fact, I loved pharmacies and their bizarre assortment of offerings, like the seasonal aisle, which at that time of year contained both water guns and purses, but I couldn’t risk any resulting amelioration of mood.
Once I stopped being angry, I’d have to start being sad.
I wanted to feel only that my friends were terrible, careless people.
I knew that they loved me. People who love you do not, however, exclusively behave in your best interest. Still, in the whole time we’d been friends, none of us had ever acted with the express purpose of hurting each other. My throat felt dry with misery.
My mother perused the aisles at a full meander. I’d never seen the woman in a hurry in my life. Her height meant I could watch her brown-and-silver head of hair on its slow journey from the first-aid section to the aisle with tissues and toilet paper.
I told myself that maybe if Eleanor had kissed me twice, I would have told Margaret.
That if she’d texted me back or taken off her shirt in my presence instead of in a picture she didn’t even tell me she’d given, I would have said something.
If she’d made whatever existed between us real by acknowledging its reality.
But then I remembered that in fact she had acknowledged its reality, because she’d told Margaret.
She just didn’t tell me she’d done so. Because she was Eleanor, I hadn’t thought she’d want to tell anyone.
Since she’d acted like kissing me was a secret, I thought it was supposed to be.
But Margaret was her best friend, and you tell your best friend when you kiss someone.
You tell your best friend everything, including other people’s secrets.
Once Eleanor told Margaret, Margaret should have told me she knew, but I should have already told Margaret about Eleanor in the first place, even if Eleanor hadn’t wanted me to, for the same reason Eleanor had told Margaret: Margaret was my best friend, and I always told her everything.
For the first time, I hadn’t wanted to, which was why I didn’t, in the parking lot, immediately apologize to Margaret.
A stubborn voice within me said I hadn’t been wrong to keep the secret, though when I asked this voice further questions about my behavior, it had very little to say.
When my mom finally got into line for the prescription counter, I joined her. If she asked the pharmacist a question when she got to the front, I thought I might expire.
“It’s freezing in here,” I said. She responded by sending me back to find her preferred brand of probiotics. “Why do you forget something every time we enter a line?” I asked.
“Because I’m managing the day-to-day existence and mental and emotional well-being of three people simultaneously,” she responded, then answered her phone on its first ring.
She said things like this to me repeatedly, but I couldn’t understand them then.
I couldn’t understand the nature of her life’s work or the incredible feat of its intelligence, the keeping of all of us alive enough to pursue our personal plotlines, or what that keeping entailed.
I recognized many aspects of the project of living as arbitrary and so made the mistake of considering them optional.
All the time with my mother I wondered, Do we really have to be doing this?
My phone vibrated with a message from Eleanor, the first since her note about tennis.
I deposited the probiotics into my mom’s basket and signaled I’d meet her by the car.
Whatever El sent me, I wanted to look at it by myself.
Outside, midday heat cooked the parking lot blacktop.
There were plenty of open spaces. I leaned my hip against the car door and then jerked backward, the olive-green metal blazing against my bare thigh.
I had to use my hand to shade the screen of my phone while I opened her message.
I’d sent Eleanor my picture from the fair via DM instead of text as an offer to ignore that she’d been ignoring me.
Eleanor didn’t like explaining herself, and she didn’t really know how to do it.
Among the three of us, for the most part, Margaret told stories, I explained them, and Eleanor asked provocative questions.
Sending her the picture this way also meant I knew when she opened it.
Seen Saturday had read the little gray text beneath my message.
Saturday was the night of the fair. Had Eleanor spent the days since determining how to reply?
She’d liked my picture—a heart appeared in its lower left corner—and she’d sent back a screenshot of a Sim swooning.
I liked the screenshot. Now what? What was I supposed to do?
How do you turn a person into your girlfriend when you’re currently mad at them and ultimately unclear on their feelings for you?
I didn’t have anyone to ask, so I spent the drive to the bakery reading the internet, which had plenty of advice on the general topic of best friends to lovers but could not instruct me specifically on how to exist in relation to Eleanor or tell me whose turn it was to do what.
What are the steps of loving? They exist uniquely between every two people who attempt to climb them.