Chapter 22 #2
“And his friends,” I stopped walking to say, “dared him to kiss Olivia when they had the chance.” But Margaret kept walking.
This wasn’t evidence she wanted to consider.
“Well, none of that was evil of you,” I said.
“We don’t have to pretend it’s not fun to hook up with someone that other people also find attractive.
” Margaret compulsively took her phone out of her pocket and then put it back again.
She sped up a little. I had to quicken my step to keep pace.
“It’s messed up you thought you didn’t have to tell me about kissing Eleanor because you thought Eleanor wouldn’t,” she said, returning the conversation to me.
“It’s not like you tell me every time someone rejects you,” I countered.
“El didn’t reject you.”
“She left me on read for weeks.”
“It’s Eleanor! You think she’s going to say she likes you via text message? You think she’s going to, like, etch her feelings for you into stone because you kissed one time?”
“Fair.”
I had considered this, but I believed it more coming from Margaret. The wood-plank path widened into a lookout point. Binoculars had been soldered to a metal rod. We stopped to watch a blue heron lift off a log in flight.
“And Bea really let Olivia kick you out?” I asked, worried I wouldn’t be able to explain my secrecy about Eleanor if Margaret pushed further. “She should have stood up for you,” I said.
Margaret shrugged. “She knows she doesn’t have to.” Whatever happened, Bea would still be Margaret’s cousin, whereas Olivia was only her friend.
“And you’re okay with that?”
“I mean, I get it.”
I wanted to protest that she shouldn’t get it, that she wasn’t obligated to be understanding about Bea’s behavior, that I’d never have done the same, that I’d never have abandoned her like that, even if she’d done something wrong, for the sake of preserving someone else’s feelings—except that I didn’t know that anymore.
I didn’t know what I’d do if she hurt Eleanor.
We sat down on the park’s single bench. The plaque on its backrest dedicated the seat to a dead woman.
Margaret pushed her hundred bracelets up and down her wrist.
“Why hadn’t you told them already?” I asked.
“I was waiting for a fun time.”
“You mean you didn’t think they’d invite you out with them if they knew you had a head start?”
Margaret allowed my interpretation to stand.
“Pun,” she said, with a point of the finger at me, which I waved away.
“How much were you texting him?”
“A medium amount,” she said.
“Still? Recently?”
She slid a breezing piece of hair behind an ear. “Not un-recently.”
“Are you sad?”
“Somewhat,” she said.
I wrapped my arms around her and put my chin on her head.
“I’m sorry, bb,” I said. “Should we go throw a tomato at him?”
“Ugh, maybe,” she said. “I honestly would feel better about it if I could feel worse. Like if we hooked up yesterday and then I found this out, it would be a betrayal. But instead, we hooked up two months ago, and then he began a new thing, and then I told people about it yesterday like it was still important to me.”
We sat for a moment in silence, sweat on our skin, wind on our faces.
“You know El gave me a physical, printed-on-a-piece-of-photo-paper naked picture of herself by putting it in my purse and never telling me?”
Margaret’s sadness, her vulnerability, called forth the same from me. Margaret nodded.
“Like, what was I supposed to do with that?”
“Well, you could have sent her one back.”
“No. I couldn’t have. We all know I couldn’t have.”
“Both of you are obsessed with being in control of what happens.”
“I’m not,” I protested. “El is. Am I?”
Margaret was my most essential witness to myself. No one else could tell me who I was like she could—not my mom, who read me inevitably as her daughter—and I’d deliberately prevented Margaret from doing so.
“Eleanor likes to fuck around, but precisely, like in a precise manner of her choosing, in order to find out what happens as a result—” Margaret began.
“That’s controlling,” I interrupted her to say.
“That’s Eleanor’s version of controlling,” she corrected me before continuing. “You never want to fuck around in the first place.”
“I fuck around,” I said defensively.
Margaret rolled her eyes. “You absolutely do not,” she said. “You try to think all the way through what would happen if you did and then skip over actually having to do it. One of the eighty text messages you sent El was a picture of a leaf.”
She’d seen my text messages?
“That was such a cool leaf though,” I protested. It had been bedewed and reticulate, veins radiating delicately across its green surface.
“She showed you her boobs!”
“Not yet she hadn’t!”
Margaret waved away my objection to chronology. We laughed. I took her point.
“So you’re saying a leaf covered in tiny drops of water isn’t an equivalent offering to showing someone your naked body?
These are the mistakes I make when you’re not available to instruct me,” I joked, but I did yearn for her instruction, for the possibility that she knew how I should behave and would tell me, or at least that we could figure it out together.
Margaret shoved me a little. “You know you don’t have to worry about me and El kissing, right?” she asked. “We don’t want to hook up with each other. It was just our mouths touching.”
“Don’t say that,” I responded, remembering in that moment that Margaret had hurt Eleanor, and that I did have to do something.
I had to at least make sure Margaret understood.
“That’s why El is mad at you—for acting like she didn’t do you a favor by kissing you in front of a bunch of people, for acting like two girls kissing doesn’t mean anything when you know it does to her. ”
“El is mad at me?” Margaret asked, and sighed. “Of course if El’s mad, she has to get mad in secret.”
“You were mad at me in secret,” I pointed out.
“It wasn’t a secret. You knew I was mad at you, and you still didn’t fix what you’d done wrong.”
I felt strangely proud of Margaret for saying this and grateful because with other people she might have hurried away from the conflict, but with me she kept pointing out what I’d done wrong, the inconsistencies in my logic, and this was how I knew she wanted to forgive me and believe it.
“I didn’t really know you were mad at me,” I said. “I thought maybe you just wanted new friends.”
Margaret shook her head. “I like hanging out with lots of people, but none of them are you and me.”
“No,” I said. “They’re not.”
She sighed. “I sent him such a dramatic text message,” she said. Then she stood up and tossed her phone into the marsh.
“Margaret!”
“What?” she said.
She started laughing. I started laughing. Then she started crying, and the invisible life of the marsh—the birds and frogs and bugs and fish—rose up to join her in keening. I wiped the tears from her cheeks, and we took a picture of ourselves on my phone, for posterity.