Chapter Fifteen #3
“No, you’re not. Would a selfish person plan a charity festival?”
Yes, I can’t stop myself from thinking. Yes, I would, if I was doing it to get my old job back.
But I don’t want to think about that. I certainly don’t want to admit to it. I just want to keep sitting here, on this overpriced towel, while Marina tells me the things I’ve always wanted to hear.
“I don’t think you’re selfish,” she says. “I’m sorry I ever said that.”
“I’m sorry about what I said. I’m sorry about not telling you when I was back in Greenstead at the end of the summer. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see you. I just felt bad about letting you down.”
“Yeah, well.” She swallows and looks down at her shoes, playing with a shoelace.
“That summer was the start of kind of a rough period for me. I thought my best friend was done with me. That internship was so boring. And the next semester just got shittier. We had that stupid fight. I started seeing someone who dumped me out of the blue. I came close to flunking a course and almost losing my scholarship. I was thinking about dropping out and living at home. Everything just got to be too much, and—”
“I wasn’t there,” I finish, wincing at the realization. Marina shrugs in silent acknowledgment. “You never told me.”
“I didn’t think I needed to,” she replies quietly.
I think back to my sophomore year. I was preoccupied with my classes, deciding on a major, being so excited to be out of Greenstead and in a new city—a city I didn’t want to leave.
“You posted less on social media,” I recall.
Marina’s posts were so prolific our freshman year of college: anecdotes about life on campus, pictures of coffee cups with captions about late-night study sessions, group photos with her dorm mates.
Just as I was eager to head to Georgetown and lose myself in a big city, Marina took comfort in the fact that her university, William the next, a scenic view of a marsh-filled hiking trial on Jamestown Island. She was happy, or so I thought.
There did come a point when she was posting less, and less, and less. But at the time, I thought she’d just gotten swept up into her own life, much in the same way I had. I thought she’d finally seen the beauty of life outside Greenstead and was clinging to it as tightly as I was.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have reached out to you. I was just so in my own head about things, and thinking you were still mad at me, that it felt easier to ignore it all.” I pull my knees up to my chest and turn to face Marina. “Do you want to talk about it now? What you were going through?”
Marina loops a shoelace around her finger, winding it and unwinding it.
“Nothing all that unique,” she says with self-deprecating laugh.
“It was partly feeling isolated because I lost touch with my old dorm mates. They all got places together and I had to dorm with random freshmen. And the rest of it was having an identity crisis. At nineteen,” she says, rolling her eyes.
“I went in thinking I was going to major in music, but I hated it. I kept trying to love it, but that just made me hate myself for not loving it. I failed a class, I got depressed, my mom made me see a therapist, and that helped me figure things out. I dropped music, took an education class on a whim, and I found my way again.” She meets my gaze. “But I still missed my best friend.”
“I missed you too,” I murmur. How easy it would have been, to pick up the phone and give her a call. To stop thinking about my own insecurities and realize my best friend needed me. “I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend,” I say. “But…I’d like to be, now.”
“Thanks,” Marina says quietly. “I’d like that, too.”
“So we can be friends again?” I ask, hope rising in my chest. “For real?”
When Marina nods, I reach over and pull her into a hug, and she squeezes my shoulders in kind.
It’s freeing to not have to limit myself to polite social convention anymore.
To know that I can squeeze her with all my might, enough to pull a groan out of her.
That if I can’t hear her, I don’t have to restrict myself to the usual two whats to avoid awkwardness as I do for strangers and acquaintances.
I can ask her to repeat herself all day long until I understand her, and she’ll do it.
Such are the laws of best friendship, and we’re finally beholden to them again.
“I’m sorry I went off about Ryser on Nancy’s show,” Marina says when we pull away.
“You were drunk,” I remind her.
“Yeah, but I could have stopped myself if I’d thought about it. Ryser doesn’t seem that bad if they’re willing to help out with the festival. And I trust your judgment.”
I let out a dark laugh. “I don’t know if you should.”
“Too bad,” Marina says, elbowing me in the side, “because I do.”
That’s something I need to absorb for a second, the notion that Marina trusts me. I certainly don’t. But I decide to take her at her word. I want to slip her comment in my pocket like a stone and rub it smooth every time I need a reminder that someone believes in me.
“I’m sorry I got mad at you,” I say. “You were just saying what you feel. I can’t blame you for the way you feel about Ryser.”
“I can’t blame you for believing in them,” Marina replies.
A quiet peace settles over us. We lie back and watch the fireworks for a while longer.
We finish off the funnel cake, and the taste transports me right back to every time I’ve been here, nearly all of them with Marina.
The laughter, the roller-coaster-induced exhilaration, the unbridled joy that feels so alien to me now.
“I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun,” I say, staring up at the sky.
Marina turns to me. “Really?” She asks it in the way she has where she’s clearly trying to be subtle.
“Isn’t DC supposed to be, like, way more fun than Greenstead?
” The light mockery in her tone makes me smile.
I’m sure I was insufferable when I was rambling to her about the wonders of DC my freshman year of college.
I stick my tongue out at her. “It is.”
“Then why aren’t you having fun?”
“No one to have fun with,” I say with a shrug.
“No friends?”
I busy myself by using my fork to scoop up a stray strand of leftover funnel cake. “I have a work friend or two.” Which is a bit of a stretch. Selma’s my only actual work friend. I’m not sure who else I’d count. Bill, maybe. That’s a sad thought.
“And outside of work?” Marina asks.
I shrug again. “I’ve just been focused on working hard and retiring early. I can have fun when I’m forty.”
“Did you ever adopt a dog?”
That was all I talked about as a kid. I wasn’t allowed to have a dog growing up because my dad was allergic, so I fantasized endlessly about adopting one as soon as I was old enough to live on my own.
I was drawn to their sweet temperaments, their playful energy, wet noses, wagging tails.
Dogs don’t care if you’re awkward, or if you mishear their bark as a woof.
Dogs are pure joy. And I do want that joy.
Just not when I’m living in an apartment the size of a matchbox.
“Not yet,” I reply. “But as soon as I move to a bigger place, I will.” I keep my words light, hoping Marina will cut the line of questioning. But she’s not done yet.
“Do you…date?”
Concentrating on straightening the tines of the plastic fork in my hand, I say, “I can date when I’m forty.
” I toyed with dating apps in my early twenties, until right in the thick of the palm oil controversy, I met someone who was interning at a legal office that was suing Ryser.
We’d gotten along so well up until I learned that fact, exchanging easy banter and accidental-on-purpose nudges under the table.
But as soon as he dropped that comment about doing research for a case against Ryser, I clammed up.
What was I thinking, dating an environmental lawyer in training while I was practically abusing orangutans for a paycheck? How could I justify that?
After that, I spoke about my job only in vague terms, and we dated for another couple of months.
But the banter didn’t feel easy anymore.
I spent too much time in my head, overthinking my every word, until finally I broke it off and swore off dating until I could be someone I was proud of. That hasn’t happened yet.
“If that’s what you want to do,” Marina says after a pause. “Sounds kind of lonely to me.”
She’s not wrong, but I don’t tell her that. “Are you lonely?” I ask, turning the focus on her.
She runs a finger along the plastic sun on her Solar Summit cup. “Sometimes, I guess.”
“I saw a save-the-date in your room,” I say carefully. “I didn’t know you and Jess were engaged.”
Marina swallows. “Yeah, we broke things off last year. But we’re moving on.”
I have to stop myself from smirking. “I don’t know if either of you has moved on. From the way I saw Jess looking at you at the mayor’s office, they definitely have not moved on.”
Marina dips her head, but not before I catch her smiling into her cup. “Shut up.”
So I do.
We continue to lie there, drink our lemonade, take in the dazzling magic of the fireworks above, and bask in the joy of friendship renewed.