Chapter 22 #2
“What?” Puck is picturing Damon in tears, his vision of graduating into manhood shattered.
“That he was relieved.” She takes a sip of the blue concoction in her glass.
“That he could tell my heart was somewhere else but he didn’t want it to be true, and he was too afraid to ask me if it was.
He said he felt like he was dreaming, and that as much as it hurt, he was glad I brought him back to reality. ”
Jesus, Puck really underestimated him, didn’t they? Lena called him “nurturing” and Mia called him “sweet” and neither, apparently, was lying. Puck even saw glimmers of Damon’s softer side in the Court that day, but they ignored them.
“Mia, I’m so sorry I ruined your wedding,” they say once there’s enough silence to squeeze in the apology. Whatever else Mia wants to get off her chest, Puck needs to lead with as direct and forthright a mea culpa as possible.
But Mia has more to say. It sounds as though she spent much of her drive rehearsing it.
“Yesterday, I felt like I didn’t want to see you again, Puck.
Not ever. But then this morning, I realized I wasn’t crying half as much over Damon or even Zander as I was about you,” she says, flatly.
“Marrying Damon would have been wrong. Eventually I would have realized I had lost myself. You were right about that.”
There is no joy in hearing this. Not anymore. It’s clear from her voice, drained of its usual singsongy lilt, that Mia’s not here to praise Puck’s acumen in matters of the heart.
“Mia, I’m really—” they start to say, ready to skip to the groveling part, but she cuts them off.
“What you did was wrong, though,” she continues. “It was my life to ruin, Puck, not yours. You’ve always wanted to protect me, but sometimes being someone’s friend means letting them make their own mistakes.”
“Even if it means letting you become someone you’re not?” Puck can’t help themself. Some piece of them still genuinely wants to know where the line is.
“I’m a person, Puck. Not your doll,” Mia says. “If I wanted to marry Damon, I would have done it. You wouldn’t have to like it.”
“I know, I know, and—”
“Friends are honest with each other. You made it clear how you felt at the hotel bar that first day, but everything after that should have been my choice, not yours,” and then Mia finally starts to lose her cool, some passion reentering her voice.
“Like, Jesus Christ, Puck, you had a diagram! That’s crazy!
Even you have to know that’s crazy, right? ”
Puck can’t maintain eye contact with Mia anymore.
They look down at the dirty thin-pile carpet instead, wondering if it was ever another color before it became a dingy brown.
They wish they could dissolve into it, becoming just another layer of grime in decades of accrued sediment.
“I wanted you to be happy, but I went about it in the wrong way,” Puck says, but even then, they still feel like they’re still defending themself too much. “In an inexcusable way,” they add.
“If you felt so strongly about it,” Mia says, making a face at the sip of energy drink she has just finished swallowing, “why didn’t you just level with me, instead of talking in riddles and playing literal games?”
“And you would have taken that well?” Puck stares into the green abyss of their glass, still afraid to meet Mia’s gaze.
“I don’t know!” she shouts. “Maybe I wouldn’t have taken it great!
But it would have been a hell of a lot better than where we ended up!
Never in a million years did I think inviting you to my wedding would end in us sitting in some shitty fucking motel drinking fucking Monster.
I’m trying to get somewhere in my life, Puck, and you’re, well, stuck. ”
Stuck. The word hits them square in the chest. After graduation, Puck had started to pity Mia instead of envying her aura of beautiful ease.
She was barely getting by in New York, while Puck got a plum promotion at Homewreckers.
Zander’s drinking turned her home life into chaos while Puck enjoyed the comforts of living alone on an ample salary.
But at least Mia lived. The last decade of Puck’s time could only be summarized as a series of escalating job titles; Mia had peaks and valleys, rapids and eddies.
She reached into the core of things that Puck would never—and maybe will never—experience: love and loathing, desperation and longing, need and loss.
Was Mia the one pitying Puck all this time?
And was their invite to the wedding ever in question?
God, Puck realizes with a wallop, of course it was.
They had always assumed that there was a shared approach to friendship among the Emory crew—that they could not talk for months, even years, and pick things right back up where they left off.
But Mia has been moving in real time while Puck has been frozen in place.
It would have stung if Mia had decided not to invite them, but Puck wouldn’t have been able to blame her, either.
How was Mia supposed to know that Puck still considered her their best friend without the evidence to back it up?
That visit to New York was three years ago now.
If future anthropologists found their phones, they might assume Mia and Puck were acquaintances at best.
“You’re right,” Puck says, trying to stop the emotion welling in their throat before giving up on containing it.
“Mia, God, I’m so sorry. I messed it all up.
Your wedding, our friendship, everything.
I’ve just been fucking working this whole time, you know?
I think maybe I never grew up, and I’ve just been hiding from the world on that stupid show. And then I took it all out on you.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re having some big realizations,” Mia says, finishing off the rest of her glass and standing up. She’s leaving already? Puck needs at least another hour to beg for forgiveness. They’ve hardly begun to dissect how pathetic they feel.
“Please don’t go,” they say, but Mia is already walking toward the exit.
Puck stands up to follow her, taking a few short steps, but Mia pivots in place just before reaching the door.
No anger remains in her eyes, only disappointment.
“I didn’t come here to help you learn how to be a person, Puck.
That’s your job. I came here to make sure you knew how badly you fucked up. ”
“I do, I really do,” Puck says.
“Do you, though? Because you didn’t just break my heart. You broke Robyn’s, too.”
It’s hard to believe given the last image Puck has in their head of Robyn is of her trembling and irate, refusing to look at them.
Hell, Puck figured by now she was probably burning them in effigy, igniting an enormous wicker person on the Athenian lawn.
But heartbreak? Puck can’t deny they shared something with her—something that felt forgotten, familiar, and brand new all at once.
Mia’s right: They are missing some essential piece of being human, but the sensations they experienced stargazing with Robyn are good leads to follow to get back on track. Puck brushes away their tears.
“What do you mean I broke her heart?” Puck asks.
“I think she was falling in love with you, you fucking idiot,” Mia says, then pauses, choking down an unexpected sob, like she can’t bear what she wants to say next.
“Mia—”
“You’re so incredible, Puck. That’s what hurts so much about this.
I really love you. I always have. For a second during sophomore year, you even made me wonder whether I was gay.
And your show isn’t stupid. I’ve watched every single episode, even in the years you didn’t call me at all.
I’ve been telling everyone I meet in Raleigh that my ‘best friend’ works on it.
Except at some point that started to feel like a lie.
Because my best friend can’t just be some cool person I knew in college who doesn’t talk to me anymore, you know? A best friend has to actually care.”
Puck sits down on the edge of the bed, bowled over by the force of their own shame.
“What can I do?” they plead. “What can I do to not lose you?”
But they can tell from the hardening of Mia’s expression that she’s done all the emotional work she was willing to do on this detour.
She’s actually going to leave now—and it’s going to be even more torturous to know that she’ll be back in her childhood bedroom for a while, just across I-20 from Puck’s place in Decatur.
“I get to decide when to forgive you,” Mia says, shoving her hands in the pouch of her hoodie, car keys jingling softly as her fingers find them.
“If I forgive you. It’ll take a long time to trust you again.
For all I know, another notepad is going to turn up showing that you planned for us to meet in this motel all along. ”
“I’m not that smart,” Puck protests.
“Clearly,” Mia responds, not missing her chance at the dig. “But you can do one thing for me.”
“What?”
Puck would do anything: They’d do a thousand jumping jacks, even in this heat. They’d quit their job. They’d lick the yellowed, smoke-stained plastic blinds blocking the sun from entering this god-awful motel room.
“Don’t make the same mistake with her that you did with me.”
She’s talking about Robyn again. But how could Puck make the same mistake with her? Ruin Robyn’s wedding? She’s not getting married to anyone.
Mia notices the confusion on Puck’s face, the slightest smirk breaking out on her face. “You really aren’t as smart as you think you are, huh?” she says. “Be honest with her, Puck. I tried to tell you how sweet she was at the start, but you didn’t listen, did you?”
“No,” Puck says, knowing the question is rhetorical but answering anyway, if only to say one more word before Mia walks away, probably for good.
“She’s been through a lot, and she really cares about people,” Mia continues. “And though I can’t imagine why, after everything you did, she cares about you. She deserves to know the Puck I once did.”
Mia turns away. She opens the door, walks out, and lets it swing shut behind her. But the last words she said are still in the room, finding new ways to be devastating.