Chapter 29 Lillian
“You have to tell Gigi how you feel,” Lillian said to James as she refilled his iced tea.
Lillian was behind the bar tonight. The Pink Pony’s usual bartender had called in sick. It was suspicious timing with the
bonfire the fudgies were throwing to kick off the Fourth of July weekend. The island was buzzing with the arrival of summer’s
biggest holiday.
“Ah, yes, everything is as simple as just telling people the truth,” James said, swiveling on a barstool. He’d come straight
from the clinic and was still in his scrubs. “I forgot about that.” He gave Lillian a warm smile.
“Touché,” she said. “I’m going to tell my parents the truth by the end of summer.” She grimaced, anticipating their reaction.
But she was nearly thirty years old. It was time to grow up and face her parents, even if it might mean losing them. “Hold
me accountable?” she said to James.
“Certainly. Though I’ll miss being your fake boyfriend, I must say.”
“You’ve played the part well,” Lillian said gratefully. “But it’s time you upgrade to Gigi.” She winked.
James jolted. “I don’t even know how I feel about her,” he said. “All I know is that I feel. It’s highly unpleasant.”
“Such is the joy of a new crush.”
James frowned, cleft chin pinching. “I don’t have a crush.”
“Right.” Lillian started whipping up rum runners and blueberry moonshine sparklers for the swarming customers. “My mistake.”
“Gigi is completely unlike any girl I’ve ever dated,” James went on. “On paper, we’d never work.”
“But...,” Lillian prodded.
“She just seems so unapologetically herself,” James said. “And as someone who’s spent his whole life staying on the straight
and narrow, it’s intriguing, I’ll admit.”
“I can empathize,” Lillian said. “So it’s just her strong-willed personality that has caught your eye? Nothing at all about
her physical beauty?”
She couldn’t help giving him a hard time. His job required him to be so serious that Lillian felt it was her duty to help
him lighten up.
James cleared his throat. “She is rather striking.”
“She’s a total smoke show,” Lillian said bluntly.
“Well, it doesn’t even matter how I feel because she’s with Ronny.”
“That won’t last,” Lillian said. “Believe me, I’ve seen it play out before.”
Gigi entered relationships the same way she entered the Great Lakes. Sprinting barefoot along the rocky beach, plunging headfirst
into the water. Bodysurfing on the fiercest wave she could find. Then dashing out again thirty seconds later, shaking herself
dry or snatching someone else’s towel because she forgot her own.
“And besides,” James said, lowering his voice though it wasn’t necessary over the acoustic guitarist filling the bar with
country ballads, “even if, hypothetically speaking, I did start dating Gigi, where would that leave you?”
Lillian had met James on her second day back on Mackinac this summer.
They went on a bike ride at her mother’s urging.
“It’ll be good to have someone close in age to talk with,” Trina had said.
Lillian couldn’t think of a good reason not to go except that she didn’t want to, which wasn’t good enough.
By the time they’d finished the lakeshore lap, James knew more about Lillian’s life than anyone else on the island.
There was a gentle, nonjudgmental way about him.
But she wouldn’t keep exploiting his kindness.
“You don’t need to cover for me anymore,” Lillian said. “Our deal was only supposed to last a couple weeks, not the entire
summer.”
Lillian hated the pity she’d gotten from the islanders and her parents, who saw her as a victim of her commitment-phobic ex-fiancé.
She had been eager to get the attention off her broken engagement and onto a new relationship, even a fake one. She’d wanted
to show them she was strong and vibrant and successful. But she’d gone about it the wrong way, she could see now. The fake
relationship with James had really just been one elaborate procrastination tool to help her delay the conversation she needed
to have with her parents.
“I don’t mind it,” James said, almost too readily. “I’m happy to help.”
“Now you’re the one trying to use me,” Lillian teased, “as a reason not to go after the girl you like.”
James stirred his iced tea with his straw. “I don’t like her like that.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
Even with all the years that had passed, Lillian still felt a raw yearning for her friendship with Gigi, their expired intimacy.
James looked at her. Those gray eyes reaching, trying to grip. “The cocktail umbrellas you gave her at lunch,” he recalled.
“Were you and Gigi ever...”
Lillian’s temperature rose. “No,” she said quickly. “Never.”
“Got it,” James said, and Lillian could have left it at that, but she kept talking, glad to have a reason to bring up the
past.
“I was definitely in love with Gigi in high school,” Lillian said, keeping her voice low. “But I didn’t really come to terms
with it until later. She’s hated me since we were fourteen.”
“You know what they say about the line between love and hate.”
Lillian clanked the bar glasses a little too hard. “Gigi Jenkins has never had romantic feelings for me.” Part of Lillian
perished as she said it. She sometimes wondered how something dead could keep on dying. “That’s one of the only things I’m
sure about these days.”
***
Lillian still didn’t understand exactly what had caused the rupture between her and Gigi. Eighth grade had ended on a high
note with a water balloon fight down at the beach. Afterward, over grilled cheese sandwiches, Gigi had gifted Lillian with
a new elephant stuffed animal to take with her to her summer camp down in the Lower Peninsula.
“I know we’re too old for stuffed animals, but my dad doesn’t realize that,” Gigi said. “He still brings me a new one every
time he visits.”
She pretended to sound annoyed, but Lillian wasn’t fooled. Gigi was overjoyed whenever her dad gave her anything. His time,
most of all.
“I like it a lot,” Lillian said, patting the trunk of the toy elephant. “What should we call him?”
“Bandit,” Gigi said. “Since you’re going to band camp.”
“Bandit it is.” Lillian liked that Gigi was a little bossy. It meant she didn’t have to make so many of her own decisions.
While Lillian was at camp, she received a letter from Gigi in the mail. It was handwritten, six pages double-sided. Gigi was
abuzz with the news that her dad was visiting and she’d caught her parents kissing when they thought she and Rebecca were
asleep. I think he might be moving back for good this time! had been Gigi’s closing line, before her Lots of love sign-off and the huge, loopy signature. She signed all of her letters Georgiana because she said it was more fun to write in cursive than Gigi .
Lillian had written back but there was no reply. She’d sent a follow-up letter just in case the first one didn’t arrive, but
still nothing (neither of them had cell phones yet). Upon returning from her six weeks away at camp, Lillian went over to
Thistle Dew right away. As she approached the house, she heard Gigi’s voice through the open window. Gigi was asking Eloise
to tell Lillian that she wasn’t home.
“I’m sorry, Georgiana isn’t feeling well today,” Eloise had said to Lillian, a regretful look in her eye. “But would you like some peanut brittle? I just made a fresh batch.”
When the first day of ninth grade arrived a few days later, Gigi sat with the tenth- and eleventh-grade girls for lunch. They
huddled together, excluding Lillian like she’d contracted the black plague.
“Did I do something?” Lillian asked Gigi the next day at her school locker. It took an embarrassing amount of courage to confront
her best friend.
“Don’t act like you’re so naive,” Gigi said.
“Is it about your dad?” Lillian asked. She tried to say it gently, having heard from her mother that Gus had left the island
right after the Fudge Festival.
Lillian knew how much Gigi’s dad meant to her. She had once told Lillian that if she had to choose between her mom and her
dad, she would choose her dad. When Gigi asked Lillian who she would choose, Lillian said she couldn’t pick, that she loved
them both the same. Gigi told her that answer was cheating.
“No, this is not about my dad, Lillian,” Gigi said, and Lillian cringed at how her name sounded sharp and weaponized.
“I just wasn’t sure, given what you wrote in your letter,” Lillian said.
“Haven’t you ever heard of creative writing?” Gigi snapped. “It was fiction. I’m going to be a great novelist one day.”
“I bet you will be,” Lillian said kindly. “So why have you been shutting me out?”
Gigi slammed her locker and started down the hallway. Lillian had to walk quickly to keep up with Gigi’s long strides.
“There are seasons for everything, Lillian,” Gigi said. “And I just think that our friendship has run its course. Our growth
trajectories are not in alignment.”
It sounded so strange and so un-Gigi-like that Lillian could only assume that it was repurposed language from a conversation
Gigi had overheard between her parents.
“Are those your words?” Lillian asked.
“Of course they are. I might not be as book smart as you, but I’m not stupid.”
“I know you’re not.”
“You’re not better than everyone, Lillian.”
“I know I’m not.”
Gigi offered no more explanation than that, and nothing Lillian did could win her back. Eventually she stopped trying, busying
herself with thoughts of college and the big, fancy job she was going to have one day in a tall skyscraper that would make
all of this look very small, very insignificant.
Without friendship to bind them together, envy slithered, filling the gaps. Lillian coveted how Gigi had the confidence to
crack jokes and brush off a teacher’s scolding like it was no big deal. How she had those long legs when Lillian was stuffing
old newspapers into her shoes to gain an extra inch of height. How she never studied but still aced every math test.