Chapter 37
Greta
There’s always a good or a bad feeling that comes with your instincts and guides you.
Every time I’ve ever been in front of that door, I’ve felt a pleasant warmth in the middle of my chest. It’s just a door.
From the outside, nothing about it looks special.
But I know the people who live inside. They’re special to me.
And there haven’t been that many special people in my life.
I could pick that doorknob and that doorbell out from among millions.
I know that as I touch the button and hear a soft ding-dong.
I admit it: I was hoping Mr. or Mrs. Morris would open up.
They’re wonderful people, the type of couple you know will stay together till their last breath, the kind that does their grocery shopping together, sleeps in their socks, finishes each other’s phrases with a grin.
Of all the homes I’ve been in and snooped around in over the years, theirs is the one that’s most familiar and welcoming.
Alas.
The girl who opens the door is my age, and she’s wearing jean shorts with little daisies sewn into them by hand.
Her shirt says Life’s better with ketchup and her shoes have colored laces.
Her dark hair has dyed-pink tips now, but that’s not the only thing that’s changed about her.
Her eyes are different too, but maybe it’s my imagination, or maybe it’s that it’s been so long since we’ve seen each other.
What do you say when you’ve got your best friend in front of you and you haven’t talked for months? I have no idea, so I stand there and stare, and for a moment, I’m scared Olivia will shut the door in my face, but of course, that’s not who she is.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
I wait. “You know, this was probably a bad idea.” I feel like I have a bone in my throat. “I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.”
I turn on my heels and take one step, two, three down the path of orange stones leading to the street.
I feel stupid. But running away is all I know how to do.
I could say I’m sorry, I guess. Or more: I’m sorry I was texting Sebastian for weeks and I let him kiss me at that party just so you’d realize how stupid your boyfriend was.
Or the longer version: I’m sorry I made you open your eyes in a way that hurt you because the thought that you might give up your scholarship to stay with him horrified me.
All year, I’ve been telling myself I was certain I’d done the best thing for her. The problem is, good intentions aren’t everything.
“Greta, wait! What are you doing?”
“Leaving.” I look back over my shoulder.
“Yeah, I can see that, thanks for the explanation. What I meant was, why are you ringing my doorbell and then running off? It’s stupid. We’re adults. Come inside and talk. Mom made cookies this morning.”
Something clicks in my head. A memory far in the depths of my mind rises to the surface. Mrs. Morris’s cookies are the best I’ve ever had, crunchy but soft, with white chocolate chips.
“You sure?” I ask.
“I’m sure. Come on.”
I enter that house that was like my home for years and that I know every inch of: where they keep the good silver, which drawer is full of batteries and parking tickets and coins and other junk, which is the creaky step (the fourth from the bottom).
I step on it and hear that familiar sound.
We go to Olivia’s room. Unlike her, it hasn’t changed, probably because she no longer lives here.
It’s weird to think, but she’s just passing through now.
Olivia leans against her desk and I stand by the door, shy, as though prepared to flee at any second.
“I guess I don’t know where to begin…”
Olivia’s nostrils flair slightly as she breathes, but I don’t think she’s mad, exactly, just impatient. And maybe a bit nervous.
“You hurt me,” she says clearly.
“I wanted to show you that Sebastian wasn’t worth it.”
“And you couldn’t think of a less aggressive way of doing it?”
“No, because you were too stubborn to listen. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how, so that was my backup plan. But I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have thought of your feelings and not just ignored them.”
For the next minute, we’re nearly silent, and I have the sense we’re both settling accounts, trying to figure out who won and who lost what, comparing that with the endless hours on the playground or out and about, our respective virtues and defects, the things that bring us together and divide us.
What matters most? That’s the question we all have to ask ourselves when we’re in an emotional dilemma. Take what you feel, put it on the scale, and wait to see which side it leans toward. Sometimes, the answer will surprise you.
“Of all the stupid ideas you’ve ever had in all the time I’ve known you, including going to the prom dressed as skeletons, that was the absolute worst.”
“You’re right. Not to mention I had to kiss him. I wanted to puke.”
Olivia presses her lips together, but in the end, she can’t keep the giggles in. She shakes her head, and a second later, she’s wrapping her arms around me, and the scent of her perfume, the same one as always (vanilla, it smells like a candy shop), climbs up my nose and lodges there.
“I’m sorry too, Greta. I really am,” she whispers, on the edge of tears. “I should have been there for you during everything with Lucy. I called you, but you wouldn’t pick up, and I just assumed you didn’t want to hear from me. I should have kept trying.”
“I never saw your calls. I ignored everything while that was happening.”
“I thought of you a lot back then,” she says softly.
“Same.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I even got a taste for carrot cake.”
Olivia smiles, and for a moment, if someone could look inside us, they’d think that nothing had ever happened, that we hadn’t gone for almost a year without speaking to each other, that all the cracks have been covered over.
Grandpa always says true friendship is like family; it’s built to withstand strain: One day you’re in the living room arguing hair, tooth, and nail, and the next day you’re cuddled up together on the sofa under a blanket watching a dumb Christmas movie.
“Didn’t you say your mom had made cookies?”
“Yeah. I’ll go get some. You should come back some day and see my parents. They ask about you. They’re out today. It’s a friend’s birthday.”
When she leaves me alone, I glance at her corkboard, the same one almost every teenager has had at some point, even if I soon realized it wasn’t big enough and decided to cover the entire wall.
I see the two of us in almost all the photographs tacked up there, from the time we were little until just recently.
In the last one, we’re at an ice cream shop with Taylor, Sebastian, Nelson, Rick, Mia, and a couple of other friends.
I’ve changed, I think. I’m still that same girl, with the same questions, the same uncertainties, but I feel stronger.
Things are clearer to me. I’m putting the pieces of myself together, even if I need a jeweler’s patience and precision to make them fit so the complex mechanism inside me will finally work as it should.
“Here.” Olivia passes me a plate.
Each of us with a cookie in hand, we sit down and talk.
The conversation just flows, picking up right where we left off.
Sebastian, in other words. I knew it was a bad idea for her to be with him just by the way she looked at him.
She thought she could save him, that there was something deep behind the surface.
She was wrong. Sebastian was hooking up with other girls when she got her admission letter, and I saw how she hesitated.
She probably thought what they had wouldn’t last if she left.
They’d only been together a few months; it was that point where you idealize everything about the other person.
Or maybe it wasn’t all him. Maybe she didn’t believe in herself.
Anyway, when she said she wasn’t sure it was a good idea to take out a student loan to pay for what her scholarship didn’t cover, I knew I had to do something.
I don’t feel proud of it, but I had told her what I thought for days on end and all I got out of it was her telling me to butt out.
So I took action. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.
I sent Sebastian a message asking what time we were all supposed to hang out.
He answered right away. We went on talking for a few days.
It was easy; all I had to do was laugh at his (unfunny) jokes and give him constant praise.
What had been a friendly conversation turned to flirting.
A while later, we went to a concert at an old farmhouse outside of town, and he got drunk and kissed me.
And, like magic, Olivia opened her eyes.
Of course, my explanation didn’t convince her.
We argued like we never had before. It didn’t help that we’d both been drinking. She took off with a friend from the grocery store where she worked, and I watched the sun come up in Taylor’s bed because his arms were always the best option when I didn’t feel like thinking.
Olivia didn’t call me the next day. I didn’t call her, either.
The silence continued, and I found out from Mia that Olivia had decided to go to school in Colorado. And all that led us here to this moment in her old bed, eating delicious white chocolate chip cookies.
“How did you ever come up with such a twisted idea?”
“Uh…” I licked the crumbs from my lips. “It just kind of happened. I don’t want to offend you, but it wasn’t hard to get Sebastian’s attention.”
She shook her head. “He’s an idiot.”
“To say the least.”
“You were right.”
“I’m glad you think so.” I take a bite of cookie.
“I still don’t think you should have gotten in the middle of it like that, though. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to think about it anymore. I missed you.”
“I’m sorry.” I hug her, and we lie back in her bed, elbow to elbow, looking at the smooth ceiling. “Can I make a confession? I was a little jealous.”
“Of me?” she asks.
“Yeah, of you. You were about to go off and live your dreams and I was going to stick around here forever with a bunch of people who don’t matter to me.
I guess a part of me wanted to stop speaking to you, even if it’s awful to say that aloud.
It hurt me that you might stay. I couldn’t let that happen, but it also hurt to see you go. Does that make sense?”
“I guess. But even if it didn’t, it would be okay.”
“You’re making it too easy on me,” I said.
The silence that follows is pleasant. Then she breaks it, “When I found out about Lucy—”
“Don’t. Please.”
“All right.”
“Thanks, Oli.” I don’t want to talk to her about my sister because I know we won’t be able to keep it superficial.
She’ll bring up some detail, something tiny, and it will hurt.
And I can’t. Not now. The practical stuff, the straight story, I can deal with: how she was twenty-four when she died; how she was disoriented, confused, out of it toward the end; how the official cause of death was liver failure.
But what Olivia would say is something like Remember how crazy your sister was about crackers?
or I saw this new stationery shop downtown and it has all this glitter and fancy paper, Lucy would have gone crazy there. And that could destroy me.
So we pass over the subject.
I tell her about my parents, how I think Mom is getting better, how her eyes are slowly opening. Who knows? Maybe everything isn’t lost.
“I started wondering if my dad was seeing someone,” I confess.
“Why?” Olivia sits up and pulls back her hair.
“I don’t know. He was coming back super-late from work.”
“What about you, then?”
“Me?”
“Are you still with Taylor? Are you guys taking a break?”
“No and no. It’s done.”
Olivia goes on to tell me about a guy named Dylan she met at a coffee shop. He’s nice and she thinks he’ll end up making it big because his work is amazing. She also tells me she got a commission to make dresses for an upcoming play at an independent theater in town.
“That’s so cool!” I say.
“Yeah. Look at you, though. Something about you is different. I don’t know what. Your hair hasn’t changed, but…” She bites her lip. “Something deeper has. So are you going to tell me, or will I have to put the squeeze on you?”
For a few moments, I waver, but then I tell her about Will and about my sister’s game, because you can’t talk about one without the other.
I tell her what the different stages have been and how it’s what led me to knock on her door.
I needed a push, I tell her; I didn’t have the courage to come here on my own.
When I’ve finished the story, she sighs.
“You realize we wouldn’t be catching up right now if it wasn’t for mistakes we both made in the past? That’s how life is, Greta. We make mistakes. And we all have a right to change. Has no one ever told you that? Think about it. It’s true.”
“Yeah.” I tug at a thread hanging from my jeans.
“Maybe he’s being honest with you.”
“That’s one possibility. Among others.”
I pull the string again, and when it’s done unraveling, I have a hole in my jeans the size of a dime.
Life’s like that, kind of: You have this teeny crack or crevice, you ignore it, but soon there’s a hole in your heart so big you can’t do anything to fix it.
Or so I think, until Olivia notices, opens a drawer in her desk, and takes out a needle, thread, and a patch.
“Take those off. I’ll have them looking better in no time.”