Summer Love
Something shifted in me. Maybe there was a direct correlation between the level of devotion you could feel for a person, if you believed he cared about you, and the depths of hatred you’d reach if you discovered otherwise.
This was what happened to me then. Over the space of time it took me to ride my bike up the hill from the library, the long way along the lakeshore back to Wonderland—more than an hour—my whole world changed.
Where, so recently, Forrest had represented everything good in my life—his approval all that mattered—what I wanted now was for him to feel the kind of grief and pain I was experiencing.
If I hurt this way, so should he.
There was only one person on earth capable of understanding what I was going through: Regina. Unlike to Forrest, for whom it turned out I had been nothing more than an amusing plaything, to Regina I was a respected friend and confidante, an ally.
Regina took me seriously. She’d called me her one true friend.
All this time I’d looked at her with a mixture of judgment and pity.
Now I understood how brave she was, how wronged she’d been.
I understood something else too, an ominous piece of information that Regina had yet to take in.
From what I’d overheard at the library, the affair with Brenda wasn’t just a replay of Forrest’s usual summer behavior.
What was going on was more than a summer fling.
Those two wanted to be together, not just for some stupid version of the summer love fun Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta sang about in Grease. They were talking about always. For real. Forever.
Brenda had called her husband an idiot. Forrest wanted to leave his wife. There seemed no other way to interpret what they’d said.
I already knew that Regina’s appeal for Forrest (not his love for her, maybe, but his desire) had expired a long time ago. She’d said as much herself back when we had our conversation down at the lake.
What I understood now was the hardest part: Forrest Emerson had no real interest in me either. Maybe he did once. Maybe he never did. But whatever little piece of his heart he might have reserved for me in times gone by, I didn’t occupy one inch of that place anymore.
I was last year’s American Girl doll.
In my fourteen-year-old brain, there seemed only one thing to do now: I would tell Regina what I’d discovered about Forrest. Whatever she wanted to do with that information, I was on her team now.