Chapter 19
May, Four Years Ago
The morning before Liam travels to Florida for his next few games, he presents me with an early birthday present (baseball-patterned pajamas and another handwritten letter I’m not to open until the actual day) and takes me to an all-you-can-eat breakfast at his favorite spot near campus, where it’s allegedly the norm to wear your sleep clothes.
He’s in gray sweatpants and a baseball T-shirt, and together, we look properly embarrassing.
I’m pretty sure Liam brought me here to get a photo of me wearing his birthday present in public, but at least I’m not the guy in a onesie with the words BLAST ZONE on his rump.
We sit on the same side of the booth and split a pancake tower.
“You could’ve borrowed one of my Teletubbies onesies,” I tell him.
He says, “I burned those as a trauma response when you weren’t looking.”
“But I always loan them out to the baseball team during hazing season.”
“Well, I’m the captain this year,” Liam says. “New regime. No more hazing.”
“I didn’t know you’re the captain!”
“You’re at an all-you-can-eat pancake house,” Liam says significantly, “with the captain of the baseball team.”
“Did this happen on an episode of Stranger Things?”
He smirks at me, tugs on the sleeve of my top while I lather our recently delivered pancakes with syrup. “Would you consider yourself a birthday person?” he asks.
“Yes, actually. Maisy always makes a big deal of it.”
Liam twists to look at me, brow raised. “She does?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s her birthday, too.”
“Ah.”
I laugh. “Really, though. Our birthday party is our favorite day of the year. It’s always right at the start of summer and sweltering, with water games and frozen drinks.
Maisy’s mom used to plan it when we were younger, but Maisy took over four years back and does a great job with it.
It’s also like, our annual friendship-commemoration day. I love it. I love our birthday.”
“What are you going to do this year?” he asks.
“If I had to guess, a pool party at her new apartment. It would just be her friends though, since you and Zara will both be gone.”
“If she puts one o’clock on the invitation, should you show up at five?”
I squeeze his knee. “Maisy has her flaws, but she’s always been a good friend to me, especially when other kids weren’t.”
He chews, takes a sip of his orange juice. “I believe you. Have you talked to her about…?”
My stomach twists up like a Slinky. “Not yet, but I’m seeing her tonight.” She’d said she had something to tell me, which is just as well, since I’ve been putting off our next meeting.
Liam nods and graciously changes the subject.
He kisses me breathless when he drops me off, promises to call on the bus ride.
I make it as far as the sidewalk when he rolls down the window and groans, “Fuck, I already miss you,” before stumbling out of the truck to kiss me again.
And sometimes it feels like I’ve stolen all of someone else’s luck.
When he’s gone, I head upstairs to help Zara with the last of her packing.
Her movers are coming tomorrow morning, and next week, after her graduation, I’ll drive her, Maren, my dad, and Candice (who are coming for the ceremony, along with Candice’s girlfriend) to the airport for their flights home.
Zara puzzles out my mood instantly the way sisters always can; I spill the beans about Maisy, explain that I’m anxious to see her later, and then am subjected to Zara’s pitying eyes as we pack her special editions into carboard boxes.
“I can’t believe you haven’t said I told you so yet,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I don’t want to be right about Maisy being a shitty friend, Paige. I’m sure Liam feels the same.”
“She’s not a shitty friend. There has to be a misunderstanding. Remember your grade’s senior prank day? Those girls made me steal the principal’s cellphone, and when I got caught, Maisy took the blame. She had detention for two weeks.”
Zara pauses her stacking, looking over at me, conflicted. “Yeah, I remember, but didn’t she have a crush on some guy who was always in detention?”
“And when we were sophomores, and nobody asked me to homecoming, but she got asked by two different guys. Maisy promised to go to spring prom with one of them if he took me to homecoming that fall.”
Zara makes a face. “I’d argue Maisy had a personal stake in you being invited to homecoming.”
“Maybe, but part of her did it because she cares about including and protecting me. I really do believe that.”
“I don’t doubt that she cares about you, Paige.
I only doubt that it’s healthy. For all the ways Maisy was a good friend to you, she was an equally bad one in others—like, oh, for instance, when she outed your very personal, anonymous poetry about our shit mother to the entire school—and it’s not supposed to be a wash like that. ”
To this I have nothing to say. But eventually, Zara goes on, so quietly I know she’s nervous to air it out: “Don’t let her off the hook just because I’m leaving town.”
I nod, too vulnerable to answer aloud.
Zara and I have far more in common from our childhoods than we don’t.
A father who was bone-tired. A mother we don’t remember.
Sisters we idolized, then watched become fallible.
But while Zara’s independent to the point of needing only stories, I sometimes feel like a sea barnacle that grows best from tenacious attachment.
I head to Maisy’s apartment around four. I haven’t seen her in three weeks, give or take, a natural byproduct of our new normal. I can’t help but wonder if she invited me over to talk about the same thing I need to hear from her.
When I knock, and the door swings open, Maisy greets me with a tentative smile, her skin freckled and her red hair shorter than I’ve ever seen it.
“Hey, stranger,” she says. “Please compliment my hair before I spiral over it.”
Every instinct I have screams at me to drop it, to let her off the hook, to wait and see if she’ll fess up on her own. But for once, I’m just as frustrated over something she’s done as I am understanding of it.
“Your haircut looks amazing. Really. But Maisy,” I say immediately, my voice broken, “we need to talk about Liam Bishop.”
I watch closely as her face morphs. From pleased to confused to caught. The bareness of it filters into the air between us.
Eventually, Maisy steps aside to let me in. After a few awkward seconds, she laughs to herself. It’s unnerving.
“Something funny?” I ask.
“No. This is the opposite of funny. I just thought we were going to part on better terms, and I hate that we won’t.”
“Part?” I ask, shoulder jumping. “What are you talking about? Maisy, I don’t want this to be the end of anything. I’m here because I’m willing to listen.”
“And you’d believe it, wouldn’t you? Or you’d pretend like you did.” She crosses her arms. “If I spun a line about test-driving him for you, then deciding you never needed to know, because he wasn’t good enough for Paige Lancaster, my best friend.”
It would’ve been a good line, too.
“But no,” she says, spine straightening. “This is a thing I did, and now I have to own it, even though I don’t want to.”
This I wasn’t expecting. “Then why did you do it?” I ask.
She scratches her arm. Chews on her lip. She looks so small. Guilty.
“That morning. The morning he called me—tried to call you. I’d been dropped from this one sorority during recruitment and was feeling wounded.
It’s not an excuse, but I was in a bad headspace.
Somehow, my mom found out—I guess through some parental connection—and reamed me out about performing better.
Then shortly after, Liam called me and”—she looks at the ceiling—“I was saying words before I thought them through. This wasn’t Paige, it was Maisy.
You had probably assumed he wanted my number.
Oh, yes, he’d mentioned me at the time, maybe that is what had happened.
Could I give him your number instead? Sorry, but he couldn’t have you; you were already taken.
And then I asked Liam to pick me instead. ”
“Why, though?” I ask, blinking. “Why?”
“Because I was still a little mad at you for even being here,” she finally admits.
“For not giving either of us any room to breathe. And also because during that particular week, when things weren’t going my way, I needed my life to stay the same as it had always been,” she explains.
“I needed you to be the Paige you’d always been so I could be the same Maisy.
And I know how wrong it was. How unfair, how cruel, how awful.
I always knew it, which is why I hoped you’d never find out. ”
Her honesty might be the most alarming thing about this entire confession. The meat of it I already knew, on some deep, inherent level. I just never imagined Maisy owning up to it.
“From the bottom of my heart, Paige,” she whispers. “I’m so, so sorry. I know the timing is … convenient, but I’m trying to be different now. And I really am so sorry.”
I stare at her, impressed and livid in equal doses. We’re both quiet as I gather my thoughts, figure out how to forgive her, how to apologize for making it feel like I was suffocating her, how we can put this behind us.
She gathers hers faster.
“I think there’s a chance we’ve been pigeonholing each other for a long time now,” Maisy says.
My head cocks. “What do you mean?”
She sighs, rubbing her lips together. “You as the second. Me as the leader. It isn’t that way with my other friendships, Paige. There’s so much more balance, a give-and-take. You assumed your role and I assumed mine, and that’s how we’ve operated for years.”
She’s saying the same things that Liam and I voiced to each other months back. That certain friendships are defined at the outset and have to be remolded to take a new shape.
I’m willing to remold our friendship.
“You’re right,” I whisper, voice wobbling. “I, for one, am ready to take off this skin now. I’ve outgrown it. I’m over it, Maisy. And I think there’s a chance you’ve outgrown yours, too.”
Her head is shaking. “But we have known each other for so long,” she says, “and we’ve gotten so accustomed to each other’s behavior, that we can’t do what we need to do, grow into the people we want to be, and stay best friends.”
My heart is racing, my head heavy enough to topple me. This isn’t what I wanted. I didn’t plan to cut her off, for her to cut me off.
“I’m doing an abroad program this summer,” she admits. “And next fall, I’m transferring to a school in DC. I want to get out of Tennessee, see the world.”
Does she remember? That that’s incredibly close to what my mom allegedly said to my dad before she abandoned our family? Closer still to what Dad said to me before he sold the house I grew up in and got a passport?
The floor is sliding out from under me.
“Is that what you wanted to tell me?” I ask.
Maisy nods. “This was always going to be a goodbye of sorts,” she admits.
“I just hoped it’d be less…” She doesn’t finish the sentence, moves on to her next.
“We never should’ve gotten to the point where I could sabotage you, and then lie about it for years,” Maisy whispers.
“We never even should’ve gotten to the point where your only option was moving to Knoxville for mine and Zara’s companionship. ”
I’m getting punched from all sides, my eyes misting, her resolve a tsunami set to wreck me.
“Are you breaking up with me?” I ask.
Maisy smiles sadly. “I’m taking accountability for my part in the way we built this friendship. And I’m suggesting we get some distance.”
Her head falls into her hands, and I hate that it makes it better, that she’s just as ripped up, just as distraught as I am. I want to tell her we can make it okay, smooth it out, but I don’t know if that’s something I really believe anymore.
Maybe I never did.
And if Maisy wants to change for the better, I can’t force her not to just because I’m scared to change on my own.
It was never about Liam, not really. A boy didn’t end us. This is about her and me.
We hug goodbye eventually, all tears, and before I leave, Maisy presses one single, wrapped birthday gift into my hands. Like she’d already known she wouldn’t see me on the day. I open it when I get home, in the private of my room, and sob some more.
It’s a bracelet with one charm: a tiny silver race car. On the back there’s an engraving: It’s Bristol, baby!