Chapter 7
Melly
I thought I was going to feel better.
It’s been four days, and there’s a stabbing feeling right under my rib every time I think about Chase. It isn’t heartbreak. I know what heartbreak feels like — I lived inside it for three solid years of my life — and this isn’t that.
And every time I think about the Hawthorne House Halloween party, I panic.
I can’t tell which of those two things is making the other worse.
Mila has been my rock. She’s slept over twice.
I’ve slept on her dorm floor once, in the little space between her bed and her roommate’s bed, on a folded comforter she pulled out of her closet.
She’s bought me a milkshake I didn’t ask for.
She’s brought me a sandwich I didn’t eat.
Last night, sitting cross-legged on my living room floor with a pan of brownies between us, she made me promise her — twice, both times with her pinky out like we were fifteen again — that I would pull myself together for Halloween.
There’s only so many Halloweens to spend at Camden, she said.
You have one life and you are going to live it, she said.
I agreed. I’m going to rein it in. That’s the deal.
Mila wakes me up at eight-thirty by sitting on my chest.
“Get up.”
“Mila,” I groan.
“Up.”
“Off.”
“We’re going through with our plans at the YMCA. Get dressed.”
She climbs off me. She pulls the comforter off my body in one clean motion and drops it in a heap on the floor.
“Up.”
I get up and get ready.
The local YMCA has the kind of pool that smells like chlorine in your teeth and is forty percent retirees doing water aerobics, forty percent toddlers in those little inflatable rings that have a duck head poking out of the front, and twenty percent serious lap swimmers who don’t appreciate me or Mila or anyone else not currently committed to the sport of swimming.
We do six laps. Mila says we did twelve.
I say we did six. She says six counted twice still counts.
Afterward, we play racquetball. I have never played racquetball in my entire life.
Mila has played it exactly once, with her dad, when she was twelve.
We rent the goggles and the racquets. We close ourselves inside the small white room that smells like rubber and lemon disinfectant, and a single hard blue ball ricochets off four walls at an unbelievable speed, and within about three minutes, Mila hits me in the calf, I hit her in the shoulder blade, and we have both ducked simultaneously from a ricochet neither of us made.
By the end of it, I’m laughing so hard I have to sit down on the floor against the wall.
Mila is bent at the waist with her hands on her knees, wheezing. “I think I broke a rib.”
I throw my head and laugh. “You did not break a rib.”
“I broke a rib, sis.”
I shake my head. “You did not.”
“Tell my mother I died doing what I loved.”
I shoot a look at her. “Pestering me?”
“Yes.”
I lie back on the gym floor. The fluorescents hum above us. My hair is wet against the cement under my head. My lungs hurt in the good way, and I let myself listen to Mila complain about her ribs. I realize that I haven’t thought about Chase in forty minutes. This, I understand, is the point.
Mila lies down next to me with her arms thrown over her face.
“Lunch?”
I nod. “Yes, lunch. I want a burger.”
“A burger and one of those terrible milkshakes.”
“Yes.” I groan. That sounds great.
“A burger, a terrible milkshake, and fries.”
“All three. Whole menu.”
We find the nearest diner — a place two blocks off campus — and we order everything we said we were going to. The burgers come fast. The milkshakes come faster. Mila has chocolate. I have strawberry. The cherry on top of mine is the kind of bright red that isn’t found in nature.
“I would be lost without you,” she says.
I scoff. “Try the other way around.”
She smiles. “You’re my twin flame. I’m so excited for tonight.”
I eat a fry and look at her across the table — her hair still damp from the pool, her mascara holding up better than mine, her grin the size of the whole diner — and I think, not for the first time but maybe the most clearly, that I wouldn’t be alive in this life without her.
“I wish I could be more like you.”
She scoffs at that. “And I wish I was more like you. Are you kidding?”
“At least you’re not dragging people around with your indecisiveness.”
“Yeah, well. You could be worse.”
“I guess, but it still doesn’t feel good.”
She dabs a fry in ketchup. “I’m happy you’re single,” she says. “It’s honestly going to be good for you. You relied so much on Chase.”
I nod. “Yeah. I did.”
“I think he liked it, though.”
I freeze.
The fry in my hand goes back down to the plate.
“Do you think he’ll find someone else?” The thought arrives before I can stop it, and the second it’s out of my mouth I am ashamed of it, but I am also too curious to take it back. “I mean, he got with me right after Haylee.”
Mila shrugs. “I hope you don’t care if he does.”
I think about it. I think about Chase going to his friend’s Halloween party tonight and finding someone to hook up with. It honestly wouldn’t surprise me.
“I feel like crap,” I say slowly. “But I also feel like a weight has been lifted off my chest. I knew it wasn’t good for me, and I still stayed.”
“You romanticized the hell out of him, Melly. I think you can do better.”
I look at her.
The sentence lands the way a key turns in a lock, and then suddenly the whole door is open.
You romanticized the hell out of him.
“What?” she says, searching my face.
I point a fry at her. “You just named my exact problem.”
“It’s not entirely a problem,” she argues.
“No. But it is.”
I think about Chase. The way I talk about him doesn’t exactly match what I got in real life.
His text message: fuck me then. Is that something someone would say if he respected me?
I’ve thought of him as someone who was too good for me, but is that even true, or was I romanticizing the hell out of him? And for what reason?
I think about Blue.
I’ve spent what feels like my entire life assembling a version of him out of seven looks across a high school cafeteria and two nights with him.
I’m a girl who romanticizes things.
This is my one consistent problem.
“I wasn’t saying it as a bad thing,” Mila says. “Just an observation.”
I shake my head. “No. You’re right. How do I tone that down?” Now I’m desperate for an answer. I don’t want to live in this fantasyland anymore. I want to see things for what they are.
She shrugs. “Maybe stop analyzing every little thing.”
I shrug a little to myself. “Yeah.” She’s right.
For a quiet moment, I’m left to my thoughts.
I drink my milkshake and realize what we’re doing right now.
I look at Mila over the rim of my milkshake.
Right now, in this diner, I’m finally at Camden U.
My midterms are done. I’m single for the first time in two years.
I’m eating a burger and a milkshake with my best friend on a Saturday afternoon in October.
And I’m thinking — the thought has just arrived, unsponsored, fully formed — that life can’t get better than this.
This is exactly what I dreamed of for years.
The problem is that I am already, in real time, romanticizing it.
Mila stirs her milkshake with the straw and watches me. “Shouldn’t you feel relief, though?”
I put my milkshake down. Back to the real conversation, and it doesn’t feel as hard anymore.
“I mean —” She isn’t pressing. “You knew it wasn’t going to be forever. You knew it before you transferred. You said it to me in May. You said it again in September. You were planning the how, not the if. And then you did it. So I’m just — I’m asking. Why don’t you feel relieved?”
We sit with it for a second. The waitress passes our table refilling a coffee at the booth behind us and calls somebody hon.
“I feel —” I grab a fry. I look at it and don’t eat it. “I feel guilty for holding on for so long. Almost embarrassed. Like — it wasn’t fair to him, what I did. I knew. And I stayed anyway.”
“So you’re not even that upset about the breakup. You just feel guilty.”
I nod. “Yeah.”
I pick the cherry off the milkshake and eat it.
“You’re right, though,” I say. “It was time.”
She nods.
By five o’clock, my apartment is a war zone of girls.
Gianna and Lucy have come over because there’s more room here than at their place.
My four-poster princess bed is now covered in a layer of clothing thick enough to lose a small dog in.
Mara is on the phone in the bathroom, doing the loud part of a conversation I can’t make out the other half of.
Penelope is at her drafting table near the window with a mascara wand in one hand and her laptop open on the desk to what I am almost certain is a thesis draft she is editing on her break from getting ready.
I’m in the kitchen, making little Halloween treats for the party because Mila insists that we don’t show up empty-handed.
I have, lacking the bandwidth to argue, agreed to make something Halloween-themed.
Pretzel ghosts. White chocolate dipped. Mini chocolate chip eyes.
Lined up on parchment paper and thrown in the freezer.
They look — okay. They look like pretzels dipped in white chocolate.
“Melly,” Gianna says from the doorway. She’s in jeans and an old Camden U hoodie with a full face of makeup. She has a glass of wine in her hand. “Pen says you have a curling iron.”
I nod. “Bathroom cabinet under the sink.”
“Thanks.”
She disappears. Ten seconds later, she’s back. “What’re you making?”
“Pretzel ghosts.”
She looks down at the parchment. “That’s so cute. Can I try one?”
I nod.
She bites into one. She nods. She walks back to the bedroom with the pretzel in her hand.