Chapter Eight #2
That just hung there. Two weeks ago, thinking she was someone I knew, someone who knew me, I’d imagined a different phone call, one where we shared our excitement over a future together. Now, I just didn’t know what to do with the reality of her. And it broke my heart.
I stared at a pinhole in the wall where a picture from a trip I’d taken to Spain had hung before I started taking everything down. The movers would be here tomorrow to load my scant worldly possessions into a portable storage unit to deposit somewhere in Charlottesville until I found a rental.
Everything was in upheaval.
Deep breath. I said, “You know the night we met?” just as she said, “I actually just started working—”
“Sorry,” I said. “Go on.”
“No, you.” Her shaky exhale came through the phone. “What did you want to ask?” Her voice had gone up, like she was stressed by the question.
“This is embarrassing to ask but”—another heavy sigh—“did you ever intend to tell me you weren’t my former school friend?”
“What?” She huffed a laugh, then barked, “I did.”
Was she serious? “I was there, and you absolutely did not.”
“I absolutely did.” We sat in silence for a moment, since my only retort to her gaslighting was to keep echoing the same assertion. She broke it with attitude. “Wait, are you telling me that whole time, you thought I was someone else? I swore you knew. The tuba? Really?”
Oh, my God. “For the record, my friend Lizzy played the tuba.” I thought about that again. “Or maybe it was the French horn.” I replayed that bit of conversation in my head. So many details had to be reprocessed in light of this new perspective. “So you don’t play in an orchestra?”
“I don’t play any instrument. Unless you count the air guitar.”
“What the fuck? Why did you say all that? And don’t tell me you were nervous. This goes way beyond anxiety.”
“Look,” she said, obvious frustration giving way to a tone reserved for parents of unruly children. “I know it was immature, but I honestly thought you were clued in. You even asked if Kyan had put me up to it!”
“Immature? Try dishonest, irresponsible, cruel…” I could have gone on.
“Cruel?” Her tone softened. “I didn’t mean for it to be.”
“Why would you lie in the first place?”
“I explained that already. I don’t do well with people, so Chelsea…” She exhaled. “It was just a dare, and it wasn’t supposed to go that far.”
“A dare? Did you have no concern for the people you were targeting for your mind fuck?”
“Honestly, how did you confuse me with someone you actually knew?”
“Because you told me you were her.” How was that even a question?
“I mean, you must not have known her very well. I can’t imagine I coincidentally look exactly like someone you used to be best friends with.”
“Fair point.” I closed my eyes, trying to bring an image of my Lizzy to mind, and I wasn’t even sure that was accurate.
The pictures I’d seen online, the ones I thought were some cousin, had probably been of her, but older, unrecognizable.
“To be honest, at first, I wasn’t convinced you were her, but then you convinced me.
By lying to me. I haven’t even seen her in a decade.
Can you tell me you look exactly the same as you did in high school? ”
“Fair point,” she echoed.
“I’m combing my memory, here, Elizabeth, and don’t recall you ever saying the words, ‘I was lying.’ So exactly when did you tell me you were making it all up?”
“I used those exact words, Evan.”
“When?”
“The minute we left the bar.” For some reason, she sounded irritated with me. “I immediately apologized to you for lying to you. You asked me what I lied about, and I said, everything. When I told you we’d never been friends in high school, you said you wished we had been.”
I recalled the moment. “I thought you meant”—I shook my head at the insanity of this situation—“I assumed you meant because we’d stopped being friends by then.” Oh, God, how could this have happened? “You could’ve at least told me your real name.”
“I did,” she snapped.
“You told me your name is Elizabeth, not Lizzy. Not much of a stretch.”
“I told you my name is Elizabeth, right?”
“Right.”
“Right. Oh. Jesus.” She paused. “Wright with a W. W-R-I-G-H-T. That’s my last name.”
Despite my anger, I choked a laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
She didn’t laugh. The silence hung heavy a beat, and then she said, “So what now?”
“I don’t know.” My head hurt. I couldn’t even begin to process this.
“Would you maybe want to get together when you’re in town?” She sounded so gentle, so quiet. “See if there’s any there there?”
“There there?”
“Sorry, it’s Derrida.”
Was that a foreign language? “What’s a Derrida?”
“Jacques Derrida. French literary critic and philosopher. Deconstructionism.” She said it flatly, like these nonsense words were all commonplace for her. “I don’t get out much.”
That caught me off guard, and I snorted. I was going to regret this, but the curiosity was killing me. “What do you even do?”
“I told you. I have several jobs, but I’m mainly a copy editor. I spend a lot of time buried in books. I just started a new job writing copy for the news, actually. So thanks for the tip.”
Well, we shared that in common anyway. “That’s cool. I love to read.”
“What do you like to read?” She asked it like we were having a casual conversation.
This was starting to feel too cozy, and I hadn’t intended to let myself fall under her spell again. I wasn’t sure I could ever trust her after what she’d done, and she’d left me a psychological quagmire to clean up. So I inhaled and said, “Elizabeth.”
“Yeah.” That flat tone again. I figured she already knew what I was going to say next.
“I don’t think we should do this.”
“Okay.” She didn’t even ask why. I hardly knew the first thing about her, and yet this felt like a breakup, like a goodbye before we’d properly said hello.
I knew what made her laugh, said a voice in my head. I knew how her awkwardness somehow matched mine. I knew what she tasted like, and I knew how her back arched when she came.
I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. Those were not the first things I wanted to know about anyone.
“I might see you around.” Maybe in a few weeks, I’d feel differently.
“Well, good luck with your new job.”
We said our goodbyes, and then with a finality that left me unsatisfied, I disconnected the call.
Odds were, I’d never see her again.