“Fair. Laine, this is like the dumbest thing you’ve ever done, and you gave up the best city in the world to live in some Podunk town.”
I didn’t even bother trying to make my case, as I’d already done so—repeatedly. Ann Arbor wasn’t a perfect place, as there really was no such thing. But it was small without being claustrophobically so, charming without being twee, and compared to New York, the people were just so nice.
Also, it had been six hundred miles from Ben’s home base, and when I was trying to figure out where to live after college, that detail had been paramount. As an added bonus, my mother had acted like I was moving to Siberia, which felt like proof that Ben was wrong—I wasn’t most preoccupied with what she wanted. Not all of the time, at least.
“Listen, you and I have to have a serious talk. But first, dinner at my place tonight. Bring Mom?”
“Okay,” I said, even though I felt the opposite of okay. I was glad Piper was loyal to Josh, but was I chopped liver?
“Good. I’m going to call Josh right now. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do,” she said in a voice that told me she was really talking to herself. “Okay, Laine, I’ll see you later on. Mwah and more soon!”
“Oh, me? I’m fine,” I said to the phone, as Piper had already hung up. “Thank you so much for asking.”
SIX
LAINE
For many, New York is a new beginning—a fresh start, a different identity, a better future. But as my cab sped down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Manhattan’s skyline glittering to the west, all I could see was my past.
Ben and I were the only kids our age on our block, and unlike the rest of the pack of elementary schoolers who roamed our neighborhood, he was uninterested in declaring Hadley his leader. Still, we were an unlikely duo. Whereas I was constantly worried about screwing up—and worse, someone finding out I did so—Ben delighted in doing what he wasn’t supposed to. He was a freewheeling B to my type A, and nothing made him laugh harder than telling our teacher that I’d eaten his homework or informing our classmates that I was out sick because I’d gone swimming in the Gowanus Canal, which was practically a sewer. But when no one was listening, I would match him quip for quip. Like so many other kids of our generation, we were really into yo-mama jokes for a while: Yo mama’s so ugly, she threw a boomerang and it wouldn’t come back to her. Whatchu looking at? Yo mama!
Then Ben’s mom took off when he was nine, and suddenly those jokes weren’t funny anymore.
Up until then, our friendship had been all fun and games. But a week or two after his mother left a note saying she wanted something different for her life, I’d come over to get him and found him curled up under his bed, weeping. I’d waited for him to stop, but he kept crying and crying, so eventually I called to him. He’d yelled at me to go away. I wouldn’t, though. I sat there until he was willing to take my hand, and after a while, he crawled out and let me give him a tissue.
“You won’t tell anyone?” he sniffled, not meeting my eye.
“Never,” I vowed. “Only ever us.”
He still didn’t look up, but he smiled a little. “Only ever us.”
That was when our friendship became a safe place, where secrets could be shared and promises didn’t even have to be spoken aloud in order to be kept.
Ben loathed his place—the apartment reminded him of his mom, even years after she’d been gone—and with me just three doors down, he didn’t really have to spend much time there. I don’t know that my mother was happy to have him at our place so much as she barely noticed; what was one more body watching TV on the sofa, or another serving of mac ’n’ cheese, which Hadley had made, anyway? We stayed out of her hair, and she knew I’d clean up afterward.
Ben’s dad didn’t push him to come home. Instead, Reggie started showing up wherever Ben was. He’d sit on the stoop with my mother while Ben and I played on the sidewalk, and even though we were mostly free-range kids, sometimes they’d trail behind us on the way over to Carroll Park, or every once in a while walk all the way over to Prospect Park with us. Sometimes I overheard them talking, and it was usually about Ben and if he was doing all right—the implication being that he wasn’t. He’s fine, I wanted to say. Can’t you see? He has me. And for reasons I didn’t understand, even back then, I was enough for him.
Ben and I stayed as thick as thieves in middle school, though there was a period of time where we tried to be sneaky about it because everyone thought we were dating and that made both of us gag. He got into a magnet high school while I went to the one near our neighborhood, which made it easier to sidestep other people’s opinions. Most days we’d meet at Carroll Park after the last bell, and head out on whatever adventure we’d decided on before ending up at my place to do our homework and have dinner, only to head back out and roam the city until my curfew.
Ben started high school nearly as scrawny as he’d been in elementary school, but he filled up and out by his junior year. It wasn’t long before my girlfriends, and even my sisters, started referring to him as “hot.” I knew he was objectively attractive, but he was also . . . Ben, the kid who sometimes snorted when he laughed and looked like a baby bunny when he cried. He may have been exceptionally easy on the eyes, but he was my best friend. And as my mother had remarked offhand—although more than once—nothing ruined friendship faster than romance.
Our senior year of high school, I got into the University of Michigan, where I’d applied after seeing its picturesque brochure. He was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania, where he intended to major in finance; for someone who didn’t believe in studying, his grades had always been stellar, and he figured he’d go make a couple million quickly and retire early.
I guess I didn’t really understand that we were leaving each other—or at least I didn’t accept what that would mean in practical terms—until the night after graduation. We were on my back patio, sharing a wine cooler that we’d stolen from his dad, which we’d poured into plastic cups, and he’d turned to me. It was dark, but my mother had strung twinkle lights along the fence, and they made his eyes shine bright. “Laine?” he said.
As I looked at him, something strange in me stirred, something that hadn’t been there before. Except the way he was staring back at me made me think it wasn’t new for him; it was just the first time I’d noticed it. And to be honest, that terrified me. I loved what we had. I didn’t want to ruin it.
“Only ever us,” he said quietly.
I swallowed hard and forced myself not to look away. “Only ever us,” I said.
Then the moment passed, and we went back to being Laine and Ben. At least, that’s what I told myself.
But three and a half years later, we would have a fight that would end our friendship for good. And eventually I would come to see that it hadn’t just been that fight.
No, the night after graduation set the end in motion.
Growing up in New York, change was the one true constant. I’d blink and a favorite shop was a glass-walled condo; I’d return from a brief vacation to discover a neighborhood fixture had decamped to Vermont or Arizona or some other place that was said to offer much more for far less. But as the cab pulled off the expressway and entered Carroll Gardens, I was reminded of how much this pocket of Brooklyn still looked like the city of my youth. Redbrick brownstones and cars parked bumper to bumper. Shopkeepers spraying down the sidewalks while children played and yelled and outran their parents. People—everywhere people. I was at once comforted and overwhelmed. It was just one week. Hadn’t I gotten through countless other trips to see my family without running into Ben? Admittedly, he hadn’t been in New York then; like me, he’d managed to land everywhere but the city. But even if I saw him now, I’d simply be cordial and go on my merry way. No big discussions, no arguments that only made things worse. Just . . . goodbye.