The corner of his lips quivered, but didn’t move. It was the closest to smiling he’d ever come. “Then why it matter if I sit with friends or sit with you? It just matter that I sit somewhere.”
I looked out the window and thought about pills and letters and lunch tables and things I could never define. But it might not have been about defining anything. It was about recognizing that pain existed and deserved to. That everything I felt, from loneliness to hatred to fear, existed and deserved to. What I tried to understand wasn’t the point. The point was that I tried to understand it.
“You can sit with your friends,” I told him, after typing The Definition of Depression across the page.
He shot me a rare Polka smile. An extraordinarily comforting sight. “Who said I don’t?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
CATFISH WERE THE UGLIEST CREATURES TO ever move on the earth. It was like God made them as a joke just to say, Hey, I can make really beautiful things like flowers and Ryan Gosling, but I can also make the ugliest possible creature any mind could ever have the displeasure of imagining. I watched the slimy excuses for marine life blow bubbles on the surface of the pond, ignorant of their own hideous misfortune. The dock was wobbly underneath me, like the hundred pounds of ugly (see: catfish) were forming an anarchy to take me down. If I’d still been talking to Snake, I would have demanded that the elusive pond committee fund a restoration project immediately.
Carla had texted that Tuesday morning to ask me if I would meet her on the dock after I left the hospital. Once again, she’d been a Hawkesbury no-show. Like the Snake standard, she’d better have been dying, dead, or having a baby for her absence to be permissible. If I had to suffer through seven hours of busywork, social drama, and hardly edible grilled cheese, so should she. But she was Carla Banks. She had money, an intimidating dad, and a giant ginger squash stuffed in her womb, so she could pretty much get out of anything.
I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to see her. And I sure as hell didn’t want to brave the pond knowing that Snake could come down at any minute and confuse me. I didn’t want to hear his voice, and see his much-too-pretty eyes, and listen to one of his arrogant speeches that was actually kind of endearing, and forget why I left him in the first place.
However, there was always the grand but. And that particular one was that there wasn’t much left to lose. The afternoon could turn out to be a hormonal tearfest or plot for revenge or battle of the ex-and sorta-ex-girlfriend, and it would amount to nothing. I couldn’t get hurt any worse.
She made it to the pond only five minutes after I did, her red hair tied back in a curly ponytail. She wore a pink sundress that swelled her up like a pregnant peach. Her stomach was abnormally huge, so much so that I worried about her getting near any sharp objects for fear of popping. That would have been a mess I wasn’t willing to clean up.
When she saw me, she grinned like we were old friends who hadn’t seen each other for a stretch. I thought it best not to mention that we were in no way friends and that not seeing her for a stretch would have been what got me grinning. She waddled to the dock and wasted a minute attempting to sit down gracefully beside me. There was nothing graceful about it.
“Thanks for coming,” she said, straining to catch her breath from the grueling sit. “I didn’t think you would. I know you have a lot on your plate, with your dad and everything—”
“I thought if you saw my disinterest in person, you’d get the hint that I’m not your BFF.”
“I got the hint when you didn’t answer my first fifteen calls.” She smiled. “Thanks for that.”
“Anytime. And for the record, calling someone fifteen times in thirty minutes could be considered harassment. It’s unethical.”
“So is stealing a pregnant girl’s boyfriend, but I didn’t fault you for it.” She smirked at how well she was keeping pace.
“Touché. But I didn’t steal him. We were never dating. I’m sure he made it sound that way, though.”
“Don’t worry. I know he’s very skilled in embellishment.” She caressed her stomach with her hands. There was a solemnity in her eyes that seemed like too deep a feeling for her. She didn’t look like picture-perfect Little Miss Flashburn. “How come all of our conversations end in Snake?”
“He’s the only thing we have in common.” I shrugged and tore off a splintered piece of wood from the dock and tossed it in the water.
“Is he? Because we knew each other years before we met him.”
“Yeah, but we weren’t friends. You were captain of the prissy posse, remember?”
She smiled, embarrassed at the reminder of her seventh-grade self. “That lasted one month. Tops.” She gazed across the lake, the water bobbing in her eyes. “We should have been friends.”
“Me and you? Friends?” I faked a laugh. “That would have never worked.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re you. You’re beauty-pageant, mansion-by-the-pond material, and I’m the one who quietly mocks your kind from across town. It’s a delicate balance. It would have been detrimental to our health to upset it.”
She looked at me with amusement and curiosity, but also a hint of grief. Grief for herself, or me, or her baby. It was hard to tell. It was oddly not Carla. Truthfully, it was a familiar despondency. Like looking in a mirror.
“I don’t think that’s me anymore,” she whispered, her voice floating through the crisp air. “Something changed when I got pregnant. I can’t explain it. It’s like, all the things I cared about before seem so ridiculous now.”
“Like what?”
“Like prom. Before I got pregnant, I would have gone dress shopping with my friends and taken pictures and danced with my boyfriend, and it would have been the most exciting thing to happen to me all year. But it wasn’t like that. I wore a maternity dress I had to buy online, and my friends didn’t even talk to me, and I didn’t want to take pictures because I looked bloated. And Snake, well . . . let’s just say the evening was a far cry from ‘Ohmigod, this is so romantic.’ I mean, we danced and everything, but none of it felt the way it was supposed to.” She sighed, staring down at her stomach.
New Carla was having quite the uncomfortable effect on me. It was similar to compassion. Sympathy, maybe? Whatever it was, I didn’t like it. Carla and I couldn’t . . . get along. A bearable Carla who was potentially half friend material defied the laws of sanity. But I was understanding her in ways I hadn’t before. And her life was almost as twisted and senseless as mine. And I just . . .
I couldn’t hate her the way I wanted to.