“Of course I do!” Olivia’s eyes widened; she came back into the room then, perched on the edge of my bed. It was the closest we’d been to each other in weeks. “You’re my best friend.”
“You’re my best friend!” I told her. “You know that. And I feel weird and crappy that me coming here is what started it. Like, if I had stayed back in Jessell obviously I’d miss you, but maybe it would be better to miss you if you were far away instead of, like, right down the hall.”
“You coming here didn’t start it,” Olivia told me, pulling her knees up onto the mattress and settling in. “I loved having you here, are you kidding?”
“Really?”
“Yeah!” Olivia said. “What started it was everybody here pitting us against each other like we’re on American Gladiators or something.”
I wasn’t sure if that was what had started it, actually; I worried it was deeper than that, some deep fissure in our friendship that dated back longer than we knew. Still, she was smiling at me, and I wanted things to be better. “Next thing you know they’re going to try to make us fight each other with those giant Q-tip things,” I joked.
Then, because I wanted to be honest with her, because talking to her at all felt like a gift and I didn’t want to waste it: “I know I was dragging you down at the beginning,” I said slowly. “You weren’t wrong to be pissed at me.”
“I was wrong to be a massive bitch about it, though.” Olivia shook her head. “But you’ve come so crazy far since we got here, you know that? Guy totally knew what he was doing when he picked you. You’re amazing to watch.”
I grinned at that, ducking my head kind of shyly even as I wanted her to say lots more. Olivia’s opinion meant more to me than anyone else’s; even more than Alex, she was the person I’d wanted to impress all these weeks.
“I’m sorry about Alex,” I told her, as long as we were apologizing. I’d said it before, but it was important to me that she knew I’d never meant to steal him out from under her, that our friendship was worth more to me than that and I knew I’d been wrong to do what I did. “The whole thing was fucked up of me. I should have stayed away from him to begin with, or at least talked to you about it right up front.”
Olivia shook her head, twisting the end of her braid around her fingers. “I didn’t even really like Alex that much, honestly. I was mostly just mad because I felt like you were keeping secrets to punish me, or pulling away on purpose, or something.”
I chafed at that a little. “You were off being best friends with Kristin and Ashley!”
Olivia scoffed. “I was never going to be best friends with Kristin and Ashley,” she assured me. “I tried to make them watch Junia with me when they were still here, did you know that?” She made a sheepish face. “Shockingly, they were not as into her as we are.”
I laughed. “Well, sad but true, not everyone has impeccable taste like you and me. Did you teach them the dance?”
“I tried to, like, explain the dance?” Olivia shook her head. “They were not buying.”
“Really?” I hopped up off the bed and struck the first pose with great drama, my arms in a big, exaggerated V over my head. “This didn’t entice them?”
Olivia scrambled up and hit the same pose. “I can’t imagine why.”
We did the dance in goofy, overblown synchronization—both of us singing the Junia theme song at the top of our voices, purposefully off-key, hitting all our made-up dance moves with a verve that would have made Charla proud until we were laughing too hysterically to finish. Finally, we collapsed into a helpless pile on the bed, still giggling so hard I thought I might actually barf. I hadn’t laughed like that all summer. Olivia was the only person I ever did it with.
Eventually we caught our breath again, lying side by side on the mattress, both of us quiet except for the odd hiccup. Even breathing felt better now, like there’d been a hair elastic wrapped around my lungs the last couple of weeks and it had finally snapped.
“So, you and Alex,” Olivia said, still staring at the ceiling. “Have you guys . . . ?” She trailed off.
I smirked. “Have we what, exactly?”
Olivia rolled over, fixed me with a look. “You know what.”
I hesitated a moment, and then I nodded. “When we got back from Jessell,” I told her. “That first night.”
Olivia nodded slowly. “What was it like?” she asked.
I thought about that for a moment. “Good,” I told her. “You know, new, but good.”
“Good,” Olivia repeated. She scooted down on the mattress then, laid her head in my lap. “Can I tell you something weird?” she asked, peering up at me. Her eyes looked very bright. “It makes me kind of sad, honestly. Like, not that you guys did it, but I guess I just always assumed that as soon as one of us did it, the other one would know right away.”
My heart broke a little at that, an ache in my chest I could actually feel. “I wanted to tell you,” I promised her, reaching down and tugging the end of her braid, just lightly. “It’s like it wasn’t even real until I did.”
“Oh, it was real,” Olivia said, wiggling her eyebrows like a pervert.
That made me laugh. “Okay,” I admitted, “it was real. But you know what I mean.”
“I do,” Olivia agreed. Then: “I missed you, jerk.”
I grinned down at her. “I missed you, too.” It was like I hadn’t even let myself feel how much until then: like there’d been a part of me that had gone quiet since we hadn’t been speaking, some vital slice of who I was. She needs you, Olivia’s mom had told me. I needed Olivia, too. We needed each other.
I took a deep breath, cautious. “Can I ask you something without you getting mad?”
Olivia looked up at me curiously. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Of course.”
“What’s going on with eating stuff?”
Olivia waved her hand, dismissive. “I told you,” she said, “I’m handling that.”
“Liv,” I said. One of the things I’d realized while we weren’t speaking was how dumb and naive it had been of me to think I could solve Olivia’s problems on my own—by watching her eat a sandwich, by forcing French fries on her and watching to make sure her ankles didn’t get too thin. The truth was, this was bigger than me. Possibly it was bigger than both of us. I hadn’t been doing anybody any favors by pretending it wasn’t. “Come on.”
“You come on,” Olivia said stubbornly.
But I shook my head. I couldn’t let things go on like they had been. I owed her more than that. “Look,” I said. “I know you haven’t been totally honest with me about what’s going on with you when it comes to that stuff. And part of that is my fault, too, because I was afraid to make it into a big deal, so I never wanted to push it. But it is a big deal, Liv.”