Me: You’re not even there when I’m there.
SN: do you always get so existential when you’re drunk?
Me: You didn’t even want to have coffee with me. It was just coffee.
I am crying now, and it’s this—my tears, not my IM’ing, or my pushing his hand off my leg, that finally gets Joe to give up and move away. Second choice to hooking up with me is, apparently, playing games on his phone. I hear intermittent beeps. At least my tears are quiet. Everyone else is way too busy to notice.
SN: what are you talking about?
Me: YOU KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.
SN: I really don’t.
Me: STOP PRETENDING I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
SN: wait, Jessie, for real, I’m confused. you know who I am? I mean, I thought maybe you did the other day, but then I thought no way. and I was going to tell you, but—
Me: It was only coffee. Am I that, I don’t know, horrible, that…Never mind.
SN: I don’t know what you’re talking about. seriously. should we wait till you’re sober to have this conversation? this is not going the way I wanted it to—
Me: Yeah. Me neither.
I turn off my phone. Run up the stairs to the small bathroom. Throw up my DeLucci’s pizza and six cans of beer and don’t even feel the tiniest bit of nostalgic relief when I see Scar’s map of the world shower curtain or even the Cat in the Hat soap dispenser that has been there for as long as I can remember. I sit on her old fluffy blue bath mat and try to hold still as the world continues to spin.
CHAPTER 28
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Scar says. I open one eye. She’s wearing flannel pajamas, her hair is back in a mini ponytail, and she doesn’t look even the slightest bit hungover. There’s an obvious hickey on her neck that I hope she will cover before seeing her parents. She sits cross-legged at the end of her bed, which I apparently slept in, though I don’t really remember how I got here. She hands me a glass of water. “Please tell me you did not hook up with Joe.”
“Eww. No. Course not.” My head throbs, a pain radiating from the inside out, like my brain is rotting. I sit up and then lie right back down. Too fast. All too fast. “So, I was thinking about going back early.”
The words come out before I think them through. I just can’t stand to be near Scarlett and for us not to be us. I imagine this is what breaking up with someone feels like.
“Don’t. J. Seriously. Not like this.”
“I don’t know why you hate me so much.” My eyes are closed, so the words are easier to say, to slip them right into the darkness. I must have spent all of my tears last night, because none come now. Just an overwhelming feeling of loss.
“I don’t hate you.” Scar scoots up the bed, so she is sitting next to me now, and her arm is around my shoulder. “God, you stink.”
I laugh. “Thanks a lot. I threw up.”
“No shit.”
“Scar—”
“I don’t hate you.” She pauses. Gathers the words. “But you left. Not me. You are the one who left.”
I look out the window, behind Scar’s head, and see that the trees are almost bare already, even though it’s still autumn. Their leaves have been shed, one by one, leaving the branches naked and unprotected in the cold. I shiver, pull the blanket up.
“That’s not fair. I didn’t want to go. You know that.”
“But you barely even ask about how I am. You didn’t just leave, you, you know, left.”
“I just, I guess I just assumed you were the same. There’s been so much going on with me, I wanted to tell you all about my life. That’s what we do,” I say, and now my bottom lip begins its familiar quiver. Maybe she’s right and I’m wrong, and everything is all my fault. Scarlett, my dad, SN, soon Dri. Maybe my mom, in some strange cosmic way. Maybe self-centered narcissists like me don’t deserve mothers.
“You know how hard it’s been for me? You think I wanted to hang out with Deena? When you left I had nobody. Nobody,” Scar says. “You never even ask, like, I don’t know. Anything.”
“I’m sorry. You’re right. I’ve had my head really far up my own ass.”
“And I feel bad even being mad at you, because it’s like, your mom died, and then you had to move and live with the evil steppeople. They don’t seem so bad, by the way. But I still need my best friend, you know? Not everything is about you.” Scar folds into herself and then starts to cry so hard, her body shakes. I put my arms around her from behind, my stomach to her back, though I have no idea what’s going on.
“Scar, it’s okay. It will be okay. Talk to me,” I say, but she’s in no condition to talk. Too many tears and too much snot. So I wait. I can do that. I can wait and then I can listen.