“Ugh, this is hard.” I know what I feel, but saying it aloud feels risky, as if I’m daring the world to come at me. Like talking about a nightmare or wearing all white to a barbecue. Once you say something, it’s just out there, where the Universe can use it against you. “God, I am a slow train wreck of inaction, or whatever she said. Alice is right.”
“You’re going to counseling, aren’t you?” Megan says. “You’re getting hypnotized and you’re staying up all night dancing and you’re fielding text messages from Matt’s parents and you’re trying to be there for Jack and I wouldn’t put it past you to send a decoy on vacation so your mom can have her perfect trip while you stay home and kill yourself trying to save someone’s life. Sure you’re scared and you have trouble opening up, but you’re not a slug, Natalie. And you’re putting yourself out there with Beau. That has to count for something.”
“Beau and I literally come from different worlds,” I say, frustrated. “So why am I putting myself through this? I mean, on the one hand I can’t even tell my best friend how I feel about him, and on the other, I can’t make myself stop going there with him.”
“Nat,” Megan says, the pounding of her feet against the treadmill slowing. “We don’t have to talk about this.”
“He does make me feel warm,” I say. “And safe. He’s . . . even. I doubt I could ever shock him. And he knows about Grandmother and the two worlds, and that makes me feel understood. Like, less alone than I’ve ever been. Like we’re somehow two parts of the same thing.” That’s what I’ve been scared to say. That’s why I’m afraid to want him, and also why I can’t make myself stop. “I don’t know. He’s gentle. He’s so gentle that I feel like crying when I think about it, and I don’t really understand that but it’s the truth and I don’t want to lose him but I’m going to, and somehow, even with the guilt about Matt, it’s still worth it to me to spend every minute I can with him.”
Megan’s silent for a long moment before she murmurs, “I changed my mind.”
“About what?”
“Denial,” she says, “I don’t want to live there after all. I want to feel everything so much it hurts.”
I take a deep breath and fumble over my words. “Did you ever think you and Matt might . . . you know.”
“Might what?”
“Date.”
She snorts. “You mean throughout the years of him staring at you like a desperate-to-please Labrador puppy? Yes, naturally. The biggest turn-on in the world is someone who’s obsessed with your best friend.”
“I’m serious, Meg. You’ve really never thought you guys might work?”
“In a group project or flag-football scenario, yes. But in a romantic relationship, only if you died shortly after having Matt’s baby and, in my resulting psychotic break, I began to wear your old clothes and only eat your favorite foods and continue your life à la Stevie Nicks’s marriage to Kim Anderson, and even in that situation I don’t think I’d make it as long as Stevie before returning to writing songs for mothers and wives rather than being a mother and wife. Hey, speaking of psychotic breaks, any reason why you’re trying to set me up with your ex-boyfriend who’s in a coma?”
Despite the way the word coma slices through me, I laugh in relief. “Sorry. I don’t want to live in Denial either. I want to live in a world where you get everything you’ve ever wanted. And cheese fries. I want cheese fries.”
“Always.”
Thursday’s hypnotherapy is a bust, and Alice won’t speak to me when it’s over. “I’m going to ask my parents tonight,” I tell her as I’m leaving. “About missing the family trip.”
“We’ll see,” she says sharply.
“I just need a little more time. It’s more complicated than it seems, but I’m going to ask.”
“Everything on this entire planet is complicated,” Alice says coolly, and with that, I nod and leave.
I hate to prove her right, but when dinner comes and we’re all peacefully sitting around the table, I start to feel like there are hands grasped around my trachea. It doesn’t help when the trip comes up in conversation naturally, and Mom starts giddily describing all the pre-trip research she’s done. I promised myself I was going to ask to stay home, right after dinner, but now the thought of actually doing it makes me visibly shake.
Then, halfway through the meal, Coco sets down her fork and clears her throat, immediately summoning all of our attention.
“I don’t want to transfer,” she announces. “I want to stay at Ryle.”
Mom sets her own fork down and stares at her, mouth agape, but Dad just half shrugs and keeps eating. “If that’s what you want, baby,” he says. It’s what he’s always called Coco, but now it elicits an eye roll. Mom shoots him a We have to talk about this before we say such things! look, and he clears his throat exactly like Coco just did. “Any particular reason?”
She shrugs and toys with her hair. It’s like watching a Twilight Zone version of tennis in which hereditary mannerisms are being volleyed back and forth. “I just don’t.”
“Coco, you’ve worked so hard for this,” Mom says. “A performing arts school—”