“Whoa,” Joy said. “Slow down.” She pressed her lips together and took a deep breath. “You can’t own a person, so you can’t steal a person. He was never mine.” She looked straight at me then. “But if you had just been honest with me, I would have had your back,” she said. “Instead I felt like you made it a competition or something.”
I looked down at my hands. I’d broken the skin. “I can’t compete with you,” I said. “Trust me, I’m a hot mess.” A lump surfaced unexpectedly in my throat, and I gulped water to keep it down.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Joy asked. “Olivia,” she said—which she never said, which is how I knew it was really showing. “What is going on with you?”
“I’ll tell you if you tell me,” I said, hedging. I already knew it was a lie, because at that moment I honestly thought that if I told Joy the truth, everything would fall apart. Because back then, on the other side, “falling apart” just meant that everyone would know how far gone I was, and that people would be mad at me and I would have to drop out and go to some rehab facility where I’d sweat and heave and feel like shit for a week. That seemed like the worst possible thing in the world. I was so fucking selfish.
I’ll tell you if you tell me. One step up from Secrets, secrets are no fun, secrets, secrets hurt someone.
“Something’s the matter with my ankle,” Joy said, looking into her water glass as she stirred and stirred, watching the ice cubes melt down to nothing. “Only Diego knows. So please don’t say anything.”
Diego knew all of our secrets, apparently.
“What is it?” I asked, before the waiter came with our food, and we did that thing of suddenly pretending we were deaf-mutes while he set down the plates and arranged the silverware.
When we were alone again, Joy shrugged and picked up a pickle. “I don’t know, I haven’t been to a doctor.”
“Why not?” A huge platter sat in front of me, my burger sitting on a lettuce raft in a sea of golden fries, but I was craving something much smaller and less filling.
“I can’t go without my parents finding out,” Joy said. “And if they found out they’d tell me to stop dancing on it.”
“Maybe you should.” I ran my dry tongue over my teeth. My ears popped.
Joy pressed her lips together and took a deep breath. “This is my one shot,” she said, her face tense just like I’d seen it through the glass panel on the studio door. “No offense, but I’m not gonna have a gap year to figure it out. You know my mom and dad. If I don’t get recruited by a company, the deal’s off. It’s over.”
We ate in silence for a minute. I took a tiny bite of my veggie burger and tasted wet cardboard.
“So,” I finally said. “What happens if it gets worse?”
“I don’t know.” Joy frowned. “I’m just trying to make it through the next couple weeks.” She reached across the table to steal a fry and shot me an embarrassed smile. “Actually, I’ve been spending some lunch periods icing it in the handicapped stall of the fourth floor bathroom.”
So Joy had a lunchtime bathroom habit, too. “You could have told me,” I said.
She shook her head emphatically. “I don’t need anyone else worrying about me. Diego’s bad enough. He’s only helping me because he knows I would dance on it anyway and he wants to be there to make sure I don’t do anything stupid.”
“I don’t think that’s why,” I said. The summer between ninth and tenth grades was when Kyle first started buying me forties from the corner store with his fake ID, saying he knew I would drink anyway and he wanted to make sure I was being responsible. It turned out he just wanted to try to kiss me in the hallway near the garbage disposal. When I didn’t let him and he kept buying, I felt more powerful than I knew what to do with.
“OK, so now you know my drama,” Joy said, chewing. “So what’s yours? You seem really upset.”
“Nope, just melodrama,” I sighed, relieved I had been smart enough to hold off confessing. “I’m just in such an awkward position. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, et cetera.”
“Between an Ethan and a Dave place?” Joy quipped.
“Pretty much.” I could feel my brain start to decelerate, the whirring and clicking getting slower, like a train approaching a station. I started to worry if I would need more before I got home, especially if my rehearsal with you went well and we decided to hang out afterward, which I knew was a long shot, maybe the longest shot, but still a shot I wanted to take. I wondered when Dante got off work, if he could meet me halfway. If I could find a good moment to excuse myself, I could text him and take my next dose at the same time. Two birds, one bathroom. I laughed, and Joy looked at me funny.
“Don’t take this wrong,” she said, “but to me, yours has an easy solution. Just let Ethan down gently.”
“It’s not, though,” I said. I thought about Ethan’s lips, and how nice they felt—but only when I was imagining he wasn’t attached to them.
“I know,” Joy said. But I could tell she didn’t.