Being Friends With Boys (33 page)

Jilly listens. And then, after a long pause, she says, “You need to do what makes you happiest. Don’t worry where it’s going right now.”

My brow furrows. I wish she could see it. “It’s not that. I’m just . . . unsure.”

“Unsure about what, exactly?”

“Unsure what I want from all of this, from all of them. Unsure if it’s about me or—” Oliver. Benji. Fabian. Trip. Lish. Taryn. Sylvia. Mom. Even Jilly.

“You can’t do it for someone else.” I hear her shift in the bed, can almost see her, in the dark, facing me fully. “You have to do it for you.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“You sound like Mom.”

She is surprised. “Do I?”

I backpedal. “Well, not exactly. But that’s something she’d say.”

I wait for her to get mad. To tell me how wrong I am, say it’s awful for me to compare her to someone she’s trying so hard not to be. But she doesn’t say anything. And I don’t want us to be fighting when she’s only home a couple of days.

“How do I know what’s really the right thing, though?” I ask, to keep things going.

“Oh, I think you know. Deep down we all really do.”

I consider this, staring into the dark. “I’m afraid I might
like
Trip,” I test out.

Absolute quiet comes from her side of the room. And then, finally: “Do you?”

I imagine him. His grandpa-style gold-rimmed glasses. His floppy hair. His sloped handwriting. His focus on me whenever I’m talking.

I imagine myself, the last six weeks, without him around.

“I know I’m better when I’m with him,” I admit.

Jilly doesn’t say anything for so long, I think she’s maybe asleep. So long I regret not saying something different.

But after a while it comes out, quiet: “Well, there’s a start.”

The next day is Thanksgiving, so the moment we’re awake, there are other, better-smelling things to focus on. We sauté shallots and chop garlic. Corn bread is baked and then crumbled for stuffing. We take pans off the stove, clean them only to dirty them again with something else. Gretchen’s made a playlist for us—songs full of thanks. When Carole King bursts out of the speakers, Hannah sings along, unembarrassed. Jilly and I do harmonies up and around her, and it feels good and right in a way I didn’t know I’d
been missing. Even Dad joins in. We sing together all afternoon.

By four o’clock, everything is ready and we’ve changed from Cooking In the Kitchen Casual to Thanksgiving Dinner Outfits. It’s sort of funny, transitioning into Formal Dinner Mode with each other. Why we don’t eat dinner in whatever we were wearing before I don’t know, because it’s not like anyone’s here to see. But when we sit down at the table—made bigger by the leaf we rarely use anymore and lit by tall candles in Hannah’s mother’s crystal candlesticks—it’s actually nice.

The reliable goodness of our family joining hands like we do every year, going around the table to each say a thing we’re thankful for—it feels like some of the questions inside me start to break apart and drift away. There
are
some things I know are right.

While we’re cleaning up the dishes after Thanksgiving dinner, Mom calls. Right away she apologizes for not doing so before now, and it occurs to me I’d hardly noticed. She tells me about the grain salad she’s making for the multifamily Thanksgiving they always have at the studio, and I wonder if she still misses regular corn-bread stuffing. But for the first time, while she talks, I can hear in her voice how content Mom is there. Holidays without her usually make me all sorry for myself, but somehow, today, I know she wouldn’t be happy if she was here. She wouldn’t—and neither would we. It’s a strange thing to have my head around.

We’re leading up to good-byes when Jilly sidles over to me and takes the phone, wanders into the living room. When she comes back into the kitchen, I can tell she’s been crying a little. But I can also tell she doesn’t want anybody to notice, so I toss her a towel and get her to help me with the drying.

Benji texts me on Friday, saying that he is dying of boredom and can I please rescue him. Since Jilly has plans with her high school friends, I suggest we go to the movies and out for Chinese. When Fabian texts ten minutes later, I invite him along.

Which turns out to be one of my best ideas, ever. Benji picks me up and we meet Fabian at the restaurant. We pile our plates with greasy buffet and talk so much we barely make it to the movies, all three of us jokingly irritated that we missed the first preview. When it’s over we stand in the parking lot debating the pros and cons of the film, until I’m in danger of violating curfew.

Before we split up, Fabian hugs me. “I think you should call Oliver,” he says.

When I start to protest, he gives me this fatherly look. I tell him I will think about it. He says he hopes I won’t think too long.

Early Sunday morning I’m helping Jilly check the bathroom for all her toiletries, making sure her laundry got separated from mine when we did Laundry Marathon last night. It sweeps over
me how much better things are, without me even knowing it, when my sister is here. How much I don’t want her to go, don’t want to go back to trying to be okay with her gone.

But it doesn’t matter how much clearer things are with Jilly, because it’s time for her to go, and for me to clear them up myself. We help load up her bags, and she moves around the circle of us, saying good-byes.

“You’re doing so great,” she says. “Just listen to yourself, and you’ll be fine.”

I squeeze her tighter and tighter, not knowing what to say. And then she’s walking down to her car, and opening the door, and driving away.

With Jilly gone, it’s best to get things back to normal, so I spend an hour turning the room back into mine—straightening the comforter on her bed, throwing the sheets in the wash, putting on my music, pulling out my binders and books to plan the week. Taking out my algebra homework, I find that reasons-I’m-in-a-band list I tried to make: the one that starts with
Our Golden Summer
and ends with
Trip
.

Immediately, I know what I have to do. I don’t know why I’ve waited for so stupidly long. I pull on my boots, grab for a jacket, then pound down the stairs and holler to whomever is in earshot that I’m going for a walk.

As I propel myself down the street, I can’t believe I’ve been so pigheaded and selfish, how I let all
this
get in the way. Oliver and I have lasted through so much. Like the time we got busted for trying to walk off campus during lunch as freshmen and had to serve detention together for a week. The month in seventh grade when he was in love with Zoe Blackstone—how silently devastated he was when she started wearing Will Stanford’s hockey jersey, and how I spent one entire afternoon filling up his locker with
Her loss!
notes. How grateful he was every day that I took notes for him while his arm was in that cast in tenth grade, so much so that, for a while, I confused it for a crush. Our fifth-grade science fair project, and the poetry project last semester in Mrs. Stenis’s class. How he’s always needed me, and I’ve always needed to be the one he counts on.

I think of the tiny things that make us what we are: the way he sees I’m irritated even when I’m doing my best to hide it, how I can make him laugh when he least expects it. How he understands that I get freaked out and will blow things out of proportion, but then how I will always calm down and come back, even if I’m convinced I never will. How he’s so cool and great and mysterious when he sings—and how he admitted that I’m better. Years and years of the two of us ending up, somehow, together. A team.

He said I didn’t have to be around. But all this time—he didn’t have to be either.

The closer I get to his house, the more anxious I feel, wondering if he’s back from his grandparents’. Seeing all the cars in the driveway washes me in relief, and I practically jump up the stairs to his porch. I’m impatient, waiting for someone to answer my knock, afraid he’ll see me and won’t answer.

And then he’s there, holding the door open. He’s wearing sweatpants and a hoodie—something I hardly ever see him in anymore. He’s got on a baseball cap and his glasses, which he never wears. He looks like the boy I met in fifth grade, only a lot taller. He looks like my friend.

We blink at each other a minute.

“Apparently,” he says finally, “I can’t write songs for shit.”

I hold up my notebook—the empty, fresh one I grabbed with my jacket. “Well”—I smile big—“apparently I can.”

We don’t talk about what happened. We don’t bother comparing Thanksgivings or families or what’s been going on since our fight. Instead we go down into the rec room to get some ideas going. When freewriting yields very little, I tell him the story of Taryn and Sylvia and Aaron. I don’t mention the band thing, or anything about Earhorn, only the story of two lesbians and a grungy hipster boy. This gets him to talk about Whitney: to admit, at least sideways, that it was weird when she started hanging out with some senior right after the Halloween dance. I tell
him about Lish dropping me again. He brings up that week in ninth grade when she fake flirted with Abe, just to get revenge on him for pointing out how she talks with food in her mouth.

We laugh. We remember. We write and write. After almost two hours we’ve come up with a couple songs that, with some revision, could become something.

“I knew we’d make it back,” he says, giving me a high five.

His words make my eyes go wide.

I stand and reach for my jacket. “I gotta go.”

He gets up too. “What, homework?”

I can see he wants to tell me this is way more vital to my future than some project for Enviro.

“No. You’ll see. Keep working on those.” I point to the sheets of our almost-lyrics. “And get ready for more.”

“Okay.” His face is confused at first, but then something in it shifts. “Spider . . .” He reaches out to give me a hug. “I’m sorry.”

I feel how good it is, our being together again.

But then I can’t help it: “Well, you were a jerk. But I’m sorry too.”

He holds my gaze for just long enough.

“So.” I snap to, pushing back my hair. “Practice tomorrow?”

“Every day until the dance.”

“I’ll be there,” I chirp, waving and bounding up the steps.

At home, I tear through my desk until I find what I’m looking for, shoved in the back of the middle drawer: the scribbled thoughts from what feels like months ago, when Trip stopped talking to me. Some of the scrawls are so messy I can barely decipher them, and some are so maudlin you can practically smell the pathos coming off the paper. But there are other parts that surprise me with their honesty, with how clearly they say exactly what I felt. They aren’t the main lines I’m looking for, though, so I smooth out each page, spreading them across the desk so that I can see, until—there they are. I’m glad I had the sense to actually record them when they were fresh.

At the top of a new page, I write,
Hansel and Gretel Crumbs
.

I hope I kept enough of them to lead me back.

I
can’t describe the happiness I feel the next day, walking out to the parking lot with Oliver, both of us excited and eager for rehearsal, not caring about anybody else around us. Though Oliver’s chin is high, I can’t help but sneak glances over at Trip, who’s hanging out with his gang a few rows down from Oliver’s car. I don’t know if it was a good idea or not, what I did last night, or if he even got it, or cared, but after spending an hour reshaping all those thoughts, perfecting the last song we wrote together—I don’t know. I was . . . thinking about him. A lot. And he and I don’t have the accordion background of me and Oliver, so it’s not like we can just snap back to the
way things were. But I’m still grateful for what we had. So last night before I went to bed, I had to let him know somehow that Our Golden Summer mattered. I opened his playlist and selected one to email to him. No message, no nothing—just that “It’s All Mixed Up” song he played for me over the phone forever ago.

I try not to stare as we drive past on the way to Oliver’s, and when we get there, I push it totally out of my mind. I’m so happy to be back—carrying a platter of snacks down into Oliver’s rec room, hearing Abe’s under-his-breath “thank god” at the sight of me. Eli comes over and wraps me in a hug, lifting me off the ground. And then Fabian, when he arrives, is all Kermit the Frog, both of us twinkling at each other. None of us dwells on my little departure. Winter Formal is in less than two weeks, and there’s a lot we have to do.

We stay focused and work, trying some of the new songs and going over old favorites. When I suggest to Oliver that we sing “Disappear” as a
duet
, he scrunches up his brow for a second, then agrees to give it a try. I realize I’m being my whole self here, surrounded by true friends. And it feels awesome.

Feels so awesome, for all of us, that we go until seven thirty, and Mrs. Drake offers to make us dinner. We decline, needing to get back to families and homework, since we’ll be practicing again tomorrow. Eli and Fabian leave their equipment down in
the rec room, and I give the new lyrics to Oliver, so he can work on melodies tonight if he has time. Fabian drives me home.