Hard (8 page)

I guess I could promise that. But I don’t know that it’s
the truth. Something I learned the hard way in England is that if
something happens once, it can happen again.

I pick up the phone and see that the text is from Savannah:
Hair
appointment at three in your hood. Meet for brunch before???

Yes!
I text.
Send me the addy. I’ll get dressed now.

Yea! I’m leaving gym. Come as you are. Sunrise Café?

I’m in PJs
, I text.
Just got up.

Seriously??? It’s noon! Jet lag or something more fun?

She’s right. 12:03 to be exact. Time flies when you don’t
get home til 3am.

Buy me brunch and I’ll tell you all about it ☺

“Wait, so you work there for free?” Savannah says after I
catch her up on why I slept until half the day was gone. I even told
her about the daily office work I’m doing, the books and
balance sheets, leaving out last night’s office work.

Not that Savannah would have cared. Knowing her, she might have high
fived me. But without knowing what Ryder’s thinking, whether
I’m even going to have a job there on Monday, I guess I’m
not sure if a high five is in order just yet.

Savannah and I sit at a window-side table at Sunrise Café, a
place we used to come when she would visit from Austin during college
breaks. She stacks a piece of bacon on her forked French toast then
dips the whole thing in a side of orange juice. It’s a combo
she’s loved as long as I’ve known her, and it kind of
makes me smile to see that her eating habits haven’t become
more refined, even though I can only assume from the oversized Louis
Vuitton tote bag she carries and Lululemon workout clothes she wears,
she can afford to eat anything she wants. Literally.

“I mean, I’m working for money,” I say. “It’s
just that Ryder’s keeping all of it til Jamie’s debt is
repaid.” The waiter pours me more coffee, not even waiting til
my cup is empty, which on the one hand I appreciate as being
attentive, but on the other I think is less about his effectiveness
as a server and more about the fact that Sunrise is kind of quiet for
a Saturday. Being a server, I realized last night, is a lot harder
than I thought it would be. Balancing a tray of drinks through a maze
of customers or even just hearing people’s orders over the
music and the talking is serious work. I was on my feet in heels for
basically six hours straight.

Except for the part, of course, when I was sitting on Ryder’s
desk. You can’t really keep your shoes on if your jeans are
coming off.

“Does Sebastian know about this?” Savannah says, and the
mention of his name shakes me right out of any memory of last night
with Ryder.

I take a small bite of my omelette, and chew it as long as humanly
possible. “Not exactly.”

Savannah sits back in her chair, sips her coffee with both hands.
“What’s going on?” Her blond ponytail, the same
length but curlier than my own, falls over her shoulder as she shakes
her head, examining me.

“What do you mean?”

“Cassie, I’m a lawyer,” she says. “I’m
paid to call out when people are trying to be deceptive. Add that to
the fact that I’ve known you, like, half your life, and I think
I can safely say: something’s up.” She punctuates the
point with another stab of French toast and bacon.

I haven’t really told anyone what happened with Sebastian.
Jamie hasn’t asked. I told my mom that I was just here to
collect some of my stuff from the house, and while I didn’t say
I was going back, I also didn’t say I wasn’t.

But Savannah isn’t just anyone. I swallow, and take a long slow
blink, trying to hang on to this one, last pre-truth moment, because
once you say something out loud, it’s real. “It’s
over. I left him.”

“Oh, God, Cass,” Savannah says. She reaches across the
table for my hand. “Like on-a-break over or over-over?”

“Over-over.” It’s scary but actually a relief
finally to be putting this information out into the world. Until
right now, I don’t think I had realized how much tension I’d
created in my body keeping this stuff to myself all this time, like
trying to wear shoes every day that are too tight.

“What happened?”

I run my index finger up and down the rounded handle of my coffee mug
and look out the window. The restaurant has a back patio, white
wooden tables on brick, surrounded by grass as green as a golf course
in Augusta. Even in shorts and a tank top, it’s too hot today
to sit out there, but there’s something so appealing about the
emptiness of that space, like it’s still untouched, unmarred by
anything anyone could do. It’s still perfect, which is how
things are before you try them, how people are before you love them,
or think you love them. I sigh. “It just didn’t work
out.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

I shrug. “I guess I felt like I had gotten myself into that
situation, you know, deciding to move to England with him so quickly,
so I needed to be the one to get myself out of it. That it wasn’t
anyone else’s problem but mine.”

“No,” Savannah says, shaking her head. “Your
problems are my problems. That’s how being friends works.”

“I felt bad,” I say. “I felt like, you know, I’d
let us fall out of touch. Like I couldn’t just out of the blue
ring you up after a year and be like, Oh, hey, I know it’s been
a while, but I made a big mistake and can you help me fix my life?”

Savannah laughs. “That’s basically the script for every
call I get from clients.”

“But that’s exactly why I didn’t want to make that
call,” I say. “I didn’t want to be just some client
you have to bail out.”

“Cassie,” Savannah says, leaning across the table, “if
there’s something I know about you, it’s that you can
take care of yourself. Remember that time in tenth grade when Natalie
Burch stole your chemistry journal at the end of the year and turned
it into Mrs. Von Peeble as her own?”

“Oh my gosh,” I say, smiling. “I can’t
believe you even remember that.”

“Of course I do. Natalie sat next to me in lab. Every
experiment she’d done the whole year had proved that energy and
matter actually can be created and destroyed, and then somehow she
got an A on her notebook grade.”

“I had to recreate the whole notebook for the entire year in,
like, a couple weeks so I could something to turn in or I was going
to fail.”

“And you made a perfect new notebook,” Savannah says,
pointing a forkful of French toast at me.

“And Natalie got caught.”

“She’s probably in some women’s prison right now,
trying to cheat Big Bertha at Uno between latrine duty shifts,”
Savannah says.

“Actually, I think I heard that she has, like, three kids and
lives in Hog Mountain.”

Savannah waves her hand. “Same thing. The point is, you’re
resilient.”

“But this isn’t just recreating a chemistry notebook,”
I say. “This is recreating my whole life.”

“You’re a problem solver. You get shit figured out. Jamie
fucks up, you save his ass. You’re negotiating with Ryder
Cole,” she says. The waiter, our new coffee BFF, refills our
mugs. “I mean, no one fucking negotiates with Ryder Cole. Or at
least lives to tell about it anyway.”

The waiter and I stare at Savannah, eyes widened.

“Kidding,” she says, looking from me to him. “I’m
exaggerating.”

The waiter nods and leaves. “I think you scarred him,” I
say.

“I’ll leave a big tip. He can put it toward the therapy.”

I exhale a little, feeling the extra room in my lungs, my heart, and
my mind that telling Savannah about what happened with Sebastian has
created. I mean, okay, it isn’t the whole story, but it’s
more of it than I’d been willing to share yet, and it feels
good to have chiseled away even a little at the boulder I’ve
been carrying around inside. I run my hand over my ponytail. “I’m
sorry I didn’t call you,” I say. “That I just let
us drift apart.”

“Me,
too,” Savannah says. “These last couple of years, I’ve
just let work take over.”“And I let Sebastian take
over,” I say, shaking my head.

“But
I could have checked on you,” she says. “My best friend
runs off to another continent with a guy she’s known six
months. The least I could have done was asked how happily ever after
was working out.”

“Not
so happily,” I say with a smirk.

“Time
to start a new story, then. Chapter one of the single girl handbook,”
Savannah says. “And I think I know just how it begins.”

***

Three hours after my last bite of Sunrise omelette, I’m a
brunette. Savannah, her lawyering skills on full display, somehow
talked the receptionist at Willow, her hair salon, into squeezing me
in for a color and cut while she got her ends trimmed.

“Oh my God, Cassie. It’s like you’re a fucking
model,” Savannah says now, her jaw literally dropped as she
takes in my new look, standing behind where I sit in the stylist’s
chair. “Case fucking closed.”

I grin at her reflection in the mirror, combing my fingers through my
new hair—what’s left of it anyway. No more ponytails.
It’s a choppy bob now, cut on a slant so that it brushes my
cheekbones—
highlights your facial structure
, the stylist
promised—with thick, straight bangs that swoop to one side. I
kind of can’t quit staring at myself, but it’s not
entirely out of vanity. It’s because, for the first time in
twenty-six years, I feel like a grown up.

For the last couple of years, I’ve kept my hair long, because
I’ve just always had it long, and even blonder than my natural
dark blond, because Sebastian liked it that way.
Like an angel
,
he’d say.
My angel.

But somehow this chocolatey brown is me. The real me. I never was an
angel, and I’m not his anymore. No more being someone I’m
not just because it’s the path of least resistance, and
definitely not just because it’s the path someone else prefers.

It’s like, sitting in this hair salon in the middle of a summer
Saturday afternoon, I’m seeing myself for the first time.

And I look good. Damn good.

Savannah runs her hands up the back of my head, gives my hair a tug.
“What are you doing?” I say, laughing.

“Just checking,” she says. She leans over my shoulder,
and in the mirror, her curly blond hair makes my dark, straight style
even more dramatic. “Good. It’s short and sexy, but still
long enough to be pulled from behind.”

“Is that in the single girl handbook?” I say.

“If it’s not,” she says, “it really should
be.”

***

Even though I slept til noon today, by the time the sun goes down
around eight, I’m totally knackered. Though I guess in America,
I’d just say I’m exhausted. Obviously they speak English
in England, but one thing I did really enjoy about living there was
the little twists on language that we don’t have here—
bollocks
instead of
B.S.,
fancy
instead of
like
,
cheers
for
bye
or
thanks
. Maybe I’ll keep
some in my vocabulary, like souvenirs that remind me of the good part
of my journey.

I’m cleaning up the kitchen, locking the new side door, and
considering a nine o’clock bedtime on a Saturday night (is this
in the single girl handbook?) when my mom calls.

“Hi, honey,” she says. “I can’t believe I’m
finally talking to you in the same time zone.”

“I know, me neither. It’s been a while.”

“Usually I’m calling before I’ve even had dinner
and you’re headed to bed,” she says.

I chuckle as I walk up the stairs. “Well, I imagine you’ve
already had dinner, but actually, I am headed to bed.”

“Really?” she says. “I thought for sure Jamie would
be showing you off to his friends on a Saturday night. His
world-traveler sister.”

Jamie.
My mom saying his name stops me cold in the doorway of
my bedroom.

She doesn’t know he’s gone. But then again, why would
she? When you get into some money trouble with an underground
fighting ring, I guess you don’t usually run to tell your
mommy.

“Are y’all getting to spend some time together and catch
up?” she says.

“Yeah,” I say, my voice a scratchy whisper. “We
are.” I clear my throat like I’m trying to expel the lie,
but I can’t expel Ryder’s question from scrolling through
my head again, like a ticker tape:
I think you should consider
whether he’d do all this for you.

Ryder’s admonishment isn’t quite right. Jamie would lie
for me. He’d negotiate on my behalf. He’d definitely wait
tables to bail me out of debt.
Free drinks, Cass!

But he would never have to. I would never try to give away our house
to pay a debt I can’t cover.

That I would never put Jamie in this position is the thing I have to
consider. That’s what I have to acknowledge: my brother, once
and for all, is a fuckup.

“I’m glad,” Mom says. “You’ve always
been a good influence on him. He could use it. I’ve been a
little worried about him since he got that DUI at the beginning of
the year. I guess he told you about that whole thing.”

I shake my head and sigh away from the mouthpiece of the phone.
Nope.
Jamie hasn’t told me anything, except that he’s not
telling me anything.

“It’s hard to be so far away from you two,” she
says. “I can’t look out for you anymore.”

“Don’t worry, Mom. You and Dad taught us well. Jamie can
be a slow learner,” I say. I see myself in the mirror above my
dresser, across from my bed, and I run my hand across the short
length of my hair, smiling at the new look, sleek and dark and
modern. “But I’m pretty good at taking care of myself.”

“Speaking of taking care of things, are you finding all the
stuff you wanted to take back to England, or did Jamie cram it into a
closet somewhere the second you moved?”