“And do you know how many quarters Jeb had to feed in before he did?” Tegan said. “Thirty-eight. He had to keep going back and getting change from the customer-service desk.”
A heaviness descended. “You mean . . . ?”
“He wanted you to have that particular one. With the heart.”
I didn’t like the way Tegan was staring at me. I shifted my gaze. “That’s still less than ten dollars.”
Tegan was silent. I was too afraid to look at her. Finally, she said, “I know you don’t mean that, Addie. Don’t be a jerk.”
I didn’t want to be a jerk—and of course I didn’t care how much a present cost. But I did seem to want more from Jeb than he could give, and the longer we went on like that, the crappier we both felt.
Flash-forward several months, and guess what? I was still making him feel crappy, and vice versa. Not always, but way more often than was, like, healthy or whatever.
“You want me to be someone I’m not,” he said, the night before we broke up. We were sitting in his mom’s Corolla outside Charlie’s house, but we hadn’t gone in yet. If I could go back to that night and never go in, I would. In a heartbeat.
“That’s not true,” I told him. My fingers found the gash on the side of the passenger seat and wormed into the foam rubber.
“It is true, Addie,” he said.
I changed tactics. “Okay, even if I do, why is that necessarily bad? People change for each other all the time. Take any love story, any great love story at all, and you’ll see that people have to be willing to change if they’re going to make things work out. Like in Shrek, when Fiona tells Shrek that she’s sick of his burping and farting and everything. And Shrek’s like, ‘I’m an ogre. Deal with it.’ And Fiona says, ‘What if I can’t?’ So Shrek takes that potion that turns him into a hunky prince. He does it out of love for Fiona.”
“That’s in Shrek Two,” Jeb said. “Not the original.”
“Whatever.”
“And then Fiona realized she didn’t want him to be a hunky prince. She wanted him to turn back into an ogre.”
I frowned. That wasn’t how I remembered it.
“The point is, he was willing to change,” I said.
Jeb sighed. “Why does the guy always have to be the one to change?”
“The girl can, too,” I said. “Whatever. All I’m saying is that if you love someone, you should be willing to show it. Because, Jeb, this is our one shot at life. Our one shot.” I felt the familiar tightening of despair. “Can’t you just try, if for no other reason than because you know how important it is to me?”
Jeb stared out the driver’s-side window.
“I . . . I want you to follow me onto a plane and serenade me in the first-class cabin, like Robbie did to Julia in The Wedding Singer,” I said. “I want you to build a house for me, like Noah did for Allie in The Notebook. I want you to fly me across the ocean at the prow of an ocean liner! Like the guy in Titanic, remember?”
Jeb turned. “The guy who drowned?”
“Well, I don’t want you to drown, obviously. It’s not about drowning. It’s about you loving me enough to be willing to drown, if you had to.” My voice caught. “I want . . . I want the big gesture.”
“Addie, you know I love you,” he said.
“Or even the medium gesture,” I said, unable to let it go.
Frustration and anguish warred with each other on his face. “Can’t you just trust in our love, without asking me to prove it every single second?”
Apparently not, as demonstrated by what happened next. No, not “what happened.” What I did. Because I sucked and I was a jerk, and because I downed thirty-eight quarters worth of beer shots, if not more. Or maybe not thirty-eight, but a lot. Not that I can blame it on that, either.
Jeb and I went inside to the party, but we went our own ways because we were still fighting. I ended up in the basement with Charlie and some other guys, while Jeb stayed upstairs. I heard later that he joined some theater geeks who were watching An Affair to Remember on Charlie’s parents’ flat-screen TV. It was such a horrible irony that it would have been funny, except it totally wasn’t.
In the basement, I played quarters with the guys, and Charlie egged me on because Charlie was the devil. When the quarters game broke up, Charlie asked me if we could go somewhere to talk, and like an idiot, I stumbled obediently after him to his older brother’s room. I was a little surprised, because Charlie and I had never had a heart-to-heart before. But Charlie was part of the group of guys we hung out with. He was arrogant and smarmy and pretty much an overall asshat, to steal a term from a Korean guy at school, but that was just Charlie. Since he looked like a Hollister model, he could be an asshat and get away with it.
In his brother’s room, Charlie sat me down on the bed and told me he needed advice about Brenna, a girl from our grade he sometimes hooked up with. He looked at me in an I-know-I’m-cute-and-I’m-going-to-work-it way and said how lucky Jeb was to be dating someone as great as me.
I snorted and said something like, “Oh, yeah, whatever.”
“Are you guys having problems?” he asked. “Tell me you guys aren’t having problems. You guys are golden.”
“Uh-huh, that’s why Jeb’s upstairs doing God knows what, and I’m down here with you.” Why am I down here with you? I remember wondering. And who shut the door?
Charlie pushed for details, charming and sympathetic, and when I got teary, he moved in close to comfort me. I protested, but he pressed his mouth to mine, and eventually I submitted. A guy was paying me all sorts of attention—a really cute and charismatic guy—and who cared that he didn’t mean it?
I did. Even during the moment of betraying Jeb, I cared. I’ve replayed that moment again and again, and that was the part that killed me. Because what was I thinking? Jeb and I were having problems, but I still loved him. I loved him then and I loved him now. I would always love him.
Only yesterday, when he never showed up at Starbucks, he sent the message loud and clear that he no longer loved me back.
Chapter Two
A ping on my windowpane intruded into my pity party. It took me a minute to pull myself back to reality. There was another ping, and I craned up from my bed to see a heavily bundled Tegan and an even more heavily bundled Dorrie standing atop a drift of snow. They beckoned with mittened hands, and Dorrie called in a glass-muted voice for me to come out.
I clambered to my feet, and the strange lightness of my head reminded me of my hair disaster. Crud. I looked around, grabbed my throw blanket off my bed, and put it over me like a hood. Holding the fabric beneath my chin, I walked to the window and jerked it up.
“Get your booty on the dance floor!” Dorrie hollered, the sound of her suddenly much louder.
“That’s not a dance floor,” I said. “That’s snow. Cold, frozen snow.”
“It’s so beautiful,” Tegan said. “Come see.” She paused, regarding me quizzically from beneath her striped wool hat. “Addie? Why do you have a blanket on your head?”
“Ehhh,” I said, waving them off. “Go home. I’m a bummer. I’ll bum you out.”
“Oh, don’t even,” Dorrie said. “Exhibit A: You called and said you were having a crisis. Exhibit B: Here we are. Now get down here and experience this glory of nature.”
“I’ll pass.”
“It’ll cheer you up, I swear.”
“Impossible. Sorry.”
She rolled her eyes. “Such a baby. C’mon, Tegan.”
They high-stepped out of my sight, and a couple of seconds later, the doorbell rang. In my bedroom, I adjusted my blanket to make it more of an official turban-y thing. I sat on the edge of my bed and pretended to be a nomadic desert wanderer with startling green eyes and a desolate expression. After all, I knew all about desolation.
Parental chatter floated up from the hall—“Merry Christmas! You girls walked all that way in the snow?”—and Dorrie and Tegan annoyingly chose to reply. Their happy voices made happy Christmas chitchat, making me grouchier and grouchier until I wanted to yell down, “Hey! Girlies! The wretched soul you’re here to comfort? She’s up here!”
Finally, two sets of stockinged feet jogged up the stairs. Dorrie burst in first.
“Whew,” she said, lifting her hair off her neck and airing herself out. “If I don’t sit down, I’m going to plotz.”
Dorrie loved saying “I’m going to plotz.” It was her catchphrase; it meant she was going to explode. She also loved Cheerwine, bagels, and pretending she was from the Old Country, which was where Jewish people lived before they came to America, I guess. Dorrie was big into her Jewishness, going so far as to call her awesome curly hair a “Jew fro.” Which shocked me the first time she said it, and then made me laugh. Which was pretty much Dorrie in a nutshell.
Tegan came in behind Dorrie with flushed cheeks. “Omigosh, I’m totally sweating,” she said, peeling off the flannel button-down she wore over her T-shirt. “Getting here about killed me.”
“You’re telling me,” Dorrie said. “Five thousand miles I trudged to get from my house to yours!”
“And by that you mean . . . twenty feet?” Tegan said. She turned to me. “Think that’s about right, twenty feet from Dorrie’s house to mine?”
I gave her a steely-eyed look. We were not here to discuss the foot-by-foot boringness of how far apart their houses were.
“So what’s with the headdress?” Dorrie asked, dropping down beside me.
“Nothing,” I said, because it turned out I didn’t want to discuss that, either. “I’m cold.”
“Uh-huh, sure.” She yanked the blanket from my head, then made a sound of strangled horror. “Oy. What have you done?”
“Gee, thanks,” I said sourly. “You’re as bad as my mom.”
“Whoa,” Tegan said. “I mean . . . whoa.”
“I’m assuming this is your crisis?” Dorrie said.
“Actually, no.”
“Are you sure?”
“Dorrie.” Tegan swatted her. “It’s . . . cute, Addie. It’s very brave.”
Dorrie snorted. “Okay, if someone says your hairstyle is brave? You pretty much want to go back and demand a refund.”
“Go away,” I said. I pushed at her with my feet.
“Hey!”
“You are being mean to me in my time of need, so you’re no longer allowed on the bed.” I put some muscle into it, and off she thunked.
“I think you broke my tailbone,” she complained.
“If your tailbone’s broken, you’ll have to sit on an inflatable doughnut.”
“I’m not sitting on an inflatable doughnut.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I’m not being mean to you in your time of need,” Tegan interrupted. She nodded at the bed. “May I?”
“I suppose.”
Tegan took Dorrie’s original spot, and I stretched out and put my head in her lap. She stroked my hair, gingerly at first, and then with more assurance.
“So . . . what’s going on?” she said.
I didn’t speak. I wanted to tell them, but at the same time I didn’t. Forget my hair—the true crisis was so much worse that I didn’t know how to get the words out without bursting into tears.
“Oh, no,” Dorrie said. Her face mirrored what she must have seen on mine. “Oh, bubbellah.”
Tegan’s hand stilled. “Did something happen with Jeb?”
I nodded.
“Did you see him?” Dorrie asked.
I shook my head.
“Did you talk to him?”
I shook my head again.
Dorrie’s gaze shifted upward, and I felt something pass between her and Tegan. Tegan nudged my shoulder to make me sit up.
“Addie, just tell us,” she said.
“I’m so stupid,” I whispered.
Tegan put her hand on my thigh to say, We’re here. It’s okay. Dorrie leaned over, resting her chin on my knee.
“Once upon a time . . . ” she prodded.
“Once upon a time Jeb and I were still together,” I said miserably. “And I loved him, and he loved me. And then I screwed up big-time.”
“The Charlie Thing,” Dorrie said.
“We know,” Tegan said, giving me several comforting pats. “But that happened a week ago. What’s the new crisis?”
“Other than your hair,” Dorrie said.
They waited for me to reply.
They waited some more.
“I wrote Jeb an e-mail,” I confessed.
“No,” Dorrie said. She bashed her forehead against my knee, bam-bam-bam.
“I thought you were giving him space to heal,” Tegan said. “You said the kindest thing you could do was stay away, even if it was super-hard. Remember?”
I shrugged helplessly.
“And not to be a downer, but I thought Jeb was hanging out with Brenna now,” Dorrie said.
I glared at her.
“I mean, no, of course he isn’t,” she amended. “After all, it’s only been a week. But she’s going after him, right? And as far as we know, he’s not exactly pushing her away.”
“Bad Brenna,” I said. “Hate Brenna.”
“I thought Brenna got back together with Charlie,” Tegan said.
“Of course we hate Brenna,” Dorrie said to me. “That’s not the issue.” She turned to Tegan. “We wanted her to get back with Charlie, but it didn’t take.”
“Oh,” Tegan said. She still looked confused.
I sighed. “Remember how braggy Brenna was the day before winter break? How she was going on and on about how she was going to see Jeb during vacation?”
