Frenemies

by Megan Crane

  “We’ll always be friends,” I promised like an idiot, and then stood there like a big, blue loser while Helen kissed my boyfriend.

  Again.

  chapter eight

  Note to self: The next time you feel the need to prove just how funny you are, please endeavor to do so in a way that will not involve performing the Royal Blueberry Walk of Sartorial Shame across the Boston metropolitan area at two o’clock in the morning, to the delight of Boston’s numerous drunks, one of whom you’re pretty sure thought you were Pat Benatar. Furthermore, please recollect in future that the horrifying dress in question comes with a pair of shoes (pumps!) that are not only uglier than sin but desperately, blisteringly uncomfortable.

  It was a week before Thanksgiving in Boston, and the gray Saturday was so cold the air practically shattered around me when I inhaled. I jammed my (embarrassingly ugly, yet warm) hat tighter on my head and wrapped my scarf around my neck an extra turn, and yanked Linus along on his leash. It was a short walk to the park at the Victory Gardens, where dogs romped around off leash and I could brood over my ridiculous life. Today the walk felt even longer than usual. Half because of the bitter cold, and half because my brain refused to stop turning over the events of the night before.

  Event one: Helen. And everything she’d said and/or insinuated, which seemed to be repeating on an unpleasantly loud loop in my brain.

  Event two: it was perhaps time to realize that not all things that made me snicker had to be acted out—which was to say, it was one thing to cackle with Georgia about the idea of wearing the blueberry dresses out, and another thing entirely to do it. The blueberry dress—I could see now—was a metaphor. It was time to retire the blueberry dresses.

  Event three: Nate. Thanks to that strange little moment we’d had at the party, and his repeated assertion that he could count on me, I was more hurt and confused than ever.

  Event four: Henry. More specifically, knowing that Henry and Nate were roommates had started to panic me. Talk about too little, too late. The fact was, Henry could at any moment decide that he needed to come clean with Nate. He could be doing it right now. And yet, somehow, every time I saw him my brain vacated the premises and my mouth took over, and the next thing I knew I was exchanging insults with him. As plans went, mine needed some serious work.

  I pulled my heavy coat tighter around me while I kept half my attention on Linus. I called him back from an overenthusiastic sprint toward some distant pedestrians, and then scowled. I was still hearing Henry’s threat in my head, and I didn’t like it.

  Here was the story with Henry: I slept with him.

  Georgia’s epic crush. Boston’s number-one male slut. The roommate of the guy I had literally just found out was cheating on me. I still didn’t understand how it had happened. It was an accident, and then it was embarrassing, and then he was a jerk.

  Well, he was always a jerk. That was sort of his niche.

  This was what happened that night, in its entirety:

  Nate had called to tell me that he didn’t feel well and couldn’t come over as planned. As planned meaning as decided after I all but begged in a humiliating conversation I could never tell my friends about; they’d disown me. I had decided that I would be like the physical embodiment of chicken soup. I’d soothe him. And if he wasn’t actually sick, as I was trying not to suspect—well, we could talk.

  So, clearly, I kind of knew.

  There was a moment, the way I guess there always is, when I second-guessed myself out there on the doorstep. I hadn’t rung the doorbell yet. I could have gone back home and let things play out however they were going to play out. I didn’t have to force the issue by showing up. I didn’t have anything to prove, after all. Nate was my boyfriend. He’d actually said so himself to a third party (if Henry counted) a few weeks before. I had no reason to worry—except for the fact that I was already worried enough that I’d hauled myself over to his house to prove to myself that I had no reason to be worried.

  I rang the doorbell and Henry answered. He lounged across the doorway in that lazy way he had, and smiled at me. I remembered it as a smirk, but I thought that was just retroactive editing.

  That night, he was doing that thing guys do, with his hand against his belly so his T-shirt rose up and his six-pack peeked out. It was impossible not to look, so I did, even though the truth was, I never really permitted myself so much as a stray fantasy about Henry. He was hot, true, but he had always been Georgia’s domain. End of story. He said hello, and told me that Nate was in the kitchen.

  And then he just stood there for a minute, and looked at me.

  “What?” I said. With absolutely no sense of foreboding of any kind.

  “Nothing,” he said, and then he stepped aside so I could walk into his kitchen and find my boyfriend kissing Helen in the shade of the copper cookware hanging from the ceiling.

  It was a bad scene.

  The thing no one ever told you about scenes like that was how completely unlike television and the movies they were. Because first of all, there was no soundtrack. That sounded like an unimportant detail, but trust me. Without a soundtrack, there was just you. Standing in a doorway, watching your boyfriend kiss a woman who was supposed to be a friend of yours. Just you. And the desire to walk back out, or blink, or do something to make it not real. No music as you spoke, and no writers to make you say something interesting when you did. I wanted to denounce them both—scream—demand explanations—

  But I said, “Um.”

  They looked at me.

  “Um,” I said again, in a very high voice that sounded nothing like me, and certainly didn’t sound the way I wanted to sound, which was unaffected by what I was looking at. “What are you guys doing?”

  As if I couldn’t see what they were doing.

  But my brain was already racing, constructing stories, making excuses, making it right. Making it not only okay, but necessary that Nate was kissing Helen.

  Before I could come up with anything, Nate sighed. He shook his hair back from his forehead with a jerk of his head. He looked pained, as if he were the wounded party.

  Helen touched her hand to her lips, and then squared her shoulders. She didn’t look even slightly pained.

  She looked me straight in the eye and said, “I told him to tell you.”

  And then everything went to pieces for a while.

  When the smoke cleared—and I mean that literally, since the meal they were cooking got forgotten in the oven in all the yelling and started smoking right around the time Helen decided she was too fragile to handle all the drama so Nate (the scumbag) chased after her to make sure she was all right, leaving me to sob and rescue the charred remains of their illicit feast—I found myself sitting at the table in the kitchen, going drink for drink with Henry.

  I wasn’t sure when he’d turned up in all the commotion, but I didn’t much care. I was stunned and angry. I was hurt. I couldn’t believe either one of them could have betrayed me, and certainly not together. I cried, and Henry handed me a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I thought that he was a good listener. And that my nose was running. Things got a little bit blurry.

  I’d like to claim that Henry took advantage of my emotional state, and part of me still thought he did. True gentlemen, it didn’t need to be said, would not avail themselves of the weeping drunk girl they found in their kitchen, especially when they were the ones proffering the alcohol. But no one ever said Henry was a gentleman, and anyway, he was drunk himself. I’m not sure why drunk men were expected to be more responsible than drunk women—it seemed like further condescension toward women, quite frankly, but that was me avoiding the subject.

  There was that other part of me. The part that remembered that it was me who leaned over and laid my mouth on his. Me who pulled him to his feet and then pushed him back onto the long oak table. Just as it was me who crawled up there on top of him. I had perfect frozen images of myself doing all of those things. Of the Celtic tattoo he had on his left shoulder
blade. Of the sweet hollow between his pectoral muscles. And more.

  What I didn’t remember was how we got upstairs, or what else happened that night, although I had the faintest memory of talking, held up close to him in that huge bed of his. And I distinctly recalled waking up sometime before dawn, with the expected hideous headache and parched throat, in a state of horror and despair. I also remembered the actual Walk of Shame I undertook then, cursing myself all the way. When I got home, I commenced crying, which I did for a long, long time.

  I never told anyone.

  I mean, I told them about Nate and Helen, of course. But as for Henry, I just told them that he’d let me in when he knew exactly what I was walking into, and let me walk on into it. I may have embellished his role. I may have added a smirk, and a tone, like he was enjoying himself. I may, in fact, have deliberately suggested that he’d enjoyed the whole spectacle at my expense.

  And my friends had believed me, because it was easy enough to imagine Henry the Womanizing Scum also being Henry the Guy Who Finds It Amusing That His Roommate Is Cheating.

  Not that Henry Farland was anyone’s victim. Hardly. He turned up at yet another birthday get-together the Wednesday after that night. He had the gall to seem surprised that I was mad at him.

  “What was I supposed to do?” he asked, his eyes registering something sharper than their usual lazy amusement. “I’m not his butler. I wasn’t going to lie for him. Isn’t it better that you know, though?”

  “Thanks for your concern for my feelings,” I snapped at him. “I suppose you’re so disgusted with his behavior that you’re kicking him out of your house, right?”

  “Gus . . .” Henry shook his head. “I’m sorry that Nate treated you like that. I mean, the guy’s a jackass. But I’m not sure I can evict him over it.”

  “Men.” I glared at him. “Fucking typical.”

  “And anyway,” he said. “I think we have other things to talk about, don’t you?”

  “We are never talking about that,” I hissed at him.

  He blinked. “What?”

  “It never happened,” I declared.

  “Yeah, but it did.”

  “Which I’m certainly never admitting, and neither are you!” My voice sounded scathing. It was because my heart was pounding too hard. Even talking about what had happened between us made me feel weak and angry and kind of slutty.

  He just looked at me.

  “Promise me!”

  He shook his head. “Fine. Whatever you want.”

  “What I want,” I snarled at him, “is to live in a world where people don’t break up with other people in such a horrible, crappy way. Where people are grown-ups.”

  “Oh,” Henry said, his eyes narrowing. “You mean like where they talk about suddenly having sex with someone they’ve known for almost ten years? That kind of grown-up stuff?”

  “I hate you,” I told him, and stormed away.

  Roughly ten days later, I was wasted and belting out classic rock. A week after that, I was back at the scene of the crime. The only thing that had changed in the interim was the fact I’d managed to rile up Amy Lee and Georgia on my behalf. Not that it took much riling, when it came to Henry.

  Anyone would do the same, I thought then. In all the years I’d known him, I had never harbored any romantic feelings for Henry. Other than thinking he was incredibly good-looking in that smooth, blond way, which was sort of like noticing that the sunset was pretty. It was just a fact. And I’d had plenty of time to consider my feelings for Henry in detail during the long years of Georgia’s obsession with him. There was no way I could admit that after years spent pointing out his numerous character flaws, all the ways in which he could never be worthy of Georgia, and the simple fact of his apparent disinterest in women over ninety pounds, I had accidentally slept with him. I wouldn’t know how to begin to broach the subject. It was far better to pretend it had never happened.

  Jack Daniel’s had a lot to answer for.

  Besides which, I knew perfectly well that Nate had a thing about Henry. You might even call it jealousy. If he found out, it wouldn’t be pretty.

  I braced myself against another rush of cold wind. Linus was oblivious to the temperature as he romped around the frozen ground with another creature of indeterminate breed. The sky looked like snow, all sullen and metallic, which only added to my unpleasant mood. Nothing like a New England winter to beat the will to live right out of you.

  I smiled at the other dog owner, and whistled for Linus when I could no longer feel my toes. He surprised me by obeying immediately. (It was really cold.) We trudged back to the sidewalk, where I clipped his leash to the metal ring on his collar and tugged him with me across the street.

  Back in the steamy warmth of my cozy little hovel, I collapsed on my couch (liberated from my parents’ garage years ago, it boasted that black-and-white zigzag pattern that was now almost delightfully retro) and kicked at the blueberry dress. I’d left it crumpled in the middle of my puny living room when I’d arrived home last night. The blueberry pumps had gone to their maker via a quiet death in the garbage chute.

  When the phone rang, I was so busy continuing to justify my hate-on for Henry that I didn’t glance at the caller ID.

  That was proving to be a costly mistake.

  “Gus,” Helen purred at me. “I took a chance that you’d be home. I’d love to see you, just for a quick chat. Would you mind if I dropped by?”

  “Um . . .”

  “Excellent!” she cried. “I’ll be about a half hour.”

  Which was how the enemy found her way into my home.

  chapter nine

  First, though, I threw myself into one of those whirlwind cleaning frenzies, the sort you could only summon the energy to perform when someone was about to enter your house for the first time in years. (Or when your mother called to announce she was dropping by, but that was a whole different level of panic.) Having lived with me when I was eighteen, Helen knew that I had once been lackadaisical about housework, to the point of outright slovenliness from time to time. The fact that this was still true over ten years later was irrelevant. I just couldn’t allow her to assume I was still my eighteen-year-old self, based on my continuing lack of housekeeping skills.

  Helen, I was sure, would take one look at the dust bunnies cavorting about in the corners and assume they were stand-ins for deep-seated character flaws she’d long suspected lurked within me. Dust bunnies were representational, as every woman with a subscription to Real Simple knew full well. I refused to let Helen think she had some kind of shortcut into my psyche based on my inability to wield a Swiffer.

  It wasn’t only my house that needed cleaning, either. When you’ve had the bad luck to spend an evening with a collection of your nemeses in a Royal Blueberry Bridesmaid’s Gown (with matching bag and shoes), you’ll find that you cannot bear to let your number-one nemesis see you in all your Saturday morning glory. It wasn’t just that I suspected I looked bad. It was that looking bad in front of Helen would prove that Nate had been right to dump me for her. That I deserved it because I was fat, ugly, and unlovable.

  Sure, it was pathological. Welcome to neurotic womanhood. It wasn’t like I was alone.

  Every woman I knew had specific complaints about that thing that rendered her ugly and unlovable. I’d yet to meet a woman who didn’t have her own secret shame hidden away in there somewhere, clutched in tight fists by her sulking twelve-year-old child within.

  Georgia, for example, never seemed to care about her weight or her clothes size. She told me once she’d never in her life fit into clothes below the double digits and paid no attention to it anyway. She enjoyed being statuesque. And yet she hated her ankles. For years, she’d refused to wear short skirts because she felt her ankles were so thick that she ran the risk of having people point and laugh at them. It didn’t matter how many times you told her they were fine, either, she still wept over those shoes with ankle loops and considered herself deformed.

>   Amy Lee, meanwhile, was obsessed with her thighs. The fact that she was tiny, had never worn a garment above a size four in her life, and had a flat stomach no matter what she ate or how little she exercised? She didn’t care. She was forever railing against the tyranny of bikinis and rattling on about minimizing her thunder thighs.

  For me, without question and despite certain Oracle of Delphi moments concerning my own thighs, it was my belly. The belly that refused to turn into abs no matter how many crunches I performed or how few carbs I ate. (This obviously led to alternating phases wherein there were no crunches and only carbs, to soothe the pain.) Either way, the belly hung there over the edge of my otherwise fabulous low-slung jeans, rounded and spiteful, despite my best efforts. I was convinced the belly made me a troll. That it was disfiguring. That it was the outward evidence of my true inner unlovableness. No one could convince me otherwise.

  Helen knew about my belly issues. She would be able to glance at me, see the belly that damned me, and use it against me to play on my worst fears. And what could I use against her? She claimed to feel oppressed by her eyebrows, which was weak, to say the least. Eyebrows could be tweezed into submission. My belly just hung out for all to see.

  A glance in the bathroom mirror confirmed it: I looked like the sea hag. (Not a sea hag—the sea hag.) It went without saying that I also looked fat. My hair was mushed into vaguely geometric shapes, and the less said about my half-hungover eyes, the better.

  Of course Helen was on her way. Of course she, out of all the people I knew in Boston, should get to witness the haggishness.

  It was just so unfair.

  So I cleaned like a whirling dervish for about fifteen minutes, which involved flinging the contents of my living room into my bedroom and shutting the door, and then attacking particularly egregious problem areas with a Swiffer and some Windex. After that I dove into the shower, where I held my breath and stood under the hottest spray I could handle. Then the coldest spray. Then the hottest again. When I climbed out of the ancient, claw-footed tub (the sort of tub that was only cool when it came with a matching, painstakingly renovated country house—otherwise it was just old and you had to use one of those handheld things clipped to a pole as your showerhead) part of me was shivering and part of me was scalded, but the bags under my eyes were gone.