by Jessica Love
“I, uh…” I don’t know what to say. Of everything I’d been expecting when we met, I never thought we’d have trouble talking. Talking is the thing we do best, the thing we can’t stop ourselves from doing. Somewhere in the back of my head, I thought maybe our meeting in real life would be uncomfortable, but I never, never imagined not being able to talk to him.
The startling distance stings in a dark place deep inside me. I catch him looking at the stage again. Frankie. This is her fault. This stupid girlfriend.
I decide to hate her.
“Well, I guess I’ll let you get ready for your show.” Leaving isn’t what I want to do, but I have to get away. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, not at all, and I’m irritated with both of us. “I’m over there.” I wave my hand toward our corner, where I know Grace and Lo are watching all this go down like it’s some trashy reality show. “If you want to talk afterwards or have anything else you want to tell me.”
As soon as I turn around to walk back to them, I feel my face crumple. I want to go back to five minutes ago and do this over. Or go back to six minutes ago and not walk up to the stage. Back to yesterday and never make this awful decision to ruin our friendship—or three months ago and take back what I said to Nick that time he drunk-dialed me.
Damn you, time travel. Why can’t you be possible?
“What’s he doing?” I say as soon as I get back to them.
“What the hell happened?” Grace asks.
“What is he doing?” I hiss through my teeth.
“He was staring at you with his mouth open when you walked over here,” Lo says. “Then he went back on the stage, and now he’s talking to that Oscar guy. Oooh. It looks like they’re fighting or something.”
“What—the hell—happened?” Grace asks again. “Who is that girl?”
I let out a long, pained sigh and cover my face with my hands. “That’s his girlfriend. The chick with the red hair and the huge boobs. Her name is Frankie and they’ve been together for three months and she’s like an Easter Peep on speed and she’s his girlfriend.”
“Oh shit,” Grace says. She’s on her second drink, and she sucks it down like she’s on a deserted island and it’s the thing standing between life and death. “That’s unexpected.”
“It’s awful.” I uncover my face to look at them. “It was so good for a minute. He hugged me and it was amazing. But then it got all weird and neither one of us knew what to say and he probably doesn’t even want me here so I freaked out and left and now he’s probably never going to talk to me and I ruined everything.”
Grace frowns. “First of all, you ruined nothing. You’re not the one with the secret girlfriend, so don’t blame yourself. Second—here. You need this.” Grace hands me her drink.
I consider waving it off, but I change my mind and take a big sip. Drinking wasn’t on the to-do list today, but neither was Nick’s having a girlfriend, and Grace is always telling me I need to be more flexible. The taste of lemon-lime soda mixed with rubbing alcohol fills my mouth, and my whole body shakes as I force it down.
Fake IDs and booze in one night. I don’t even recognize myself right now.
“I don’t feel better yet,” I say as I hand the glass back to her.
“Okay, don’t turn around,” Lo says. I turn my head back toward the stage, but Lo grabs my arm and yanks me forward. “I said don’t turn around. Jeez, follow directions.”
“What’s happening?” I can’t keep the panic out of my voice as I imagine every worst-case scenario—which, apparently, had all been lurking in the shadows of the sunshiny best-case scenarios I daydreamed for the past few years. “Is the band packing up and running away before I notice? Or is he kissing that girl right there onstage?”
“No.” She leans into us, like there’s some chance Nick and the people onstage might hear her. “He’s still arguing with that Oscar guy. And Oscar was totally looking over here and pointing.” She chews the side of her mouth. “Oscar is super hot, by the way.”
“Can I turn around now?” I look at the stage without waiting for an answer. Nick’s back is to me as he waves his arms around; his posture and body language scream upset or annoyed or wanting to be anywhere but here. Oscar laughs. My heart sinks to the basement of House of Blues.
“Look, he’s trying to figure out how to get rid of me.” I turn back to the girls. “Should we go? God, I’ve made such an ass of myself already, it’s obvious he doesn’t want me here.”
“No way, man,” Grace says. “We came all the way out here. We listened to you go on and on about this guy for four hours in the car. And, hell, we’ve been hearing about him for years now. We are staying for this show.”
“But—”
“No buts, Hannah. So things didn’t go the way you expected. Deal with it. You aren’t throwing away four years of friendship because of one uncomfortable conversation.”
“And a girlfriend,” I say.
“So he has a girlfriend,” Lo says, patting my shoulder. “Whatever. I’m sure he’s had other girlfriends since eighth grade, right?”
He has had several girlfriends, like I’ve had several boyfriends. But those girlfriends of his never bothered me. Partly because he never told me much about them until after it was over, so the focus was on why they didn’t work out, and partly because I didn’t think of Nick that way. They were just girls; they weren’t competition.
But this girl? I don’t know anything about Frankie yet. He’s never mentioned her, not even once, so I have no idea if they’re serious. If she’s actually competition.
And he was mine first.
“Yeah, but—”
“Good,” Grace says. “You dealt with it then and you’re going to deal with it now. Put on your big-girl panties, watch this show, cheer for your friend, and talk to him again when they’re done playing. I bet things will be a lot better then, and you can figure out WTF he’s doing with a girlfriend then.”
I hate when my wild sister is the voice of reason. But she’s right—I can’t leave. Not like this.
“You know you want to hear him play those songs,” Lo says.
And that’s what keeps me here. I do, more than anything. I want to see if he looks at me when he plays. I know Jordy is the one who writes the songs, and sings them, but I feel such a connection to the lyrics, I do need to hear them live, just to settle something in my soul.
“Fine,” I say, covering my face with my hands again. “One song.”
CHAPTER
9
THREE MONTHS AGO
There’s a Nick story I didn’t share with Grace or Lo. I’ve kept it to myself because I’ve never been sure what it meant, and I know I’ll never share it with them because I realize, after Frankie, after the weirdness, that it doesn’t matter.
About three months ago, I was in the middle of a dream about going to Berkeley, but Berkeley was on a tropical island and I went to all my classes in a coconut bra that kept slipping down, when something jolted me back to reality.
My phone.
Nick’s ringtone.
I shot up in bed and felt around my bedside table until my fingers landed on my phone. I didn’t know what time it was, but I had been well into my dream and it was still pitch-black outside, so it must have been the middle of the night.
“Nick? What’s wrong? Are you okay?” I figured the only reason he would be calling so late was because he was dead on the side of the road or something.
Loud noises blasted through the phone. “Ghost!” he yelled over the din. “I’m going outside so I can hear you. Hold on.” Shuffle, shuffle, loud bang, and then the background noise faded away.
“Where are you? What’s going on?”
“I’m at a party. I’m at Jeff’s party.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine.” His voice sounded all mushy. Drunk. “I texted you before. I texted you. Did you see my text?”
I looked at my phone and saw a notification for three new texts in the corne
r of my screen. “I must’ve slept through them,” I said, yawning. “What did you want?”
“I just wanted to talk to you,” he said. “Let me sit down, hold on.” More shuffling on his end, then a loud thump. “I dropped you! I dropped you in the grass!” His voice was distant. “I can’t find you. Say something so I can find you!”
“Nick,” I said as loudly as I could. My parents aren’t the deepest sleepers, and explaining this middle-of-the-night phone call would not be fun. “Nick, I fell in the grass. Pick me up!”
“I’m coming,” he said, sounding closer. “Here you are! I got you!” His voice was clear in my ear again. “Why are you trying to run away from me, Ghost?”
“You know how clumsy I am. Can’t take me anywhere.”
He was silent for a few seconds, so I tried again. “Is everything okay, Nick? Do you need something? Do you have a ride? I don’t want you driving home like this.”
“I’m not driving. The band played at the party. Alex is here. He’s driving me home. He’s not drinking. But he’s, uh, busy right now. Busy with some girl. I don’t know. They’re in Jeff’s bedroom. Jeff is pissed. You know how Jeff gets.”
“Not really. I don’t know Jeff.” I was annoyed to have been woken up, but not enough to hang up on him. Drunk Nick was entertaining.
“No, you don’t, Ghost. You don’t know my friends. Because you are a ghost. Why are you a ghost? Why aren’t you here? Why are you so far away from me?”
I rolled over on my side, pressing the phone closer to my ear. “Because that’s how it is. You live in Vegas and I live in Orange County and there’s nothing we can do about that.”
“It’s not that far, Ghost. It’s not that far.”
“It’s four hours in the car. It’s across a state line. That’s a long way.”
“I would do it right now, you know? I’d get in a car and drive four hours to see you. I want to see you so bad, Ghost. I would drive there right now.”
Something inside me tingled, and the hairs on my arms stood straight up. He’d never said anything like this before. When our Barstow meeting fell through, we never spoke of it again, understanding it was a distance we couldn’t logistically deal with. We both agreed anything more than virtual friendship simply wasn’t meant to be.
“You’re not driving anywhere right now. How much did you drink?” Subject change, stat. This conversation was heading into dangerous territory, and there was no way I’d be able to maneuver around these land mines at dark o’clock in the morning.
“I had some beers. There’s a keg here, but it’s done now. The keg is done. And Alex made me take a shot or two of something because he said maybe if I’m wasted, I’ll act like a normal person and stop being so freaking awkward all the time, or something. Something Alex-y like that. I don’t know.”
“Asshole,” I mumbled. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” He let out a sigh. “You always take such good care of me, Ghost. Even on the phone, you always look out for me. You didn’t get my texts? I texted you.”
“I see them on my phone. Do you want me to read them right now? Or do you want to tell me what they said?”
“Read them later. I don’t want you to hang up on me. Stay on the phone with me. Alex, he’s trying to make some other girl jealous by hooking up with this girl. The other girl doesn’t care, though. It’s dumb. He’s dumb.” He laughed. “You’re the only person I can talk to. Stay with me until Alex comes out of Jeff’s room to take me home.”
“Of course,” I said even though I had no idea how long that was going to be. I fluffed my pillow and curled into a ball, propping the phone up so I didn’t have to hold it. He launched into a rundown of the events of Jeff’s party—who was hooking up, who was having drama, and who was a hot mess. Alex and the girl he was trying to make jealous. He always talked to me like I knew all these people personally, and by the end, I felt like I was there at the party.
“You should have been here, though, Ghost. You should be here right now.”
“Mmmm.” I was getting very sleepy now, but I forced myself to stay awake because I’d promised I would stay on the phone with him. My eyes fluttered closed, but I gave my head a small shake to force them open again. “Mmm.”
“You should be with me, Ghost. We should be together, don’t you think?”
My fluttering eyelids flew open. “Wait. Nick…”
“What?” He sounded genuinely confused about my reaction, as if he’d already forgotten what he just said. But I couldn’t forget it.
And I didn’t want him to say it again.
“Stop it.”
Nick lowered his voice to a whisper that was almost conspiratorial, like he was about to fill me in on his top-secret plan for world domination and he wanted me to help execute it. “Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it, Ghost. Us. You know you have.”
“No. I haven’t.” I shook my head even though I knew he couldn’t see me. In fact, knowing he couldn’t see me made me shake it harder, like my head shake in Orange County might butterfly-effect itself into a hurricane of “no” in Vegas. “I don’t think of you that way, Nick. I never have. There’s just absolutely no way.”
It wasn’t true. In fact, it was such a ridiculous lie. I’d been thinking of him that way more and more. But the lie was the first thing that came to my mind and my lips, and once it was out, I couldn’t take it back. And that lie was an easier way to live, anyway. It made way more sense than the truth. I could never be with Nick. He lived hundreds of miles away, and it’s not like I wanted some long-distance, online boyfriend. The way things were between us, friendship, just friendship, online, on the phone, video-chat friendship, was the only logical thing.
So I just kept word-vomiting out the lie. It’s like I couldn’t stop. “I mean, I couldn’t have more platonic feelings for you. You’re hardly a dude to me. You might as well be Lo.”
Nick let out a long sigh. “I get it. You don’t have to keep saying it over and over.” His voice was still mushy with beer, but it was resigned now. Defeated.
My emphatic insistence that there would never be anything between us was such a knee-jerk reaction, I didn’t stop to think of how he would take my flat-out rejection of him. And when I heard that sadness in his voice, and understood it was my fault—well, for a second I considered taking it all back. Apologizing and saying, Never mind. I lied. I’m sorry. Because if a lie was making him sad, why not fix that with the truth?
But there was a commotion from his end of the phone, and the opportunity passed.
“Alex is done,” he said. “I mean, he’s here. He’s going to take me home. I have to go now.”
With everything hanging between us, I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “Okay.”
“Can we just—?”
But I didn’t let him ask me if we could pretend it never happened. Things were already uncomfortable enough between us.
“Text me when you get home, okay? Let me know you got home all right.”
“Nick! Hurry up!” Alex’s yelling was so loud, I could hear it clearly on my end of the phone.
“I will. Um. Bye, Hannah.” And before I could say anything back—tell him good night, give him crap for using my real name, make a dumb joke in a halfhearted effort to cut the weirdness between us—he hung up.
I sat up straight on my bed, blinking into the darkness and trying to process the conversation we’d just had. He was drunk—he was so drunk. His words were slurred, and he had no idea what he was talking about. Me and him together. There was no possible way he’d really meant it. Shooting that idea down right away was the only logical thing to do, the best way to avoid tomorrow’s inevitable awkward conversation.
Right?
I looked at the time on my phone: 2:15 A.M. This was not the time normal people made phone calls to express their feelings. This was the booty call hour. It must have been the booze talking.
I clicked on my incoming texts. Three, and all of them
from Nick at various points in the night.
At 11:57: YOU AWAKE, GHOST? THIS PARTY SUCKS. I WISH YOU WERE HERE.
At 1:03: WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BE SO FAR? THIS COUCH NEXT TO ME WOULD BE A MUCH BETTER PLACE FOR YOU TO LIVE.
Then, at 1:41: ME AND YOU. WHAT DO YOU THINK? ASKING FOR A FRIEND.
I stared at the screen of my phone, trying to make sense of any of this. Drunk texts should never be taken seriously. I learned that from being friends with Lo. I had to physically restrain her from texting at parties sometimes, because I knew she’d be telling all her exes nonsense she didn’t mean at all.
That meant this, all of this, was nothing I should take seriously. And if it was nothing to take seriously, I shouldn’t feel bad about lying to him.
Right?
Sleep was impossible after that. He texted me about fifteen minutes later to tell me he was home, but for the first time in four years, I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to him. I replied with a thumbs-up emoji, like I usually did, and I tried to close my eyes, but my mind replayed his texts and our conversation and my reply on an endless loop.
My reply? Who was I kidding. My lie.
It took at least an hour before my mind calmed down enough to get sleepy again. I didn’t get a restful sleep, though. I tossed and turned and half-listened for my phone, thinking he might call or text back with something more.
Thinking I might get a chance to take it all back.
The next morning, I knew I needed to say something to him, but I didn’t know what. After hours of thinking about it and not being able to concentrate on my homework at all, I decided to go for it and text him.
HOW ARE YOU FEELING THIS MORNING?
There. Totally innocent, but opens a conversation.
I turned my phone over in my hand until he replied about a minute later.
NEVER DRINKING AGAIN, BUT I’M ALIVE.
GOOD. I WAS WORRIED ABOUT YOU.
SORRY FOR CALLING SO LATE.
NO WORRIES. YOU KNOW I DON’T MIND.
THAT’S WHY YOU ARE THE BEST, GHOST.
I frowned at the phone. How was I supposed to respond? Did he want me to say something about what he said? It would be best to get it out of the way, move beyond it, get things back to normal ASAP.
