by Emily Giffin
"Planning my wedding," she says in her beguiling way. She points to her now-crumpled veil that she is clutching like a precious souvenir.
"Aww. Say it ain't so! You gettin' maah-ried?"
I clench my teeth and hit the up button on the elevator.
"Yeah," she says, cocking her head to the side. "Why, do you think I shouldn't?"
Jose laughs, showing all his teeth. "Hell, no. Don't do it!" Even my doorman wants her. "Blow that guy off," he says.
Clearly he hasn't put the pieces of this puzzle together.
Darcy takes his hand in hers and twirls herself around. She finishes the move with a hip-to-hip bump.
"C'mon, Darce," I say, already in the elevator, holding the door-open button with my thumb. "I'm tired."
She twirls one last time and then joins me in the elevator.
On the ride up, she waves and blows kisses into the security camera, just in case Jose is watching.
When we get into my apartment, I immediately turn down the volume on my answering machine and switch off my cell phone in case Dex calls. Then I change into shorts and a T-shirt and give Darcy clothes to wear.
"Can I have your Naperville High shirt instead? So it will feel like old times."
I tell her that it is in the wash, and she will have to make do with my "1989 Indy 500" T-shirt. She says it is good enough, as it reminds her of home too.
I brush my teeth, floss, and wash my face as she sits on the edge of my tub and talks to me about the party, how much fun it was. We trade places. Darcy washes her face and then asks if she can use my toothbrush. I say yes even though I think it's disgusting to share with anyone. Even Dex. Okay, maybe not Dex, but anyone else. Through a mouthful of toothpaste, she remarks that she is not drunk, or even very buzzed, which is surprising considering the amount of alcohol we consumed. I tell her it must be all the meat we ate.
She spits into the sink. "Ugh. Don't remind me. I probably gained five pounds tonight."
"No way. Think of how much you burned off dancing and sweating."
"Good point!" She rinses her mouth, splashing water everywhere, before she leaves the bathroom.
"Are you all ready for bed?" I ask, wiping up her mess with a towel.
She turns and watches me, unapologetic. "No. I want to stay up and talk."
"Can we at least get in bed and talk?"
"If we keep the light on. Otherwise you'll fall asleep."
"All right," I say.
We get in bed. Darcy is closer to the window, on Dexter's side of the bed. Thank goodness I changed my sheets this morning.
We are facing each other, our bent knees touching.
"What should we discuss first?" she asks.
"You choose."
I brace myself for wedding talk, but instead she starts a long gossip session about the girls at the parry, what everyone wore, Tracy's new short haircut, Jocelyn's struggle with bulimia, Claire's incessant name-dropping.
We talk about Hillary not showing up for her party. Of course, Darcy is red-hot mad about that. "Even if she is in love, she should have blown off Julian for one night."
Of course, I can't tell her that the real reason for Hillary's boycott has nothing to do with a new boyfriend.
Then we are on to Ethan. She wants to know if he's gay. She is always speculating about this, proffering flimsy bits of evidence: he played four square with the girls in grade school, he took home ec in high school instead of industrial arts, he has a lot of women friends, he dresses well, and he hasn't dated anyone since Brandi. I tell her no, that I am almost completely certain that he's not gay.
"How do you know?"
"I just don't think he is."
"There's nothing wrong with it if he is," Darcy says.
"I know that, Darce. I just don't think he is gay."
"Bisexual?"
"No."
"So you really don't think he's ever made out with another guy?"
"No!" I say.
"I have trouble picturing Ethan touching some guy's penis too."
"Enough," I say.
"Okay. Fine. What is your latest analysis on Marcus?"
"He's growing on me," I say, for added insurance-just in case she has the slightest intuition about my feelings for Dex.
"He is? Since when?"
"I kissed him on Saturday night," I say, and instantly regret it. She will tell Dex.
"You did? I thought you went out with Hillary and Julian on Saturday night."
"I did. But I met up with Marcus afterward… for a few drinks. It was no big deal, really."
"Did you go back to his place?"
"No. Nothing like that."
"So where did you kiss him?"
"At Aubette."
"And that was it? You only kissed?"
"Yeah. What do you think, we had sex at Aubette? Jeez."
"Well, this is noteworthy… I thought things had sort of tapered off with you two. So can you see yourself marrying him?"
I laugh. This is classic Darcy-taking a little bit of information and running like crazy with it.
"Why are you laughing? Is he not marriage material?"
"I don't know. Maybe… Now can we please turn out the light? My eyes hurt."
She says okay, but gives me a look of warning to say it's not yet time for sleep.
I turn off my bedside lamp, and as soon as we are in the dark, she brings up Dex and his note. She had been fairly dismissive of it when I gave it to her at the start of her party, but now she calls him thoughtful.
"Hmm-mmm," I say.
A long silence follows. Then she says, "Things have been sort of weird with us lately."
My pulse quickens. "Really?"
"We haven't had sex in a long time."
"How long?" I ask, crossing my fingers under the sheets.
She tells me the answer I want. Since before the Fourth.
"Really?" My palms are sweaty.
"Yeah. Is that a bad sign?"
"I don't know… How often did you have sex before?" I ask, grateful for the dark.
"Before what?"
Before he told me that he loves me. "Before the Fourth."
"It comes and goes. But when things are going well we have sex every day. Sometimes twice a day."
I force the sickening images out of my head, struggling to find something to say. "Maybe it's the pressure of the wedding?"
"Yeah…" she says.
And maybe it's because he's having an affair with me. I have a pang of guilt, which increases tenfold when she switches topics again and asks out of the blue, "Can you believe how long we've been friends?"
"I know it's been a long time."
"Think of all the sleepovers we've had. How many sleepovers would you say we've had? I'm not good at estimating things. Would you say a thousand?"
"That's probably close," I say.
"It's been a while since we've had one," she says.
My eyes have adjusted to the dark, so I can vaguely see her now. With her face freshly scrubbed and her hair pulled back into a ponytail, she looks like a teenager. We could be in her bed back in high school, giggling and whispering, with Annalise snoring softly beside the bed in her Garfield sleeping bag. Darcy always let Annalise fall asleep. I think she almost hoped she would. I know I sometimes did.
"You wanna play twenty questions?" I ask. It was one of our favorite games growing up.
"Yeah. Yeah. You go first."
"Okay. I got one."
"Same rules?"
"Same rules."
Our rules were simple: you must choose a person (instated after Annalise tried to do neighborhood pets), someone we knew personally (no celebrities, dead or living), and you must ask yes-no questions.
"From high school?" she asks.
"Yes."
"Male?"
"No."
"Our graduating class?"
"No."
"Class above us or below us?"
"That's two questions."
"No, it's
a compound," she says. "If the answer's yes, I still have to break it down and use another question. Remember?"
"Okay, you're right," I say, remembering that nuance. "The answer is no."
Student?
"No. That's five questions. Fifteen to go."
Darcy says she knows she's on five, she's counting. "Teacher we both had?"
"No," I say, six fingers hiding under the covers. Darcy has been known to "miscount" during this game.
"Teacher you had?"
"No."
"Teacher I had?"
"No."
"Guidance counselor?"
"No."
"A dean?"
"That's ten. No."
"Other staff?"
"Yes."
"Janitor?"
"No."
"The nark?"
"No." I smile, thinking about the time the nark busted Darcy leaving school to go to Subway with Blaine at lunch. Darcy told him to get a real job as he escorted them to the dean's office. "What are you, thirty? Isn't it time you left high school?" The comment earned her an extra pair of demerits.
"Ohh! I think I got it!" She starts giggling uncontrollably. "Is she a lunch lady?"
I laugh. "Uh-huh."
"It's June!"
"Yep! You got it."
June was a high school icon. She was about eighty years old, four feet tall, and massively wrinkled from years of heavy smoking. And her main claim to fame was that she once lost a fake nail in Tommy Baxter's lasagna. Tommy ceremoniously marched back to the lunch line and returned the nail to June. "I believe this belongs to you, June?" June grinned, wiped the sauce and cheese off the nail, and stuck it back on her finger. Everybody cheered and clapped and chanted, "Go, June! Go, June!" Other than reapplying her nail, I'm not sure what she did to earn the respect of our student body. I think it was more that somebody in the popular crowd just decided along the way that it was cool to like June. Maybe it had even been Darcy. She had that sort of power.
Darcy laughs. "Good ole June! I wonder if she's dead yet."
"Nah. I'm sure she's still there, asking kids in her raspy voice if they want marinara or meat sauce on their rigatoni."
When she finally stops laughing, she says, "Aww. This feels just like a sleepover from way back."
"Yeah. It does," I say, as a wave of fondness for Darcy washes over me.
"We had fun as kids, didn't we?"
"Yeah. We did."
Darcy starts laughing again.
"What?" I ask.
"Do you remember the time we spent the night at Annalise's house and hanged her sister's Barbie dolls?"
I crack up, picturing the Barbies, tied with yarn around their necks, dangling from the doorways. Annalise's little sister cried hysterically to her parents, who promptly met with the two other sets of parents to come up with a suitable punishment. We could not play together for a week, which is a long time in the summer. "That was sort of sick now that I think about it," I say.
"I know! And remember how Annalise kept saying it wasn't her idea?"
"Yeah. Nothing ever was her idea," I say.
"We always thought of the cool stuff. She was a big-time coattailer."
"Yeah," I say.
I am quiet, thinking about our childhood. I remember the day we were dropped off at the mall with our paltry sixth-grade savings, racing to the Piercing Pagoda to purchase our "best friend" necklaces, a heart inscribed with the two words, split down the middle, each side of the charm hanging from a gold-plated chain. Darcy took the "Be Fri" half, I got the "st end" half. Of course, we were so worried about Annalise's feelings that we only wore the necklaces in secret, under our turtlenecks, or in bed at night. But I remember the thrill of tucking my half of the heart inside my shirt, against my skin. I had a best friend. There was such security in that, such a sense of identity and belonging.
I still have my necklace buried in my jewelry box, the gold plate turned green with grit and time, but now also tarnished with something impossible to remove. I am suddenly overcome with profound sadness for those two little girls. For what is now gone between them. For what might never be regained, no matter what happens with Dex.
"Talk more," Darcy says sweetly. There is no trace of the brash, self-centered bride-to-be whom I have come to resent, even dislike. "Please don't sleep yet. We never get to hang out like this anymore. I miss it."
"Me too," I say, meaning it.
I ask her if she remembers the day we bought our "best friend" necklaces.
"Yes. But remind me about the details," she says in her charming way.
Darcy loves to hear my accounts of our childhood, always praising my more complete memory. I tell her the story of the necklaces, give her the longest version possible. After I am finished, I whisper, "Are you asleep?"
No answer.
As I listen to Darcy breathing in the dark beside me, I wonder how we got to this. How we could be in love with the same person. How I could be sabotaging my best friend's engagement. In the final seconds before sleep, I wish I could go back and undo everything, give those little girls another chance.
Chapter 17
The next morning, I am awakened by the sound of Darcy rummaging through my medicine cabinet. I listen to her bang around as I try to piece together my dreams from the night before, a series of incoherent vignettes featuring a wide cast of the usual characters-my parents, Darcy, Dex, Marcus, even Les. The plot is unclear, but I recall a fair amount of running and hiding. I almost kissed Dex a dozen times, but never did. I can't even be satisfied in my dreams. Darcy emerges from the bathroom with a happy face.
"I'm not hungover at all," she announces. "Although I took some Advil just in case. You're out. Hope you didn't need any."
"I'm fine," I say.
"Not bad for the day after a bachelorette party! What do you want to do today? Can we spend the day together? Just doing nothing. Like old times."
"Okay," I say, somewhat reluctantly.
"Awesome!" She walks toward my kitchen, starts rooting around. "Do you have any cereal?"
"No, I'm out. You want to go to EJ's?"
She says no, that she wants to eat sugar cereal right here in my apartment, that she wants it to feel just like old times, no New York brunch scene. She opens my refrigerator and surveys the contents. "Man, you're out of everything. I'll just run out and get some coffee and some essentials."
"Should we really drink coffee?" I ask her.
"Why wouldn't we?"
"Because I thought we were going to be authentic. We didn't drink coffee when we were in high school."
She thinks for a second, missing my sarcasm. "We'll make an exception for coffee."
"Do you want me to come with you?" I offer.
"No. That's okay. I'll be right back."
As soon as she leaves, I check my voice mail. Dex has left me two messages-one from last night, one from this morning. In the first, he says how much he misses me. In the second, he asks if he can come over tonight. I call him back, surprised at how grateful I feel when I get voice mail. I leave him a message, telling him that Darcy is over and plans to stay for a while, so tonight won't really work out. Then I sit on my couch thinking about last night, my friendship with Darcy. Will I be able to live with myself if I get what I want at her expense? What would life be like without her? I am still thinking about it all when Darcy returns. Bulging plastic bags hang from her forearms. I take the coffees from her hands as she dramatically drops the bags to the floor and shows me the red indentations the bags made on her arms. I make a sympathetic noise until she smiles again.
"I got great stuff! Froot Loops! Root beer! Cranapple juice! And Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream!"
"Ice cream for breakfast?"
"No. For later."
"Aren't you worried about your wedding weight?"
She waves her hand at me. "Whatever. No."
"Why not?" I ask, knowing that she will eat now and ask me later why I let her do it.
" 'Cause I'm just not! Don't rain on my parade!… Now. Let's eat Froot Loops!"
She busies herself in the kitchen finding bowls, spoons, napkins. She brings them out to the coffee table. She is in her giddy, high-energy mode.
"Would you rather eat over there?" I say, pointing to my little round table.
"No. I want it to be just like my house after a sleepover. We always ate in front of the TV. Remember?" She aims the remote control at the television and flips through the channels until she finds MTV. Then she pours cereal into bowls, carefully making sure we have the same amount. I am not in the mood for Froot Loops, but it is clear that I do not have a choice in the matter. Although I find it somewhat touching that she wants to re-create our childhood, I am also annoyed by her bossiness. Running roughshod, Ethan said. Maybe it is a precise description after all. And here I am, a willing participant, letting her steamroll me.
"Tell me when," she says, pouring whole milk onto my cereal. I hate whole milk.
"When," I say, almost instantly.
She stops pouring and looks at me. "Really? They are barely moist."
"I know," I say, appeasing her, "but this is how I liked it in high school too."
"Good point," she says, pouring milk in her own bowl. She fills it to the brim.
I take a few bites as she stirs her cereal with her spoon, waiting for the milk to turn pink.
Dido's "Thank You" video is on. Of course, it makes me think of Dex.
"This song," Darcy says, still stirring. "You know the part when she says she's home at last and soaking and then 'you handed me a towel'?"
"Yeah."
"That line totally reminds me of you."
"Of me?" I look at her. "I think it's supposed to be a romantic song."
She rolls her eyes. "Duh! I know that. Don't worry." She takes a bite and continues to talk with her mouth full. "I'm not dyking out or any-thing. I'm just saying you really are always here for me. You know, when the chips are down."
"That's sweet." I smile, push away the guilt, sip my coffee.
We listen to the rest of the song as Darcy noisily eats her cereal. As she finishes her last few bites, she raises the bowl to her lips, gulping the pastel milk.
"Am I being too loud?" she asks, glancing up at me.
I shake my head. "You're fine."
"Dex calls me the Slurper whenever I eat cereal."
