I took a break to hit the bathroom, and as I splashed my face with water to clear my head I wondered how I’d ever thought I could get this together. I’d been so sure we were short money, a lot of money, but what we’d billed and what we’d received was the same. So we couldn’t be, which meant I was wrong. Again.
Fortunately I hadn’t told Kia or anyone else about my suspicions. So only I knew how stupid I was.
Sighing, I scrubbed the water off my face then put on my old ugly hooded sweatshirt again and took myself out to buy some groceries since I hadn’t managed it yesterday because of Kent and MC. Back home, fortunately without seeing anyone who recognized me, I ate some soup and clicked around the website just for something to do.
An email address caught my eye, a support one. I had changed the password for it when I’d changed all the others, but then I’d forgotten about it. Orders went to a different address, and I’d been good about checking it, but who knew what lurked in the support one?
Only one email, as it turned out, but it was a stunner.
Dear Summer,
This’ll seem weird, but it’s bugging me so I have to tell you. I got a suit from you back in December (which I love!) but you never charged me. I gave you my credit card info and everything, but I never got billed. I gave it a little while to see whether you just charged me later, but now it’s been over three months and I don’t think it’s coming up this late and every time I wear the suit I feel weird about it.
So... was it a gift or did you mean to charge me? :)
Thanks,
Lori
No, Lori, thank you.
She’d attached her original order form, and when I checked I found that in fact Kia had not billed her. She’d placed her order right when I was first off hunting down Courtney, back when Kia had told me she was overwhelmed. Well, she sure had been, because Lori wasn’t the only one who’d received a suit for free.
When I dug into the actual orders from that time, instead of just the billing emails, I discovered that a full thirty customers’ suits had been shipped out without their cards being charged. Thirty! At around a hundred bucks a suit, it was the three grand I’d thought was missing.
I had told Kia back then, I remembered, that the math hadn’t seemed right, and she’d told me in rather rude words that I was wrong. But I hadn’t been. Maybe... maybe I wasn’t quite as stupid as I thought?
*****
After emailing Lori back and telling her we had meant to charge her but she could now keep her suit as a gift from me for being so honest, I charged the other twenty-nine buyers then wrote up an email to send to each of them to apologize for it being so late. As I was about to send the first one, I realized they might be annoyed that I was doing it after all this time so I added an offer of a twenty percent discount off anything they chose to buy from the site.
Then I sat back and stared at the laptop, feeling such happiness I could barely breathe.
I had figured it out. I’d been right, and I hadn’t given up, and I’d figured it out. Kia was smarter than me, and I knew it, but this time I had found something she hadn’t known about.
Unless.
Had she known? Could she have done it on purpose?
Even as the thought made me angry, I pushed it aside. Not charging all those people had hurt her too, since back then she got half of the profit from each order.
So, not on purpose. But as a mistake? She’d told me she felt overwhelmed, so it was definitely possible she’d screwed up. Had she ever realized? If she had, surely she’d have charged them. Wouldn’t she? Unless she’d decided it was too late to do it.
But then she should have told me.
No matter how it had happened, it came back to that. She must have realized at some point that all of those orders had gone out for free, and she’d done nothing about it.
Though I hadn’t talked to her since that awful pre-wedding party, and I’d never intended to talk to her again, I had to know what had happened. I took a few deep calming breaths, and picked up the phone.
I knew she didn’t have call display on her phone because she hadn’t wanted to pay for it so I figured she might actually answer my call, and sure enough after a few rings I heard her breezy, “Yello.”
I’d always said, “Green,” or some other color, as a response, but I didn’t want to do that now. “Kia, it’s Summer.”
“Oh,” she said, in a tone that told me she wished she’d sprung for call display. “I... hi.”
“Look,” I said, not feeling like asking her how she was since I didn’t care, “I have just figured out that thirty December orders never got billed. What do you know about that?”
The pause that followed those words was heavy enough to break my couch if it sat on it. Eventually, she said, “I told you I wasn’t able to keep up. If you’d helped me--”
“You said you were having trouble getting everything shipped,” I said, annoyed that she was trying to pass it off on me, “not that you hadn’t bothered billing a ton of people.”
“Thirty’s hardly a ton,” she said, and the scoffing sound in her voice, which also held a hint of that ‘you’re not so bright, Summer’ tone she’d often used on me before, made me so angry that I couldn’t sit still another second.
I got up and stomped around the apartment as I said, “You think that’s the point? That’s not even close to the point. You knew, didn’t you? So when you realized you’d forgotten, why didn’t you bill them?”
“Why didn’t you know they hadn’t been billed?” Kia countered. “Because you were too busy chasing celebrities to bother. I saved your ass so many times and you don’t even know. So yeah, I screwed up once. Big deal. If you’d been paying attention back then it would never have happened.”
“And what about Aaron?” I snapped, not meaning to but so enraged by her blaming me that I couldn’t hold back. “Is that my fault too?”
“You had all those hot guys hitting on you and you couldn’t be bothered to introduce even one to me. Aaron’s not the kind of guy who’s gonna wait forever for sex, and you were stupid to make him wait at all. And it sucked being at that party around all those couples and being all by myself. So when he came on to me, and remember, he came on to me not the other way around--”
“But you still went for it! And you screwed up my business. I can’t believe you won’t even apologize for any of this.”
“I am apologizing,” she said, sounding shocked. “I’m telling you how it all happened.”
I had to lean against my wall to keep from falling over. Those were so not the same thing, and being told why things had happened didn’t make everything okay. Even an apology wouldn’t do that, but it would go a long way toward improving the situation.
She wasn’t apologizing.
And I hadn’t apologized to Ron or Kent or anyone.
I had tried to explain, but they hadn’t let me.
And now I understood why.
“So,” Kia said tentatively. “We good now?”
For a moment, I tried to convince myself that we were. I had no friends at all now, and Kia and I had known each other for years.
But we’d never really been friends. I knew that now. I’d seen how Liv and MC were with each other, and even how Liv and I had started to be, and I knew that what I’d had with Kia was just a bad imitation. Like my cheap knock-off Zephyr bag, it was nothing like the real thing. The real thing had depth and meaning and truth to it, and the fake was all about how it looked on the surface.
Kia and I had looked great on the surface, but I knew better now.
“No,” I said, my throat tightening. “We’re not good now. We’re done. I’ve got to go.”
“You screwed up too, you know. You’re not perfect. Far from it.”
I hung up, then said, “I know.”
I crawled into my bed and pulled the covers up over my head. I didn’t want to face it, but alone in the dark I had to admit that my attempted apologies had been no better than Kia�
�s. I might have been more sincere, but I still hadn’t apologized. Not really.
And I had to.
If Kia had said, “Look, I’m really sorry that I messed up, with the suits and with Aaron. What can I do to fix things?” we might have been able to stay friends. I’d probably never have trusted her the way I’d done before, but I’d have appreciated the apology. It would have made me feel better to know she understood that she’d hurt me and wanted to make it right.
I had to give that feeling to my former friends. They deserved it, and I couldn’t see any other way to maybe someday get them back in my life.
But how could I apologize, when nobody would speak to me?
Chapter Thirty-One
“Summer, hi!”
I turned, startled, to see the lifeguard I’d been trying to avoid grinning at me. “Hi, Beatrice,” I said, making my voice match hers in excitement though I wasn’t feeling any at all. “How are you?”
“Good, thanks. Haven’t seen you in ages, but your swimming looks great. I guess you’ve been coming in when I’m not here?”
Yes, on purpose. I was still swimming as often as I could, because I found it calming and because it made me feel a little connection to Ron, but I’d picked times I thought she wouldn’t be working because I hadn’t wanted to explain why Ron wasn’t swimming with me any more.
I didn’t want to do that now either, so I wrapped my towel tighter around me and said, “Yup, I guess so. Well, I’d better get going. Nice seeing you.”
“Oh, sure. You too.”
I’d gone five steps toward the change room when she said, “Hey!”
I made myself look back, wishing I’d been able to escape, and she said, “Everything’s okay, right? With Ron and his brother? They’re okay now after the wedding mess?”
I swallowed hard. “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it.” Or anything. Tomorrow would be a week since I’d seen Kent and MC at the grocery store, and I’d wanted to contact them so many times but I hadn’t. I was too afraid of what they’d say.
She shook her head. “I saw those pictures. I felt so bad for them. And for you! You looked so sad. The caption said it was because your ex was getting remarried but I thought it was more because some jerk told those camera people where to find you guys. That must have sucked so bad.”
She didn’t know the half of it. And she didn’t know how bad the “jerk” still felt about it. But I could hardly breathe, never mind answer, through the tears that were rising fast, so I nodded and took off while I still could.
I heard her say, “Summer?” from behind me but I didn’t stop. I made it into the change room and into the shower area, then turned on the nearest shower and let its water run down my face while I cried as quietly as I could.
After a minute or two, I heard that same voice say, “Summer?”
I pulled my face out of the water, wiping my eyes, and turned to Beatrice. “Aren’t you supposed to be on deck? Won’t everyone drown?”
She gave me a small sad smile. “Got someone to cover for me. Are you okay?”
I shook my head. “Not even a little bit.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
I started to shake my head again, then realized maybe I did. The only people I spoke to these days were Simon and my coworkers and none of them saw anything at all wrong with what I’d done. “Sure you can take it?”
She put her hands on her hips like Wonder Woman. “I’m tough. Try me.”
So I did. I didn’t tell her MC was pregnant, since I doubted that was common knowledge yet, and I didn’t say what I’d done to make my ‘agreement’ with Simon, but otherwise I didn’t hold anything else back. A lot of it didn’t make me look particularly good, and I knew it, but somehow telling it seemed to straighten everything out in my mind and make it clear what I needed to do next.
When I’d finished, I said, “So? What do I do now? I think it would help to get Ron to talk to me, because if he could forgive me he might be able to get me in to apologize to the others, but...”
She nodded. “Yeah. Tough when he won’t return your texts or emails. Would he answer the phone?”
I shrugged. “Seems unlikely since he’s ignoring everything else. I guess I could camp out at his apartment and try to make him talk, but his schedule’s all over the place and sitting there all day waiting would make his neighbors call the cops. Plus pressuring him doesn’t feel exactly right.”
She bit her lip, clearly deep in thought, then her face cleared and she said, “Of course. This weekend.”
“What’s this--”
“The swim meet! The big one right here. He’ll be at the pool, no question. You’ve got today and tomorrow to figure out what to say, and then on Saturday you can find him and get him to listen.”
I could find him, sure. But could I get him to listen?
Only one way to find out.
My eyes filled with tears again, but these ones felt soothing. “You’re the best, Beatrice. Thank you so much for listening and for helping.”
She blushed. “Didn’t do much. Just mentioned the swim meet.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t have to say more than that. Those two words might be all I need.”
*****
I came up with, and gave up on, easily a hundred different opening lines for talking to Ron at the swim meet, so by the time I walked onto the crowded pool deck on Saturday morning I still didn’t know what I was going to say.
Beatrice had let me know that I wouldn’t be allowed on the pool deck if I didn’t register to actually swim at the meet, and so I’d done that, signing up for the fifty yard butterfly because Ron had been working hardest on that stroke with me, even though I knew I’d come dead last.
I hadn’t counted on the difficulty of picking one swimsuit-clad man out of a throng of similarly dressed men and a ton of women too, and during the warmup time and for the first hour of the meet itself I simply couldn’t find him.
Beatrice had been sure he’d be there, and I was too, but it was starting to look like we’d both been wrong.
Then, with a shock that jolted my heart against my ribs, I spotted him.
He stood, wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants with no doubt a swimsuit underneath, in a group of people, none of whom I knew. I wanted so badly to rush over to him, but I couldn’t bear the idea of being rejected in front of all of those people.
I watched him from across the pool, never staring too long in case he’d feel my eyes on him, and again imagined a bunch of ways to start the conversation.
They were all terrible.
It occurred to me for the first time that this might be how MC felt when she started a conversation with me. The girl wasn’t much of a talker, to put it mildly, and maybe she felt like every word mattered just as I felt now.
Of course, this time every word did matter. If I had any hope of getting Ron to forgive me I needed to say the right thing, and I didn’t know what that was.
Tell him I was sorry immediately? I’d done that already, in my emails and texts, and it hadn’t gotten me anywhere.
Ask him to let me explain? I had tried that a bit, although maybe not as much as I should have. It had seemed so impossible to do without talking to him, and I hadn’t been able to do that.
Appeal to our developing relationship? That didn’t seem fair, and besides I had a feeling that relationship had died the moment the camera crews arrived at the wedding.
Though I tried hard, I had nothing by the time my race was called to the starting area. As I joined a bunch of other women moving in that direction, I wished I could talk to Beatrice again because she’d been so helpful but she was working and I didn’t think she could spare the time.
As I waited with the other women, on a whim I said to the ones nearest me, “If you wanted to get a man to forgive you, what would you do?”
“Make him dinner.”
“Make myself his dessert.”
One didn’t speak, but made what I knew was supposed to be
a hand job gesture. I felt sick at the memory of doing that to Simon and tried to hide it by saying, “Okay, but what if he won’t even talk to me?”
The hand job one repeated her gesture and the others laughed. “Yeah, that’d do it,” someone nearby said.
Another woman, who I hadn’t even thought was listening, said, “Why not admit you’re a horrible person and wrecked his wedding?”
The others swung to look at her then back at me.
I’d hoped having my hair hidden under my bathing cap and not wearing my usual makeup and bright clothes would be enough camouflage but apparently someone had seen past that and recognized me.
“Wait,” the ‘make yourself his dessert’ said. “You’re that Summer one. Right?”
Someone else jumped in with, “Those camera crews... did you actually do that? You’re horrible!”
“Oh, come on,” the dessert woman said. “No way she brought them in on purpose. She seemed too nice on the show.”
“She seemed like an idiot on the show!”
“Yeah, true, so maybe it was a mistake then?”
It felt like those two had forgotten I was there, but the angry looks I was getting from the other people nearby and the bickering I could hear around me meant I hadn’t been entirely forgotten. Unfortunately.
The referee blew the whistle to signal our time to race, but at first nobody moved because they were too busy telling me and each other off. I stood frozen, surrounded by people arguing about me, wondering why I’d been so stupid and drawn attention to myself.
The referee blew the whistle again, louder, and said into his microphone, “Ladies, care to swim?”
The place erupted in laughter and applause, and we scuttled over to our starting blocks. I could feel people glaring at me, though, as we took our places, and I looked straight ahead.
Then, since everyone was looking at us and I might not have a better chance than this, I turned to where I’d last seen Ron. He was staring at me, and even from a distance I could see the shock on his face. Shock and...
I didn’t know what else, and I didn’t have time to analyze it because the referee said, “Take your marks.”
Fifteen Minutes of Summer Page 16
