“She’s having a panic attack. A really intense one. She was hyperventilating, Tabby. And she’s, you know, I do love her. She needs me.” He pauses, and there’s expectation in the wordless gap. Like I’m supposed to give him permission. Like I’m supposed to tell him it’s okay and I understand and to go, go, go. But my jaw drops and my eyes well up and it hurts, not only in my heart but also in my blood, in my muscles. “Look, I don’t have time to talk about this,” he says, not really looking at me or my teariness. “My girlfriend’s sitting on a couch breathing into a paper bag, and she just has me and some weirdo online friends to help her out, so you know . . .”
I can still taste the berry from his lips. But I cannot compete with an anxiety attack and a year-and-a-half-long relationship and mile-long legs and hair that looks like sparrow’s feathers. So I allow myself one more grimace and don’t make him hug me good-bye.
If I did, I wouldn’t let go. My arms would lock around his neck and refuse to loosen up. Everything in my stomach twists and turns, which I guess I deserve. It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. This is basically exactly what someone like me deserves.
“If everything were different—” Joe says. He hasn’t stepped out the door yet. If he really loved her, if he really thought she was in peril, he would be sprinting to his car and running red lights. I take note of this and store it as a reason to sign on later and let him chat with me.
“Everything could be different,” I say, and make my eyes go as wide as they can, which isn’t very. They have a tendency to squint when I’m smiling or nervous. So, always. My shirt’s slipping off one shoulder, and God I hope that looks sexy. I may be a terrible person, and Joe may be complicated and confused, but I am vowing to make this work. Him and me.
“I need you to try to understand—” Joe says. I will not, under any circumstances, tell Elise that he said this. In fact, I may not tell Elise anything about tonight at all. She won’t understand. I’m not sure I understand. I swallow and shrug and shake my head all at once. Anything, anything to keep from howling with sobs.
Joe adjusts the gold chain around his neck. Plays with the little gold cross. I asked him about it once—the cross sort of freaked me out, and I wondered if it meant he was really into Jesus or something. I knew he was Italian Catholic, but wearing a cross seemed more serious than that. He said it was his grandfather’s, given to him from his deathbed. Is it weird that that made me fall even harder? Stoner-Jock, Grandfather-Loving, Kinda-Catholic Guy. His phone’s ringing again, and then he does actually leave, runs out of my house, and I listen to his car turn on, his ridiculous rap music blast and then fade out as he drives away from my house.
I touch my own shoulder, the way he might have, and try not to think about the sweetness he uses when he touches her, versus the desperation when he grabbed at me. I give myself a moment to let the tears spill out, and then I spend an hour closing my eyes and breathing deeply to deal with the reality that Joe and I finally kissed.
He doesn’t come online the way I predicted he would. I sit in the computer room and stare at the screen, willing the computer to flash with his name and a flirtatious message about the taste of my lips or his hands on my back or how doing the wrong thing felt so right. I occasionally look away and text Elise because a watched pot never boils, so I delusionally believe maybe if I talk to Elise about something else I’ll forget he exists, and then he’ll chat me, and the gray, damp feeling in my chest will turn golden and sparkling and alive.
It doesn’t appear to be working.
“Tea?” Cate says around ten, when my eyes are burning from the light of the screen.
“I’m not thirsty,” I say with a small smile. She knows better than to leave me alone, though.
“I meant to say it not as a question. We’re reading. We want you there. I brought cookies from the Cozy. We can’t risk you becoming some weird tech-obsessed video game kid or, like, chat room lurker, you know? You have a sister on the way.”
“Saving me from myself, huh?” I say, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to have normal parents of normal ages, instead of Cate and Paul. Cate shrugs, and I laugh and shut down the computer the way you are supposed to pull off a Band-Aid: too quickly to notice how much it hurts. There’s a hiccup of pain that comes with leaving the computer and the possibility that Joe will say something awesome to me tonight. But Cate’s right. Every minute that passes with Joe not signing on is more depressing than the moment before.
“I’m not a techie weirdo, by the way. I’m a book weirdo,” I say, because joking with Cate and Paul makes the actual world hurt a tiny bit less.
“Good. Let’s keep it that way,” Cate says.