When I got there, her mother answered the door and said stiffly, “Oh, Ellie. What are you doing here?” Our last exchange had been when she asked me to stop calling Heather’s cell, so it was pretty awkward.
I asked to see Heather, and Mrs. Smith called out, “Heather? Come to the door, please.”
Heather came down the stairs and stopped short at the sight of me.
Her mother said, “You didn’t tell me you were expecting Ellie,” and Heather said in a faint voice, “I wasn’t.”
I slipped past Mrs. Smith—who hadn’t invited me in—and went right to Heather. I said, “Can I talk to you for just like five minutes? Please?” and she hesitated but then said a reluctant okay—she was incapable of being cruel—and led me up to her room.
Once the door was closed, I said in one breath, “I misled you and I also hurt you. I’m sorry in every possible way. I love you and I need you in my life. Can you ever forgive me?”
It was Heather. That’s the thing. Maybe someone else would have made me suffer a lot longer. But that wasn’t who she was. She was made to like people and I was her best friend. So she burst into tears and we threw our arms around each other and hugged for a while and I apologized about fifty more times, and pretty soon she was telling me it wasn’t my fault, that she understood, that she had made her own decision about applying and she knew it, and pretty soon after that, she was chattering away again, confiding in me about school and friends and her parents, just like always. Or almost like always—neither of us mentioned George, which meant things weren’t entirely normal between us. He was such a big part of my life now that I had to keep editing things I wanted to tell her. But the important thing was that we were friends again.
Later—after we’d left the house and gone out for cupcakes and more tears and hugs—we came back and looked up the colleges on George’s list. One was less than two hours from where I’d be in Connecticut, and we both got stoked for that, but I was careful this time not to push her or act like I knew what I was talking about. I’d learned my lesson.
“I’m over Elton anyway,” Heather said, leaning back against her headboard—we had curled up on her bed with the laptop. “If all the kids are like you, they’d be smarter than me and I’d just feel stupid for four more years. Anyway . . . it was always more your choice than mine.”
I couldn’t argue with any of that. And didn’t.
thirty-eight
Over the next few weeks, Aaron and Michael moved out of the hotel and into a huge and beautiful penthouse apartment in Santa Monica with a view of the ocean. Crystal kept the house. She and Michael were working out some kind of joint custody agreement, which for now mostly involved Megan’s carting the baby back and forth and having to take care of her in two different places. Crystal was going back to acting, Aaron said. He never saw her alone: one of the conditions of his getting to stay with his dad in LA was that he wouldn’t. He admitted to me that it was sort of a relief. He was over her.
Whatever Crystal felt about the whole thing remained a mystery: she was completely out of our lives. Mom and I did spend time with Mia when she was at Michael’s, though. She was still the world’s cutest baby, as far as I was concerned.
Arianna continued to tell everyone at school that I was stuck-up, and Riley continued to come rushing to report it to me no matter how much I made it clear I didn’t want her to, but none of this affected my life much. The kids who fawned over me because I was Luke’s stepdaughter still did; the ones who I’d always hung out with stayed loyal; the ones I didn’t know well may have believed Arianna but it didn’t matter: we had only one more semester together and I could survive a few dark looks and mutters for that long.
Right before Christmas, we finished collecting donations for the Holiday-Giving Program and handed out the presents at the annual party at the shelter. To my relief, Ben was civil—almost pleasant—to me when we were working together. I didn’t know whether he had softened because he knew he had been unfair to me or because Arianna was losing a little of her luster as a girlfriend, but I was glad either way. It made the whole thing more pleasant.
Luke wasn’t able to come to the party, but even if some people came hoping to see him (thanks to Arianna), they didn’t leave too disappointed. Once they got busy entertaining the little kids and handing out presents, most of the students had fun, and I knew a lot of them would sign up again next year—with or without a celebrity tease.
As we were cleaning up at the end, Ben told me, a little uncomfortably, that he thought we should make Arianna the president of the program for the following year, since she was the only junior who had run any part of it. I instantly agreed. He looked surprised, but I figured she had worked hard and earned her place at the top.
And I’d be at college. She couldn’t bug me there.
Aaron got accepted early to the USC film school, which was his first choice, so he was as relaxed as I was as second semester got under way. We got together a lot in the evenings when neither of us had any other plans, going out for frozen yogurt, drinking boba tea, trying new restaurants (Aaron got his father’s assistant to book us some of the hardest-to-get reservations in town, using Michael’s name), and being generally hedonistic and sugared-up.
George was never thrilled to hear I had plans with Aaron, but he wasn’t the kind of boyfriend who was going to tell me what I could or couldn’t do. (Not that I would have gone out with anyone who was.)
“It would be easier if he were just a little less cool and handsome,” he said once when I came over to his apartment after having dinner with Aaron. “Or if I were a little more cool and handsome.”
“Cool and handsome is overrated,” I said.
His smile was pained. “So you agree I’m neither?”
“You’re everything good and smart and funny and kind and wonderful and exciting and wonderful,” I said.
“But not cool or handsome.”