“He’s in town to scope out UW.”
She waggled her eyebrows at me and put the minivan into drive. “An older man, huh?”
Don’t you think you should have told me you were underage? I blushed at the memory of Dom’s parting words, answering now more defensively than I intended: “He’s just a year older.”
At my combative tone, Reb’s eyebrows furrowed. “What’s up with you?”
“Sorry, just a little sensitive, I guess,” I apologized, as I dug out the cookies my mom had pushed on us, handing one to Reb as a peace offering. “So Brian had his mother call mine yesterday.”
“She did not call your mom.”
After a therapeutic bite of butterscotch cookie, I gestured with the remnants. “She actually told my mom I was a pathological heartbreaker! Like I had some kind of disease!”
“That’s just wrong, but…”
“What?”
“Okay, I’m not saying you’re pathological or anything,” Reb said carefully as she glanced over her shoulder to change lanes, “but what’s with all these guys? I mean, it’s like you’ve become some kind of Ellis Island: Give me your jocks and your losers.”
“Reb, not you, too,” I said. One analysis of my love life a day was more than enough.
“Well, what about that guy Doug? The one who used more product in his hair than I ever had.”
“Or ever would.” I shrugged. Three dates in a row full of excuses for why he was perpetually late, and it was good-bye, Doug.
“And what about that control freak? Mr. Texter Guy?”
I frowned, trying to remember. “Oh, you mean Stephen? Yeah, he was a mistake.” After two dates, he thought he had the right to monopolize my calendar. So I voted him off mine.
“And Brian obviously lived in some kind of self-sustaining ecosystem of him, himself, and his mom,” Reb said.
At that, we both laughed the way she, Ginny, and I do on late summer nights in Reb’s treehouse, raucous and loud, when we’re hyper from too much sugar and too little sleep.
“They’re all nice guys,” I said.
“Yeah, and they’re all pretty good looking and can form complete sentences, but, Shana, no.” Reb slowed when we hit the traffic going into downtown Seattle. “The longest you’ve been with anyone in the last—what? year?—has been a week.”
“Two weeks.”
Her hands clenched around the steering wheel like she was strangling someone. Then, she turned her gaze from the road to peer closely at me before looking away. “I’m not sure what happened, but when you’re ready to talk…”
As used to Reb’s spot-on insights as I was—after all, the women in her family had uncanny premonitions—I felt flustered and embarrassed. I clasped my hands together. According to my friends, I was the quote-unquote idiot savant of boys. Little did they know the truth: I was pure idiot. Eight dates over one summer with Dom back when I was almost sixteen shouldn’t have slayed me. I knew that. I was Little Miss Rah-Rah Independence on the outside, chanting about seeing the world before settling down, but I had harbored a secret fantasy of me and Dom. He wasn’t just older and wiser, and he didn’t just have to-die-for biceps and superhero shoulders. He was turning his Big Plans for his life into reality, halfway done with business school and had already seen a huge chunk of the world. In other words, he was everything high school boys were not and he was everything I thought I wanted. I could so easily picture him in the future with his jet-setting career, and me with mine. It was a match made in sine qua non heaven.
Or so I thought.
I fidgeted with my seat belt, then switched the subject abruptly: “What’re you up to this week?”
Reb’s primary job was helping her grandmother lead tours to sacred places around the world, like Bhutan, where the gross national product is measured in happiness. I was envious—can you imagine the photos Reb could make in locales that most people never visit? But she was content with the camera feature on her cell phone. It killed me.
Reb took her eye off the traffic to stare at me. “Oh, my gosh, you know that treehouse builder I like?”
I laughed. “You mean, the one you’re obsessed with?”
“Well, a new resort in Bend asked him to build a treehouse restaurant. Zip lining will be the only way to get in. And he wants me to join his team.”
“That’s so cool! So when are you starting?”
“In a few weeks, right after Machu Picchu,” Reb said as she merged onto the exit ramp that would deposit us a few blocks from Quattro’s hotel.
“Oh, just Machu Picchu,” I teased with a careless wave.
She gasped so abruptly, I thought we were about to smash into the car in front of us. Instead, Reb reached over to grab my arm. “You should come! There’re two spots left. You could take one of them. You’d be saving me.”