I was alone in my room when I found out online that I’d been accepted to Elton College. I screamed and Mom and Lorena came running in, concerned. Once I explained, we all jumped around for a while and they hugged me, and then I said, “I want to tell George in person. Don’t call or text him, Mom.”
“Why would I?”
“You told him my SAT scores without my permission.”
“That was when he was your tutor, not your boyfriend,” she pointed out. “And I was paying him for the time he spent with you. I’ve stopped doing that, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I should tell him to submit a bill,” I said. “He’s been putting in some long hours with me over the last couple of weeks. Lots of late nights . . .”
“I don’t want to hear about it!” she said, putting her hands over her ears. She was in a much better mood these days, willing to laugh and be silly. Jacob had a whole weekly regimen with various therapists and had added about fifteen more words to his vocabulary in just a few weeks, and Mom had said to me a few days earlier that knowing he was getting help and seeing him respond to all the interventions made her feel better about everything. And I could see that in her face every day—that little line between her eyes had virtually disappeared.
She dropped her hands and said more seriously, “But can you still apply somewhere else? You got in so easily—maybe you didn’t reach high enough. The Ivies—”
I cut her off. “Too late. I’m committed now—early decision, remember?—and it’s good news, so don’t harsh my buzz.” I slipped my feet into flip-flops, twisted my hair into a knot, threw on a sweatshirt, and was out the door before she could say anything else.
It was late afternoon on a weekday, and traffic was predictably hellish going over the hill into the Valley. I listened to music and tailgated every car in front of me. Not that it helped.
About halfway there, I got a call. Heather. My stomach tightened. It was the first time she’d called me since I’d told her about George. I’d texted her a bunch of times, asking her if we could please just talk, but she never responded. I kept trying; she had a right to be mad at me, and I had a right not to give up on our friendship.
But now she was breaking the silence. She must have heard from Elton.
I hoped she was calling to say, “Hey, since we’re going to be going to school together, let’s make up!”
Please let it be that.
I hit the car’s Bluetooth speaker and said hello. I heard weeping on the other end, then finally some broken words. “You got in, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
Crap. “Yeah. You?” But I already knew the answer.
“I listened to you!” she sobbed. “I listened to you and you told me I’d get in and I could have applied somewhere better for me. I didn’t even want to go to Elton—I let you talk me into it—”
“Then maybe it’s not so bad,” I said, torn between irritation and remorse. “You’ll get in somewhere you like better.”
“You’ve been a bad friend to me.” She hung up.
I reached George’s apartment about fifteen minutes later. When he opened his door in response to my knock, I said, “I got in,” and burst into tears.
He pulled me inside, shut the door, then sat down with me on the sofa while I told him about Heather. “She’s so unhappy. And it’s all my fault. I’ve ruined her life in every possible way. What do I do now?”
He gently brushed his knuckles against the tears on my cheeks. “Don’t panic. She’ll be okay.”
“You were right. You said she wouldn’t get in just because I wanted her to, that I should stop pushing her to apply there.”
He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t the I told you so type but we both knew it was true.
“I’ve lost my best friend. I had already hurt her and now she hates me even more.”
“You didn’t lose her. She loves you and she knows you love her. Just give her some time to recover.”
We sat like that for a while, my legs across his lap, my head on his chest. Just being with him made me feel better. I inhaled the salty-sweet scent of his neck (no cologne, just him, thankfully) and felt better. I wished I hadn’t had to hurt Heather to end up here, inside George’s neck, but I didn’t regret the outcome.
But then . . . I sat up suddenly and moved away from him. “You don’t seem all that happy for me,” I said accusingly. “About Elton, I mean.”
“I am,” he protested. “It’s great news. I’m not surprised but I’m happy for you.”
“Then why don’t you sound happy?”
He looked down at his hands. “Connecticut just seems very far away, that’s all.”
“Oh,” I breathed, suddenly understanding. I threw myself on him and pinned him against the sofa. “That’s a very good reason for you not to seem happy.” I straddled him, then leaned forward and dropped my head until my lips met his.
A day or two later, George showed me a list he’d made of schools that he thought Heather would like and could get into. “She said her college counselor wasn’t very good and had hundreds of kids to oversee, and her mother didn’t strike me as a clear thinker, so I went ahead and did some research. I could email her this. Do you think she’d be okay with that?”
“Print it up,” I said. “I’ll take it to her.”
“Really? You think it’ll be okay if you just show up?”
“I’m hoping that if we’re face-to-face, I’ll be able to convince her to forgive me.”
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.