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I’m afraid of that happening with all my friends, but Alex the most. She’s the one most likely to call bullshit on even perfunctory get-togethers, unhappy with the charade of being friends when we aren’t actually anymore. I want to find a way to say these things, and have been plowing through a couple of beers to make the whole thing less awkward while she drives out to a beaver dam she wants to show me (yes, really). She’s got her eyes on the road, humming something that I’m pretty sure she’s making up as she goes, when I blurt out what’s on my mind.
“I wish I had you longer,” I say, then blush up to my ears. “Wait—that sounded weird. What I mean is . . . never mind. Screw it.”
Alex’s eyebrows go together and she brakes, pulling off the road into the shade of a little turnaround in the woods. “I get it,” she says.
My head is humming a little so I just nod, too aware that I don’t have a way with words like she does.
“Claire, listen to me,” Alex says, using the tone that makes dogs sit even when she didn’t give the command. So I listen.
“I didn’t have anything for a long time,” she says. “All I knew was my house and school. There was a path in between the two I never left, like a sleepwalker. You woke me up, Claire. Pushed me off it and made me see other paths, other people. Do you realize I wouldn’t even be going to college if it wasn’t for you?”
“Really?” I ask, voice small as I pick at a hangnail.
“Yes,” Alex says. “After graduation I wouldn’t have even had that path anymore. No school. Just home.”
“That’s no good.” I shudder, thinking of Alex stuck at home with her mom, two shadows passing each other without speaking until they both forget how.
“Definitely not,” she says, putting the car back in gear and us on the road again. “So don’t think that college changes—”
In the cup holder, her phone goes off as a text message comes in.
“Want me to get it?” I ask.
“Sure.”
“What the fuck? It’s from Branley.”
Alex shrugs. “What’s it say?”
“Just that she wants to talk to you and can you meet her at the church in half an hour.”
Alex doesn’t say anything, but takes a left at the next crossroads, which makes my head sing with alarm bells on top of the beer buzz.
“We’re not seriously going?”
“Why not?”
“Uh, because she’s like your archenemy or something.”
“She’s not.”
“Alex, seriously—”
“Branley’s not a bad person. If she wants to talk to me so she can get some closure, I’m not going to deny her that.”
I’m about to say that closure is overrated, but she’s already switched back to the conversation before we were interrupted by Branley’s text.
“College won’t change anything between us, Claire,” she says. “The kind of friendship we have doesn’t just stop.”
I don’t want to argue about going to see Branley, so I crack another beer as we head toward the church, the shadows of the woods around us lengthening in the dying light.
57. JACK
I’m the world’s biggest idiot.
An idiot for thinking Branley would let me go so easily, for not reading more into her parting shot over the phone, for not questioning why she wanted to meet out at the church and not at her parents’ house. I’m an idiot for not taking everything I know about Branley and realizing the equation didn’t add up. Branley who doesn’t give in. Branley who always gets what she wants. Branley who is sprawled across the altar when I walk in, push-up bra obvious under her cheerleading uniform, lacy panties flashing in my face.
The worst part is, I’m an idiot with a dick, and that part of me is dead curious about what she’s got planned.
