I've never been this happy and this sad at the same time.
I remember this feeling, this exhilaration when I'm with him, this stabbing sadness when I'm not, but it was so incredibly different before. Because back then, I was jealous; the thought of him with Josey ripped at me even though I didn't want it to. And it sucks that I can't call her after our dates, to make fun of what he was wearing, or to vent about homework stuff that doesn't particularly interest him but that she would always listen to. And I miss that so much. But honestly? That's not even what gets to me the most. It's knowing that when I'm home alone, they're home alone too. They could be together, they could be happy, and they're not.
It's so hard to live with that.
“Have you thought about going to Miami next week?” My mother says. We're in the car on the way home from cake-tasting, so we're both in a pretty unshakeable good mood.
“What?”
“For Spring Break,” she says. “You could have the car for the weekend if you wanted.”
“I could?” That's so nice of her.
“Sure, mija, I can spend a weekend at home. And there's always Dom's car.” It's not so much her being stranded that's the big deal, it's her trusting me with the car for a whole two or three days. She is a lovely human, my mother.
But. “No, I think I'll stick around here,” I say. “Get a head start on my Faulkner paper. Maybe get an extra tutoring session or two in with Lucas.”
“How's that been going?”
“Good. He works hard.”
“I'm surprised you're not going to take the opportunity to see Aanya, though,” she says.
There are a few reasons I'm not going to go to Miami. The simplest is that Aanya and I haven't exchanged more than a handful of texts, and exactly no phone calls, since she met Theo, an event neither of us has mentioned since. We text about benign stuff: school gossip, on her end, wedding gossip, on mine.
The more complicated and more important reason is that Josey's abortion is in the middle of that weekend, and I'm not going to leave either her or Theo alone with that. I don't really know what our game plan is, here. I assume Theo's going with her—I know he would if she wanted him to—but he hasn't said anything about it to me in a while.
We are, though, spending a little more time with Josey these past few days. Once she even sat with us at lunch, and all three of us acted like we'd never been in a relationship and like everything was the most normal cordial friendship imaginable. We even joked and smiled a bit. And then at the end of lunch she took our trays for us and cleared them and we didn't see her until Monday, when we waved in the hallway and that was it. It's so strange, all of us acting like this is an acceptable way to do things.
I've never experienced anything like this before. I wish I'd told someone I was in love just so they could have warned me for what happens when you break up. When I broke up with my old boyfriends, I'd cry for two days and we'd go through any lengths necessary to avoid each other at school, and I'd glare at anyone who brought his name up and glare at any girls going after him just for good measure, long after I actually cared. We'd go straight from making out to hating each other, and even while I was actively doing that I'd wonder how it was possible. Where that hate even comes from. How your feelings about someone could change that completely so suddenly.
I'm beginning to think that they can't. Because it doesn't matter that the three of us aren't together any more; we're drawn to each other like magnets.
And I just know that if I try to tell my mother any of this, all she will hear is that there are two people making her baby unhappy, because she is my mother and to her it doesn't matter that they make me unhappy and so many other things too.
“Aanya's really busy with Jake and everything,” I say.
“Ha. Aanya's always made time for you. Jake knows that.”
“I think the lemonberry cake,” I say, to talk about anything else whatsoever.
I don't know if she picked up on my desire to change the subject or if she's just easily hypnotized by wedding talk, but either way it works. “It was good,” she says. “But I just can't get over lemonberry.”
“You mean the name?”
“Yeah. Lemonberry.”
“It is a little clunky,” I say.
“And for dinner we have salmon croquettes followed by...lemonberry.”
“Hmm. We could always rebrand it.”
“Citrus...what's another word for berry.”
“Citrus is too vague anyway.”
“We're just going to have to pick a different cake, I guess.”
I say, “Yeah. Something all fancy like Tahitian Vanilla.”
“Maybe that's the trick!” she says. “You put a location in front of it, all of a sudden you've got a high-class flavor.”
“So like...Arcadian Lemonberry?”
“Floridan Lemonberry.”
“Cuban Lemonberry,” I say.
“Indonesian Lemonberry.”
“Ooh, I like that one.”
“Good,” she says. “Indonesian Lemonberry it is.”
Theo calls me the night before school on Thursday, our last day before spring break. I shut the door to my room with my foot amid the sound of Alexis shrieking at Dominic
