Good Luck (11 page)

I kept waiting for something more to happen—for him to ask to see me outside the library or maybe to kiss me on one of those nights when we spent our study break sitting on a bench talking together. But he never made a move. At first I appreciated how slowly he was taking things; it seemed sweet and romantic, and I knew that if something did happen, it wouldn’t be a disposable hookup. Then I began to worry that we’d crossed that invisible line from love interest to friendship.

“And once that happens, there’s no going back,” I said to Hayden a few weeks after the night I’d first met John. I was perched on the edge of the bed, watching her get ready for a semiformal mixer. She was wearing a short black fitted dress edged with white piping that she’d discovered at Goodwill and yet looked like couture draped on her tall, angular frame. She’d twisted her hair up into a neat chignon and was now carefully applying her signature red lipstick.

“That’s not necessarily true. Remember
When Harry Met Sally
? They were friends who first met in college, and they eventually got together,” Hayden said. She blotted her lipstick and then tossed the capped tube into her black satin evening bag.

“Eventually? Didn’t they get together, like, fifteen years after they first met in that movie?”

“Something like that.”

“I don’t want to wait fifteen years.” I sighed dramatically and traced one of the poppies on Hayden’s Marimekko duvet cover with my finger.

“Maybe he’s shy. Maybe you should make the first move.”

Just the idea of this made my stomach twist.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

Because I want him to like me enough to ask me out,
I thought.
I want him to think I’m worth it
. And if I asked him out, even if he agreed, a part of me would always feel less valued.

I knew Hayden would never understand this, though, so I just shrugged and, to placate her, said, “I don’t know. Maybe I will.”

The doorbell rang then, Hayden’s date arriving to pick her up.

“Would you mind getting it?” she asked. “I have to pee.”

“Sure,” I said sliding off her bed.

While Hayden ducked into the bathroom, I padded to the front door. I opened it and found myself face-to-face with…
John!
My heart gave an excited lurch and then seemed to zoom up into my throat. He’d come to see me! And since I hadn’t given him my address, that meant he must have tracked me down! Which meant he must really, really like me! Joy bloomed inside me. It was finally, finally happening for me.

“Hey!” I said.

“Hey yourself,” John said. He seemed confused. “Do you live here?”

Now I was confused too. Hadn’t he expected me to live here? And why was he wearing a jacket and tie? He looked fantastic—his shiny dark hair curled back from his face, his brown eyes dark with excitement, and the jacket emphasizing his sexy broad shoulders—but it was a departure from the wool sweaters and beat-up Levis I was used to seeing him in.

“Jonathan!” Hayden said, gliding into the room, her face aglow. “Did you meet my roommate, Lucy?”

And it all became horrifyingly clear. His name wasn’t J-O-H-N…it was J-O-N. Short for Jonathan. More to the point, short for the Jonathan that Hayden had been half in love with ever since she quite literally bumped into him on the quad a week earlier. She’d been gazing skyward, wondering if it was going to rain; he was looking back over his shoulder, talking to a friend. They’d had coffee twice, lunch once, and tonight he was taking her to the semiformal.

And I had convinced myself that he was falling for me. Shame and humiliation welled inside me, pressing upward.

“We already know each other,” Jonathan said.

“You do?” Hayden asked, looking delightedly from him to me. “You didn’t tell me that, Lucy.”

I don’t know how I managed to keep my face set in a neutral, pleasant expression that completely disguised what I was feeling inside. But somehow I must have, because Hayden didn’t notice my distress.

“We have a class together,” Jonathan said.

And before he could go on and disclose that he was the John I’d been mooning about for the past few weeks, I said quickly, “That’s right. We’re old buds.”

This was patently untrue; we’d known each other for only a few weeks. But it was the sort of teasing patter the best friend of the love interest can get away with—Jonathan would just assume it meant I was giving Hayden a subtle thumbs-up of approval—so he grinned and said, “That’s right. Lucy’s saved my sorry ass. If it wasn’t for her, I’d be failing poli-sci.”

I was sure that would give it away, that Hayden would immediately figure out that Jonathan was John. And I didn’t want her to know. Hayden was a zealot when it came to loyalty. If she even suspected that I had feelings for her Jonathan, she would immediately dump him. I didn’t want that; it would make me feel even more pathetic and humiliated than I already did.

But Hayden was too smitten to notice. Her eyes seemed to drink Jonathan in, and an almost goofy smile played at her lips—something I’d never seen before. Jonathan was gazing back at her as though he couldn’t believe his good luck. I had never in my life felt more extraneous.

“Have a great time,” I said, backing away from the pair.

“Bye,” Hayden said.

“Yeah, bye, Lucy,” Jonathan echoed.

I spent the rest of the evening in my bedroom, curled up in a fetal position on my bed, my hands clasped to my stomach and my eyes sore and puffy from crying. I listened for Hayden’s return.
Please don’t let them come back here together,
I thought.
Meeting him by the coffeepot first thing in the morning is more than I can bear
.

But I didn’t hear them return, and eventually I fell asleep. And the next morning, when I first listened at the door, then knocked softly, and finally—sure it was safe—cracked open the door to Hayden’s bedroom, I discovered that she hadn’t come back at all.

I never did tell Hayden about the John/Jonathan mix-up. Their relationship lasted longer than most of Hayden’s flings; they were still together by the time we graduated. I got over Jonathan eventually, and the ache of seeing him regularly sprawled out on our couch, Hayden’s head resting companionably on his shoulder, or, worse, the bitter jealousy that rose up in me like bile when I heard the soft, sighing sounds of their lovemaking through our paper-thin walls first lessened, then disappeared.

Jonathan and I were thrown together so often that we grew to be pretty good friends. And even after he and Hayden eventually broke up the summer after graduation—or, I should say, after Hayden unceremoniously dumped him, claiming that she wanted to transition into the next phase of her life unencumbered—Jonathan and I stayed in touch. He went on to med school at Dartmouth, eventually became a pediatrician, and was now married with two kids and living in Baltimore. I hadn’t seen him in years, but we e-mailed back and forth occasionally, and every Christmas I received a card with a picture of his two adorable, dark-haired, apple-cheeked daughters, both of whom had inherited his smile.

After graduation. I moved back to Florida, got my teaching certificate, and applied for teaching jobs at a number of local high schools, including Andrews Prep. Hayden moved to Manhattan to pursue her acting career. Her biggest part was playing a golfer in a tampon commercial. In it, she pranced around in white shorts, taking graceful swings with a golf club.

I called Hayden the first time I saw the commercial air.

“Hey there, movie star!” I said, when she answered the phone. We hadn’t talked in a few weeks, which felt like forever after having seen each other nearly every day for four years. I even felt a little uncertain about calling her. She’d been distant the past few times we’d spoken, and I’d never heard the whole story of why she and Jonathan broke up. But as soon as I heard Hayden’s warm, rich chuckle and the deep exhalation of her cigarette smoke, it was as though no time had passed at all.

“Sadly, one tampon commercial does not make me a movie star.”

“I thought you did a great job. You nailed the part. I totally believed that you had your period and yet felt secure wearing short-shorts.”

“Not to mention that I actually played golf,” Hayden said. “All of those years my mother dragged me to lessons paid off. Who would have thought?”

“I have a hard time picturing you being dragged anywhere you don’t want to go,” I said.

“I was madly in love with my golf coach. He had the best legs I’ve ever seen on a man,” Hayden conceded. “So I didn’t mind the lessons so much. But I never told my mom that. She would have stopped bribing me with Chanel lipsticks if she’d found out.”

“Chanel lipsticks? How old were you?”

“Eleven,” Hayden said. She laughed again. “Eleven going on thirty.”

Hayden never did get her big break; after a few years she gave up acting altogether. She flitted from job to job, each time fizzing with excitement over the dazzling future she was suddenly envisioning for herself. For a time she worked as an assistant to a famous photographer and was convinced that it was only a matter of time before she’d become a photographer in her own right, with
Vanity Fair
and
Vogue
clamoring after her. Then there was her stint at an art gallery, organizing exhibits and acting as a liaison with artists. And then she landed a job as the assistant to a rising fashion designer.

I usually never heard why she’d left these jobs; Hayden called only when she was bubbling with excitement over her future prospects or when she had yet again fallen in love. When she was licking her wounds over another job failure or breakup, she withdrew completely and wouldn’t return my phone messages or e-mails for months at a time.

Although our lives couldn’t have been more different in the eleven years since we’d left school—Hayden leading her glittering chaotic life in the big city, me teaching in quiet, sleepy Ocean Falls—we still managed to stay in touch. I called Hayden every few weeks, usually leaving her a message—she was never home—which she would eventually return. Twice I traveled up to Manhattan to visit her, and every year she came down to Florida to spend a few weeks at her family’s estate on Palm Beach, and I would drive down to meet her there.

It had been over three months since I’d heard from her. I’d called and left messages, which went unreturned. I assumed she was in the midst of another of her withdrawn phases, which meant she was either out of work, or brokenhearted, or both. So I was thrilled to hear her voice on my answering machine. I fumbled for the phone, nearly knocking over a glass of water as I reached for it.

“I’m here, I’m here!” I said after I’d punched the talk button. “Don’t hang up!”

“Stop yelling, I’m still here.”

“I haven’t heard from you in ages,” I said, smiling for the first time in days.

“Is that what this is all about? A stunt designed to flush me out?”

“That’s right. I won the lottery and got fired from my job just for you.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s all about me, me, me.” Hayden laughed her wonderful deep laugh, and then I heard the unmistakable sound of a cigarette being lit.

“I thought you quit smoking.”

“I did. And then I started up again. It’s like Kurt Vonnegut said—smoking is a socially acceptable form of suicide. Or at least it used to be, before all of the antismoking Nazis took over Manhattan,” Hayden said.

“So, seriously, where have you been?”

“Vancouver.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“What were you doing there?”

“It was a business thing,” she said vaguely.

“What sort of business?” I asked.

“You know: for my job.”

I tried to remember what it was she was doing these days. PR for that record label? No, that was last year.

“You don’t even know what I do, do you?” Hayden asked accusingly.

“Well…no,” I admitted. “What are you up to these days?”

“It was really exciting. I got in on a new dot-com venture. A personal-shopping Web site for people who don’t live near stores with personal-shopping services. Which apparently is most of the country. Customers could submit pictures of themselves, and then our personal-shopping experts would pick out the outfits for them from various online stores. And here’s the best part: We’d get paid twice. Once from the customer for performing the service and then again from the clothes vendor for referring the business,” Hayden enthused.

“That sounds great,” I said. “Very inventive. Is it up and running now?”

“Well…no,” Hayden admitted. “That’s why we were in Vancouver. We were trying to get investors for the project. But the financing fell through.” She sighed, and I could picture the smoke pluming from her nose. “So we couldn’t move forward with it.”

“We?”

“I was working with a partner. Craig Wilson. He’s a whole other story.”

I had a feeling I knew where this was going. “A new boyfriend, I take it?”

“No. A very ex ex-boyfriend.”

“What happened?”

“He went back to his wife,” Hayden said flatly. “The wife who he claimed had never understood him and who he was no longer in love with—and who, come to find out, is now pregnant with their second child. Yes, I really was that stupid.”

“You’re not stupid. He sounds like a creep,” I said. “How were you supposed to know he was lying?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really want to talk about him. I want to talk about you—and whether that really was Elliott I saw being interviewed by Larry King last night.”

He went on Larry King too?
I wondered, as a wave of nausea washed over me. I’d been trying to avoid the television. Listening to reporters bandy my name around had felt surreal at first. Now it was just depressing. But this was the problem with not watching the news when you’re at the center of the biggest story in the country—you don’t know when your asshole of an ex-boyfriend is going to do yet another interview where he tells millions of people what a horrible person you are.

“Lulu?” Hayden asked, using her pet nickname for me. She was the only person I let get away with calling me that, having hated it since childhood. “Are you still there?”