My Summer Roommate (16 page)

I don’t realize I’m crying until a
warm tear drops on my hand.

“Oh, dear,”
Mom says, but doesn’t look half as distraught as I’m feeling. She walks to me without hesitation and throws her thin arms around me and pulls me into a fierce hug. After I’ve been a bitch to her, she hugs me.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and hug her back. “I
don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“
Nothing’s wrong with you, love. Nothing at all. I made a mistake. I thought I could fix whatever went wrong between you and Chris. I thought if I could convince him what a great girl you are, that he’d try and patch things up. But I only made a bigger mess. I should never have intervened. That was between you and him. I had no right …”

“That’s why you asked him to help? So you could get us back together?” It never occurred to me that
Mom would try something like that. She’d never tried to interfere with any of my previous boyfriends.

“Well, you seemed pretty stubborn when I tried to get you to talk to him.
I imagined he’d react the same way if I just went to talk to him, so I thought I’d ask him for help and … slyly mention you a few times …”

“Oh,
Mom.”

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.
Whatever it was between you, and my intervention. I know he was different than the others. I could tell from the beginning that he meant something to you.”

“Thanks for trying. I
’m sorry I was mean to you, but I wanted someone else to hurt like I’m hurting.”

She wipes
the tears from my face. I realize that she may have fucked up a few things in the past, but so have I. We learn and we move on to being better people.

“I love you, Chloe. That has never been questionable, although my mothering skills may have been and still are.”

“I wouldn’t be who I am without you, Mom. And I’m pretty awesome, so I guess that makes you a pretty awesome Mom.”

Her
giddy giggling sound makes me laugh through my tears.

As we stand
embracing in the backyard, I feel the winds pick up. The sky has turned even darker, and there’s a rumbling quality to the air. The storm is closing in. It feels appropriate.

“How cliché,” I say, and
Mom looks at me like I’m insane. “Stormy emotions and all that,” I say.

Mo
m caresses my cheek. She’s already forgiven me. I, in turn, have a lot of forgiving to do.

I notice Isabelle has vanished.

“Let’s go inside.”

As we walk up the steps,
Mom hesitantly says, “And you’re not the only one hurting, you know.”

I don’t want her to continue because I know what she’s going to say and I don’t want to hear it.

“Chris is in a pretty bad way, too.”

I make a noncommittal sound, hoping she’ll get the hint.

When we enter the house, Harper arrives. He is supposed to cook dinner tonight, and he says he didn’t want to brave the elements later, so he came before the storm broke. He starts on the dinner early in case of a power outage during the storm. Isabelle helps him in the kitchen and I watch them wistfully as they joke and smile, touch each other deliberately while passing one item or the other, and banter as Harper scolds and instructs Izzy teasingly.

Mo
m and I sit on the couch in the living room and talk. Izzy’s dad joins Harper and Iz in the kitchen for a while, then returns to his study.

“You’ve been through a lot lately,”
Mom says. “Because of me, our roles have been reversed since you were a little girl, Chloe. I imagine that must’ve been a lot of pressure on you. Pressure you didn’t deserve.”

“
It was, but I handled it. Just this thing with Chris … upset me. I lost … myself for a little while.”

“Of course, hon.”

“I shouldn’t have said those things,” I say.

When she shakes her head, her brown curls
bounce left and right. Her eyes are blue like mine, but with a greenish tinge. They remind me of Chris a little, and everything inside me starts breaking all over again.

“Most were true,” she says. “I’m sorry that even though I’m doing my best, it isn’t good enough.” She doesn’t say it with resentment or sadness
. She’s stating a fact. I realize how, despite her frailty, she’s also strong. She’s raised me on her own. She’s given up a lot because of me, for me. Her strength is the one thing I want to learn from her.

“It’s good enough,
Mom.”

When dinner’s ready, we all sit at the table: Isabelle, Harper, Isabelle’s Dad,
Mom and I. It’s a quiet dinner, and the lights go out half-way through. We chat and praise the food, and I know Iz and Harper are playing footsie under the table. I have a difficult time keeping my face straight.

Although
Mom and Izzy’s dad have met countless times over the years, I can’t help myself but wait for them to suddenly forget each other’s names or ask who the stranger at their table is. Sometimes, it’s difficult living with a parent like that. Other times, it’s liberating and fun. Like with everything in life. You cope and fight to get to the good parts. You don’t give up just as you reach your goal and fall back on the hardships. You don’t give up, period.

Chapter
Twenty-Two

CHRIS

It’s been thirteen days, and I count them like a lovesick idiot. Which is, I guess, what I am. But still, you know … It’s humiliating. It’s distracting me at work. Salvo’s given me a dressing-down twice this week. I messed up four deliveries. Needless to say, I didn’t get any tips for that.

Every morning
, Sal’s trying to convince me to take a box of croissants to Izzy’s and try to talk to Chloe. I think my love life is beginning to substitute for his soap operas, which is just tragic. I’m not convinced his idea is a good one. I think trying to talk to her when she obviously doesn’t want to talk to me would only make it worse.

I can avoid her, but there’s nothing I can do
to stop feeling like this. Nothing I can do to stop thinking about her the way I imagine alcoholics think about their next drink, even dream about it.

I fucked up. What pisses me off is t
hat it wasn’t even deliberate. That bet was an act of total idiocy. My only excuse is that I made it when I still thought I didn’t have the slightest chance with Chloe. I would never have done it otherwise. I don’t sleep with girls for bets, for chrissakes. Especially not with Chloe. She wasn’t even just a girl. She was different. She was supposed to be
my
girl.

I tried calling her. I left her two dozen messages. She hasn’t responded, so I gave up. I need a better plan
. Inundating her cell phone is obviously not going to help. Maybe I should ask Isabelle for help, but I’m not certain she would even listen to my reasons because she is Chloe’s best friend and she’d feel she has to be loyal to her, not to me. Maybe Harper. But I don’t want to put him into a position where he’d have to choose between Isabelle and me.

I am on my own. I just need to get her to listen to me. She is smart enough to see the truth once she hears me out. I decide to write her a letter. My handwriting is awful and my hand will hurt for a week, not being used to writing, but I think it will get the message across. She’ll see how much
she means to me.

It takes me ten minutes to get a pen and paper. I can’t remember the last time I wrote something down by hand.

I sit at the kitchen table and think about how to start. I’m half way through a bottle of water by the time I write ‘Dear Chloe’. I empty it by the time I start the first sentence. Then I’m interrupted by a knock on the door.

I open the door to find Chloe on my doorstep. Shame and gratitude and hope and unease wash over me, and I’m so overwhelmed I avoid her eyes. That is my first mistake. Wait, no, it’s my second. My first
was made weeks ago.

“Hi,” she says, all neutral and poised.

I step aside, and she walks in. She stops in the middle of the room, a step from the table where my letter to her lies abandoned. I cringe at the thought of her seeing it. Now that she’s here, a letter seems such a stupid idea. But all my thinking about it must somehow align the energies in a way that make her look directly at the object of shame.

She reads the single line on the paper, and then looks at me.

I think of the inadequate words.
Dear Chloe, I don’t think I’ve ever written a letter before
.

Sounds
silly, now that I think about it. “You refused to answer my calls,” I say, and feel even sillier.

“I heard your messages.” She sounds calm, but somehow raw, hurt.

I don’t know what to say. I want to invite her to sit, but that would be lame. I also can’t just let her stand there, that would be rude. So I opt to offer her some tea.

“Coffee, please,” she says, and shrugs when I look at her surprised. “I’ve been spending too much time with Izzy.” She almost cracks a smile, I can tell. It’s there, behind the cool façade, her sparkly personality itching to get out and laugh and joke with me, the way we used to. The realization of what I’ve lost is like a slap, and I feel all this is useless. But why is she here, then? If she could switch from tea to coffee, she could go from being pissed at me to trusting me again. I know it’s not quite the same, but people
and situations change, right?

While I try to get the machine to work (it takes two attempts and one strong
punch), she says, “I couldn’t just leave it like this.”

I’m afraid to turn because I’m not sure what I’ll see.
Is she here to give me a second chance or to tell me I’m the worst sort of scum?

“We became friends over the few weeks, and I couldn’t just ignore all this forever and pretend it never happened.”

That is good, right? God, please say it’s a good thing. Please?

“Chris?”

I don’t have a choice anymore. I can’t stare at the machine spewing out coffee while Chloe’s asking me a question. I turn. “Yeah?”

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” She’s holding the back of a chair for support and her fingers are tapping out a frenzied rhythm on the blue wood.

“I’m glad that you decided you’re not angry with me anymore?” I say, making it a question more than a statement.

“I didn’t say I wasn’t angry anymore. I just said it couldn’t go on forever without … talking to you and … giving you a chance to tell your side of the story, I guess.”

She looks terribly nervous, which somehow puts us on equal ground, and I’m able to relax a little. If she were here to spit in my face and tell me I’m an idiot, she wouldn’t be nervous about it.

But this was Chloe. She always wanted to hear both sides of a story. She had trouble making decisions because she always saw the pros and the cons of every little thing. I should say, both sides and all the grey parts in between, too. There was no black and white for her. She didn’t believe in people being bad just because
. There were just various stages of goodness or lack thereof.

I hand her
the coffee mug. I pour one for myself, just to keep my hands busy since they’re all jittery from the copious amounts of coffee I already drank this morning. Talk about a vicious circle.

“Okay,” I say.

We sit on the couch, as far apart as we can get. I can’t believe that less than two weeks ago we were making out just a few paces away in her bedroom which is now empty. I’m still sleeping on the couch. Somehow I’m unable to sleep in there alone.

“What do you want to know?” I ask when I realize I don’t know how to start or what to say.

“Why would you bet about something like that?” she says, and when she looks at me, I feel like a small boy, stripped down to my very essence. Like there’s just her and me and my terrible need to make her see that I love her. But first, I need to answer a few tough questions.

I clear my throat. This is more difficult than I imagined. Must be because so much depends on it. Because the truth itself is fairly simple.

“Mike told the others about us sharing this place and there was a lot of joking and teasing. You know how guys are. I felt pretty great that everyone envied me.” I didn’t feel so great now that her lips were pressed into a thin line and her eyes were boring into me, blue and cool as an icicle.

“Someone challenged me to sleep with you.” I get the words out with difficulty, but I know I can’t stop now. “I accepted it, because I didn’t think it would ever happen. I was just fooling around with them. I’ve always liked you, but I didn’t think you’d like me back. I didn’t think that we’d … well, get so close to sleeping together. That’s why the bet seemed just a joke. I forgot about it until …”

I dare a glance at her and her expression hasn’t changed at all. I’m screwed, I know it then. But I push on, until I get it all out. “I didn’t want to sleep with you to win the bet. I wanted
you
. I still do. I’ve never felt this great in any girl’s company before. I …”