Roomies (27 page)

Her videos.

“Hello?” Keyon asks.

I will follow that thought later.

“Well, my point is you can’t ever really know how it’s going to be with a person until you meet them and hear how they talk,” I say, “and see what kinds of expressions they make and stuff. You have to spend
time
with people. That’s how you become friends.”

“Right.”

“I mean maybe this whole ‘friendship’ with her has been, like, an
illusion
from the beginning. What do I know? Maybe she chews with her mouth open or smiles too much, or not enough, or interrupts all the time…”

Keyon laughs. “Or maybe she’s just regular.”

I’m pulling out my mental EB shoe box now, digging through it. “We told each other a lot of stuff. Stuff I don’t even tell Zoe. I told her about you, for example. What happened at Yasmin’s party.”

“Really?” He puts his hand on my neck. “What did you think, that night?”

“I thought we kissed by accident.”

“A damn
tragic
accident.”

“And now look what’s happened,” I say.

It hangs there. Waiting for one of us to put into actual words what’s happened.

Keyon goes back to the EB issue. “You telling her about me sounds like real friends. Even if she’s a mouth breather.”

“I know, but now she hates me. She doesn’t even believe me.” A problem I will soon solve.

His stomach makes a gurgling sound and he grimaces. We decide to go for a walk on the promenade, to help the pizza settle. Our hands cling together every second.

Zoe’s YouTube channel is a confusing mess for someone like me who has spent maybe one hour on that site my whole life. I don’t even know if she’s done with the video she was making last weekend. Then I find one posted two days ago that already has over seven hundred views. How did she find all these people? How did they find her?

Anyway, I watch the video:
San Francisco Diary—Fine Arts Edition.

A few minutes into it, there’s Ebb’s dad, smiling at the camera, talking about cash flow.

It makes me angry all over again, how he lied to her and the way she reacted when I told her. Like I was making it up or didn’t know what I was talking about. I mean, why would I
say
something like that if I wasn’t mostly sure?

I didn’t expect her to be happy to hear it but I thought she knew me better than to think I’d tell her that news casually.

And I’ve been
open
with her, about stuff I don’t tend to tell people.

Her dad is a dick. The end.

If she needs proof, here it is.

I find the “share” link.

Maybe it is a mistake.

Maybe this guy isn’t your dad. Maybe this isn’t his gallery.

Send.

I wish I could say I did it to help her face the reality about her asshole father. To try to save our friendship and get everything into the open. To prove my good intentions.

But I know the truth: I’m mad at her overreaction, and especially using those words, which I can’t get out of my head, and I sent the video to hurt her, and the worst instinct in me hopes it really, really works.

MONDAY, AUGUST 12

NEW JERSEY

Lauren’s e-mail is like poison. I feel it seeping into every molecule of my being, toxic. I see the words for what they are. I read the letters and assemble them into words that have a certain dictionary meaning. But somehow they look different to me, like there is a mirror layer of meaning that only I get. Her words look like “told you so” or “I know more than you do about your own father” or “take that!”

No one could ever imagine that such a dopey video blog would cause someone so much pain—could they?—but here I am. Is she
trying
to hurt me? Is he?

My mother isn’t home—I slept late—so I call Mark. I am crying when he picks up. I croak, “Can you meet me?”

“Of course,” he says. “Are you okay?”

“No, not really. Just meet me. The south beach parking lot.” I throw on clothes and tear out of there.

We park our cars side by side and go sit on a wind-worn bench on an empty stretch of boardwalk. He holds my hand while I tell him the whole story about Lauren and my dad; about the video and my last e-mail to her, everything.

“Why didn’t you tell me when it was happening?” he asks.

“I don’t know.” I am wiping away tears and more. “It’s like I’m embarrassed or something. Or was. I felt sort of dumb about how I reacted but this is how she responds? With a
video
of my dad? On some idiotic blog? It feels like she thinks this is a game or something. It’s my life!”

He is still holding my hand. He is still not talking.

“I am
so mad
at her.” I am fishing for some support, some sympathy—no, empathy!—but he isn’t offering any. Doesn’t anyone get it? “I mean, she goes into my dad’s gallery and doesn’t tell me for weeks? Then she sends me this video of him like she’s got it all figured out?”

“She was probably just curious,” Mark says, finally. “You told her the name of the gallery?”

I nod, like that has anything to do with anything, and I say, “I’m sorry but it’s weird.”

“I know, but think about it. Say you knew her dad owned a restaurant in Spring Lake or something. You wouldn’t think about maybe going there?”

“Why would I? And if I did and he was there and he’d told her he was in Italy I’d say, ‘Hey, Lauren’s dad. Why’d you lie to your daughter and tell her you were in Italy?’ ”

“You would not!” He is almost laughing.

“I would!” I feel certain of it.

He shakes his head. “I looked him up. Your father. I Googled his gallery, found some pictures. How is that any different?”

“It just is.”

We sit there for a while then and I get this awful sense that he is trying to think of a way to handle me, like I am some insane person. I feel justified in that concern when he says, “Are you sure it isn’t your dad you’re mad at?”

“Of course I’m mad at him,” I say. “That’s entirely beside the point.”

He puts his hands in his shorts pockets. Maybe I do sound insane. I wrap my arms around myself, like a straitjacket, trying on the feeling for size. “How did I end up with such disastrous parents?” I shake my head. “I mean, Lauren’s parents sound amazing. Like normal, stable, loving people.”

“Well, mine are no prize, either.” He is looking at the water, not at me.

“At least you have relationships with both of them, though. My dad can’t even spare a pillow and a sofa.”

He looks right at me when he says, “Did you
really
think he’d say yes?”

I absorb his words and realize I’ve known all along that my father wouldn’t come through. I look down and start crying and Mark slides an arm around my shoulders. How did I get to be so needy? So desperate that I thought a practical stranger would take me in? Like that would somehow make things better? I’m about to go out into the world on my own and I still have all these ridiculous ideas?

He says, “Hey, at least she told you. What if she hadn’t and you
thought your dad was in Italy this whole time and kept this fantasy of becoming best buds or whatever?”

I have to wipe away tears and hold back a scream when I say, “Whose side are you on?”

“Your side!” he says. “Always. I think Lauren is, too.”

We haven’t crossed “have a fight” and “make up” off our list yet and I was hoping we’d never get to it. But he is still talking and all I want is for him to shut up.

“She did the right thing,” he says. “Even if it sucks to hear it.”

“She betrayed me!”

He groans. “But not really intentionally, or I mean, not
maliciously
. And as soon as she knew something you needed to know she came clean.”

An older couple is walking by with a large, happy dog, and the sight of it—that big brown bounding fluffy thing, with its tail wagging and tongue hanging out of its mouth—makes me want to cry until I’m all cried out. After they pass, I say, “I want you to be mad
with
me.”

Mark sighs. “I am. At your sorry-ass father. Not your seemingly kick-ass roommate. She caught him red-handed. He can’t bullshit you anymore.”

“What do I even say to her now?” I ask, annoyed that Mark is echoing stuff my mother said the other night.

“You say thanks.”

He’s never going to get it. Two wrongs don’t make a right. I stand up and say, “I’ve gotta go.”

He gets up, too. “Elizabeth, come on.”

I stand and face him. “I want to be alone.” I have my car keys in my hand and am walking away.

“No you don’t,” he shouts after me. “You
called
me. You just want me to agree with you.”

“We’re talking in circles,” I shout back to him as I open my car door and get in.

He comes to my window and knocks on it, so I roll it down even as I put the car in reverse. He says, “I’m not the bad guy here!”

“No, you never are,” I say. “It must be nice to be so perfect. Maybe you and Lauren should get together.” I pull out and my ears are buzzing and they stay that way all afternoon, while I hole up in bed feeling sorry for myself.

I show my mom the video later that night, when she gets home from her first-ever Zumba class, and figure she at least will be as incensed as I am. Instead she is… disappointed? There is a funny nonchalance in her voice when she says, “What an ass.”

“What do I do?” I ask her.

She is standing by the sink, guzzling water from a bottle. I swear I have never seen the woman drink water before.

She swallows and says, “Call him. Make him explain. If it really matters.
Or
you pat yourself on the back for getting by all this time without him and move on.”

This is the same advice she gave me over popcorn, in addition to telling me to think hard about who I’m mad at before responding to Lauren or doing anything rash. It seems like ever since then she seems to be acting a bit more rational in general, almost as if my asking her to be the grown-up has turned her back into one. I wonder, though, if she’s going to be able to take her own advice when I leave. Will she reward herself for getting by so well without me or backslide into misery?

It’s not my problem. And it doesn’t matter that no one else understands my anger but me. So up in my room, I search my in-box for the e-mail I got way back when, from Helen Blake in Student Housing. I open it, hit Reply, and dash off my message before I change my mind:

Dear Ms. Blake,

For reasons too complicated to explain, I am wondering if it is possible for me to get assigned a new roommate (someone other than Lauren Cole, as named in your original e-mail below), or a single.