I answer quickly. “Do you miss me?”
“So much.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m bored out of my mind. My mom is working—what else is new? My dad is out having coffee with a friend who may have some job leads for him, he claims. As if.” I wince knowing where her dad really is. Coffee with a friend is coffee with my mom. It’s a gateway meeting, an entree into something more. “So I decided since you’re going to prom with Lane, I need to meet him,” Amanda announces.
Crap. Prom. Lane.
I’d totally forgotten about that. It had completely vacated my brain. How am I going to go to prom with Lane when I have a secret boyfriend again?
“Sure,” I say, noncommittally.
“Hello? Kennedy, you are going to prom. This is a big deal. This is on our list of top five things that suck about an all-girls’ school and you found a loophole to one of the five. You get to go to prom. I want to meet your boyfriend. So there. Make it so.”
My heart flinches when she says boyfriend, because she can’t meet my real boyfriend. I can picture how it’d go—Amanda meeting Noah for the first time at Dr. Insomnia’s, holding back a surprise, then somehow reshaping her face into a happy look, when really she’d be thinking, Why didn’t you tell me your boyfriend is older?
“First of all, Lane’s not my boyfriend, Amanda,” I say.
“Semantics.”
“But he’s not.”
“But he will be.”
“Doubtful.”
“Why not?”
I fall back into my pillow. “I don’t know, Amanda. It’s just … I don’t know.”
“Well, whatever. You’re making me crazy. Let’s just all get coffee. I need you to entertain me. Call him and see if he’s free.”
Amanda is nothing if not insistent. She will make a great reporter someday.
“Fine.” I hang up, then quickly dial Lane’s number.
“Thank God you called. Otherwise, I was going to have to put an ad on Craigslist for a girl with a red polka-dot umbrella,” he says before I can even say hi. Was it really just two days ago when Lane bought me the umbrella? My project with Lane feels like a lifetime ago. Because the life I want has returned to me in the meantime with the man I love.
“I bet you’d get a lot of takers,” I say, when I recover to the present.
“Umbrellas have that effect on girls.” His voice is hopeful, and something in it feels too close, too intimate for me. Or maybe it’s the words. Words like girls and effect. I’m not sure I want to roll around in those words when it comes to Lane.
I shift gears. “Do you want to meet at Dr. Insomnia’s in, say, an hour? My friend Amanda wants to meet you.”
Lane pauses. In the span of his silence, I am guessing he’s considering, he’s wondering, he’s weighing the fact that neither one of us has met the other’s friends. Our friendship has always just been us, him and me.
I fill the white space. “I mean, I know we’ve never met each other’s friends, but why shouldn’t we, right? No one needs to know we met at the shrink’s. We’re just friends, that’s all. And I told her we’re going to prom. She’s dying to help me pick out a dress. I can’t not let her meet you.”
“Sure. Let’s do it. See you in an hour.”
I call Amanda back and tell her to get ready. As I leave, I let my dad know I’m meeting Amanda and Lane. I’ve told him the truth, but the truth will also pad the lie I’m about to tell him to explain my whereabouts for the rest of the day.
“And then we’ll probably see a movie or something,” I say, and the words come out so easily, so smoothly, because this is how it goes when you are a seasoned pro, when you’ve been coached by the best, by the person who perfected lying to this man for most of her marriage.
I maintain my false front as my dad smiles.
“Have fun at the movies. Say hi to Lane and Amanda,” he says.
“I will.”
Inside, I want to jab myself with sharp pencils, a punishment for the little lies I tell him, for the ways I’m not the opposite of my mom right now, for the ways I am her imprint.
I open the door to leave.
“No bike today?” my father asks.
I don’t look at him for this one. I don’t look at him because I don’t need my bike, because I’m meeting my secret boyfriend in a cab in a couple hours.
“Nah, I feel like walking,” I say.
Before I even reach the cobblestoned street, I crank up South Pacific, but I jump because the last song I want to hear right now is “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.” Instead, I switch to “Some Enchanted Evening,” and the words and the music do what they’re supposed to. Make me forget what I want to forget and remember what I want to remember.
Chapter Twenty-One
Kennedy
Back then, I didn’t think much about the lies I had to tell, because the bubble of bliss was just that. Bliss. Perfection. Happiness.
The fall of my senior year was the best. Every day, every second with Noah, was like a scene in some romance set in Manhattan, with secret dates all around the city that only we knew about. Stolen moments on the Staten Island Ferry late one afternoon, watching the big boat whip across the water as the sun beat down. Visits to Chinatown on Sundays, where we’d wander in and out of cramped little shops selling teapots with cats on them and red embroidered jackets. Popping into the theater to see a Saturday matinee of Jersey Boys, enjoying the half-price tickets he’d snagged that morning.