“Okay,” I said. I felt like I should have a bigger reaction to the news, but we’d been inching toward that possibility for so long that I guess deep down I’d already kind of accepted it. “It makes sense, right? What do you think, Luke?”
“You’ll be happy to know I listened quietly to the doctor.”
“Because you promised me?”
He nodded. “But also because you were right. It was time for me to shut up and listen. Plus I really liked her.”
I beamed at him. I felt like a proud parent. “And?”
“I told her I still don’t like the idea of labeling a two-year-old, and she said she completely understood and that the label didn’t matter anyway—the important thing was just to recognize that Jacob’s a little behind other kids his age and we need to help him catch up. Which I’m fine with.”
“Me too,” Mom said.
“Whatever it takes.” He brought Mom’s hand to his mouth for a swift kiss. “Can I go now?”
“You may go,” she said. “And thank you,” she whispered to me as he left the kitchen. “I don’t know what you said to him, but it made all the difference.”
“I have awesome powers of persuasion.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Speaking of which . . . can I persuade you to let me stay out past one tonight? I’ll just be at George’s. You know you can trust us.”
“Curfew’s midnight,” she said. “Same as always.” Grandma put a cup of tea in front of her and Mom nodded her thanks while Grandma sat down with her own cup.
“I know,” I said. “But I’m on vacation. And you should be proud of me for not sneaking home later than curfew without permission even though you’re usually asleep and don’t even notice what time I get home. I’m always honest with you. Which is why you can trust me. And it’s not like I want to go drinking or anything. I just want to hang out in George’s apartment and watch movies with him, and it’s so much nicer not to have to rush home early.”
“That’s all?” she said. “You’re just going to watch movies?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I used to tell my mother that, too,” she said, and the two of them looked at each other and laughed a little too loudly.
“Don’t worry,” Grandma said to her. “I already had the condom talk with her.”
“And I endured it without complaining,” I said. “For that alone I should get one night without a curfew.”
Mom laughed some more and gave in.
thirty-six
Crystal took the baby (and Megan, who never seemed to get any holiday off) back to her parents’ house in Boston for Thanksgiving, so Mom invited Michael and Aaron to have dinner with us.
We ate in the dining room, which we saved for big formal dinners—which meant we almost never used it. I don’t know about the adults’ end of the table, but Aaron, Jacob, and I had fun at ours. We piled mounds of mashed potatoes on our plates and sent cranberries crashing through them on skateboards made of turkey, while Aaron told me stories about life in the hotel—it sounded like he was basically an older, male version of Eloise, wheedling everyone who worked there to give him free food and drinks, making friends with the other guests, and driving the staff crazy. He was having fun, he said.
“I’m over all the drama,” he told me right after he had stuck green beans in the corners of his mouth and pretended to be a walrus to amuse Jacob, who just stared at him, then looked away again, unimpressed. Aaron tossed the beans back onto his plate. “I’m avoiding it in the future.”
“Make it your New Year’s resolution,” I suggested.
“That’ll be one of them,” he said. “Sticking close to good friends I can trust—that’s another.”
I fluttered my hands to my chest in an exaggerated You mean me? kind of way and he grinned and raised his wineglass to me. We were both drinking wine, but I was still on my first glass and he was on his second. Or third.
The plates had all been cleared when George and Jonathan arrived—they’d had dinner with the Nussbaum clan first, but had been invited to join us for dessert.
I watched from a distance as Luke got up to shake George’s hand and Mom reached up to give him a hug and a kiss, and I felt as lucky as people were always telling me I was.
Jonathan circled around the table and reached me first. He leaned over to give me a kiss and whispered in my ear, “I want you to know I don’t approve of this at all. You’re way too good for him.” He cuffed me on the shoulder and nodded in Aaron’s direction. “Hello,” he said coldly. Apparently (and probably not coincidentally) he shared his brother’s dislike of Aaron.
Jacob stretched up his arms and Jonathan scooped him up. “All right then,” he said, and carried Jacob over to the adults’ end of the table, where he sat down next to Luke, arranging Jacob comfortably on his lap.
George said hello to all the adults before coming to our end of the table, so he reached us a minute after his brother.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” he said, and rested his hand on the back of Jacob’s former seat. “Mind if I sit here?”
“Do you really want to know or are you just being polite?” Aaron asked.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” George said, and sat. I nodded a greeting at him but didn’t indicate in any other way that for the previous couple of days we’d basically spent every hour we could alone in his room, twisted around each other. I got home at four in the morning on Tuesday night—or, rather, Wednesday morning—but last night I had to be back at midnight. Mom wanted me up at a normal hour to help her get the house ready for guests.
I hadn’t told Aaron about me and George yet. This was the first time I’d seen Aaron since things had changed, and it seemed awkward to just bring it up out of context. And why should I rush to tell him about my private romantic life when he’d kept his a secret from me? It felt good to turn the tables, to have information he didn’t. I mean, if he’d asked me specifically about either George or my love life, I might have said something, but Aaron didn’t ask people questions about themselves. He liked the conversation to be about him.
The three of us chatted for a while about nothing important. Aaron kept trying to make George feel like an outsider: he’d whisper funny little observations into my ear that George couldn’t hear and catch my eye whenever George was talking, making faces and mouthing words to distract me from listening.
At one point, when George was still in the middle of telling us a story about his sister’s boyfriend, who had come to their Thanksgiving dinner and been terrified at the number of brothers all sizing him up, Aaron cut him off by turning to me and abruptly saying, “I feel like we’ve been sitting here forever. My butt hurts.”
“We could all move to the living room.”
“How about we sneak out to a movie?”
I glanced over at George.
“You could come too if you wanted,” Aaron said to him begrudgingly.
“Thanks,” George said. “I don’t want to strand my brother—we came in one car.”
“So how about it, Ellie?”
“I’m fine staying,” I said.
Aaron leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I’m going to scream if we sit here any longer. Can’t we just run out and do something? Anything? Just us two?”
“I’m really happy here,” I said, and shifted sideways in my chair so I could lean back against George. His arms went around me just like I knew they would—not in a proprietary way, just settling me against his chest. “You see?” I said to Aaron. “Happy.”
He stared at us. “Excuse me?” he said.
I put my hands over George’s and pressed them hard against my arms. “He’s a really good tutor,” I explained.
It took him another moment. “You two?” he said. “Seriously?”
“Define ‘seriously,’” I said. “I mean, I make a lot of jokes about it. . . .”
“I can see why.” He forced a laugh. “This is . . . unexpected. You could have said something.”
/> “Yeah, I really should have,” I agreed. “I hate when people sneak around and don’t tell you the truth about their love lives, don’t you?”
“Ah, I see what you did there. Clever.” He stood up. “Excuse me. I’m going to need a lot more wine to process this.” He picked up his glass and stalked down to the far end of the table, where another bottle had just been opened.
We sat quietly for a while. I watched Jacob—now on Grandma’s lap—methodically stab his pumpkin pie with a fork until it was completely dead. Apparently he wasn’t a fan.
“When you move your head, your hair tickles my nose,” George said sleepily.
“Your nose tickles my hair.”
He slid his fingers up my neck and tugged at my curls from underneath. “There’s so much of it. Maybe you should cut it all off.”
“Never!”
“It’s just dead cells, you know.”
“Yes, but my dead cells are so much more beautiful than anyone else’s.”
“Vain, aren’t we?”
I tilted my head back to look up at him. “Have you seen my hair? It’s extraordinary.”
“It is,” he said.
My phone buzzed and I moved back into my own seat to glance at it.
Meet me in the kitchen.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, and got up. I went into the kitchen, which was amazingly clean. The servers Carlos had arranged for us had left already, but they had washed all the dishes and counters and put all the leftovers in the refrigerator. You wouldn’t even have known that an entire Thanksgiving meal had been cooked and eaten there that day—except for the good turkey and pie smells that lingered in the air.
Aaron was leaning back against the counter, his arms tightly folded across his chest, his wineglass next to him.
“We need to talk about this,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s so clearly a mistake.”
“And again I say, why?”
“Because you’re—” He waved his hands in the air. “You’re fireworks and symphonies. He’s moldy books and everything that’s boring. And he’s way too old for you.”
I regarded him amiably. “Aaron, my love, are you really going to go there? Living in that glass house of yours and all?”
“That’s why!” he said, flailing his arms around. I was beginning to think maybe he’d had too much to drink. “I’ve been down that road. Learn from me. There are healthy relationships and sick ones. There are right people and wrong people. I can teach you, little Ellie grasshopper. I can lead you in the right direction, but you have to trust me.”
I put my hand on his arm. “Here’s the thing: I like George a lot, and if you can’t be nice to him and about him, he’s not going to be the one I cut out of my life. Got it?”
“Really?” he said like he couldn’t believe it.
“So really. Just be a good friend and be happy for me.”
“Bleargh,” he said miserably. “Happiness.”
I squeezed his wrist. “I know things have been bad. They’re going to get better.”
He pushed my hand away. “Traitor,” he said. “You were supposed to belong to me. What about my needs? What if I’m sad and lonely and you’re the only person I can stand to be with, but you’re off with him?”
“Then I guess you’ll have to wait for me to come back.”
“If I have to, I will,” he said. “But I’d rather have you all to myself. I’m supposed to be the most important guy in your life.”
“Yeah, no,” I explained.
thirty-seven
I was alone in my room when I found out online that I’d been accepted to Elton College. I screamed and Mom and Lorena came running in, concerned. Once I explained, we all jumped around for a while and they hugged me, and then I said, “I want to tell George in person. Don’t call or text him, Mom.”
“Why would I?”
“You told him my SAT scores without my permission.”
“That was when he was your tutor, not your boyfriend,” she pointed out. “And I was paying him for the time he spent with you. I’ve stopped doing that, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I should tell him to submit a bill,” I said. “He’s been putting in some long hours with me over the last couple of weeks. Lots of late nights . . .”
“I don’t want to hear about it!” she said, putting her hands over her ears. She was in a much better mood these days, willing to laugh and be silly. Jacob had a whole weekly regimen with various therapists and had added about fifteen more words to his vocabulary in just a few weeks, and Mom had said to me a few days earlier that knowing he was getting help and seeing him respond to all the interventions made her feel better about everything. And I could see that in her face every day—that little line between her eyes had virtually disappeared.
She dropped her hands and said more seriously, “But can you still apply somewhere else? You got in so easily—maybe you didn’t reach high enough. The Ivies—”
I cut her off. “Too late. I’m committed now—early decision, remember?—and it’s good news, so don’t harsh my buzz.” I slipped my feet into flip-flops, twisted my hair into a knot, threw on a sweatshirt, and was out the door before she could say anything else.
It was late afternoon on a weekday, and traffic was predictably hellish going over the hill into the Valley. I listened to music and tailgated every car in front of me. Not that it helped.
About halfway there, I got a call. Heather. My stomach tightened. It was the first time she’d called me since I’d told her about George. I’d texted her a bunch of times, asking her if we could please just talk, but she never responded. I kept trying; she had a right to be mad at me, and I had a right not to give up on our friendship.
But now she was breaking the silence. She must have heard from Elton.
I hoped she was calling to say, “Hey, since we’re going to be going to school together, let’s make up!”
Please let it be that.
I hit the car’s Bluetooth speaker and said hello. I heard weeping on the other end, then finally some broken words. “You got in, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
Crap. “Yeah. You?” But I already knew the answer.
“I listened to you!” she sobbed. “I listened to you and you told me I’d get in and I could have applied somewhere better for me. I didn’t even want to go to Elton—I let you talk me into it—”
“Then maybe it’s not so bad,” I said, torn between irritation and remorse. “You’ll get in somewhere you like better.”
“You’ve been a bad friend to me.” She hung up.
I reached George’s apartment about fifteen minutes later. When he opened his door in response to my knock, I said, “I got in,” and burst into tears.
He pulled me inside, shut the door, then sat down with me on the sofa while I told him about Heather. “She’s so unhappy. And it’s all my fault. I’ve ruined her life in every possible way. What do I do now?”
He gently brushed his knuckles against the tears on my cheeks. “Don’t panic. She’ll be okay.”
“You were right. You said she wouldn’t get in just because I wanted her to, that I should stop pushing her to apply there.”
He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t the I told you so type but we both knew it was true.
“I’ve lost my best friend. I had already hurt her and now she hates me even more.”
“You didn’t lose her. She loves you and she knows you love her. Just give her some time to recover.”
We sat like that for a while, my legs across his lap, my head on his chest. Just being with him made me feel better. I inhaled the salty-sweet scent of his neck (no cologne, just him, thankfully) and felt better. I wished I hadn’t had to hurt Heather to end up here, inside George’s neck, but I didn’t regret the outcome.
But then . . . I sat up suddenly and moved away from him. “You don’t seem all that happy for me,” I said accusingly. “About Elton, I mean.”
; “I am,” he protested. “It’s great news. I’m not surprised but I’m happy for you.”
“Then why don’t you sound happy?”
He looked down at his hands. “Connecticut just seems very far away, that’s all.”
“Oh,” I breathed, suddenly understanding. I threw myself on him and pinned him against the sofa. “That’s a very good reason for you not to seem happy.” I straddled him, then leaned forward and dropped my head until my lips met his.
A day or two later, George showed me a list he’d made of schools that he thought Heather would like and could get into. “She said her college counselor wasn’t very good and had hundreds of kids to oversee, and her mother didn’t strike me as a clear thinker, so I went ahead and did some research. I could email her this. Do you think she’d be okay with that?”
“Print it up,” I said. “I’ll take it to her.”
“Really? You think it’ll be okay if you just show up?”
“I’m hoping that if we’re face-to-face, I’ll be able to convince her to forgive me.”
When I got there, her mother answered the door and said stiffly, “Oh, Ellie. What are you doing here?” Our last exchange had been when she asked me to stop calling Heather’s cell, so it was pretty awkward.
I asked to see Heather, and Mrs. Smith called out, “Heather? Come to the door, please.”
Heather came down the stairs and stopped short at the sight of me.
Her mother said, “You didn’t tell me you were expecting Ellie,” and Heather said in a faint voice, “I wasn’t.”
I slipped past Mrs. Smith—who hadn’t invited me in—and went right to Heather. I said, “Can I talk to you for just like five minutes? Please?” and she hesitated but then said a reluctant okay—she was incapable of being cruel—and led me up to her room.
Once the door was closed, I said in one breath, “I misled you and I also hurt you. I’m sorry in every possible way. I love you and I need you in my life. Can you ever forgive me?”
It was Heather. That’s the thing. Maybe someone else would have made me suffer a lot longer. But that wasn’t who she was. She was made to like people and I was her best friend. So she burst into tears and we threw our arms around each other and hugged for a while and I apologized about fifty more times, and pretty soon she was telling me it wasn’t my fault, that she understood, that she had made her own decision about applying and she knew it, and pretty soon after that, she was chattering away again, confiding in me about school and friends and her parents, just like always. Or almost like always—neither of us mentioned George, which meant things weren’t entirely normal between us. He was such a big part of my life now that I had to keep editing things I wanted to tell her. But the important thing was that we were friends again.