Claire, the biggest gossip hound in Manhattan, had added me to her inside scoop. So I added her to my ever-growing list of enemies—of people who would be sorry to have crossed me.
seventeen
For the next few days I cranked up.
“I Will Survive,” Ace of Base’s “I Saw the Sign,” and other inspiring songs as I racked my brain, trying to come up with a plan, a way to escape the shame of so much rejection. I needed a fresh start, a change of venue, a new cast of characters. I scoured my list of contacts in the city, but everyone was somehow linked to Dex or to Claire or to my firm. I seemed to be without options. And then, just as true despair set in, a call from Indianapolis showed up on my caller ID. It was Annalise, my last girlfriend standing.
“Hi, Annalise!” I answered, feeling guilty for all the times in the past that I had dismissed her as boring, neglected to call her back, even scoffed at her suburban, kindergarten-teaching existence. I felt especially bad for not meeting her new baby, Hannah, when I was back in Indy.
“I’m so glad you called!” I told her. “How are you? How is Hannah?”
I listened patiently as Annalise gushed about her baby and complained about the lack of sleep. Then she asked how I was doing, her tone implying that she already knew my tale of woe. Just in case she was missing some details, I filled her in on everything. “My life is falling apart, and I don’t know what to do,” I cried into the phone.
“Oh, wow, Darce,” Annalise said in her heavy Midwestern accent. “I don’t know what to say. I’m just… really worried about you.”
“Well, you
should
be worried,” I said. “I’m at the absolute end of my rope. And this is all Rachel’s fault, you know.”
I was yearning for one derogatory comment about Rachel, her other best friend. Just a tiny dig would have felt like a cooling salve. But Annalise was not one to be mean, so she only made a concerned clucking noise into the phone and then said, “Can’t you and Rach just try to work things out? This is just too sad.”
“Hell no!”
Annalise made another remark about forgiveness, one of those annoying religious comments that had become her trademark after marrying Greg, a Bible beater from Kentucky.
“Never,” I said. “I’ll never forgive her.”
Annalise sighed as Hannah Jane fussed in the background, making an annoying, and escalating,
ehh, ehhh, ehhhhhh
sound that wasn’t exactly igniting my mothering instinct.
“So, anyway, I just think I need a change of scenery, you know? I thought about the Peace Corps or some outdoorsy type of adventure, but that’s not really my scene. I like my creature comforts. Especially now that I’m pregnant…”
That’s when Annalise suggested that I return home for a few months, live with my parents, and have the baby in Indianapolis. “It’d be so fun to have you here,” she said. “I’m in this amazing playgroup at church. You’d love it. It might be really grounding for you.”
“I don’t need to be grounded. I need the opposite. I need an
escape
. Besides, I can’t go back to Indy. It just feels like such a downgrade. You know, like I’m selling out, settling, cashing in my chips, admitting defeat.”
“Okay!” Annalise giggled good-naturedly. “I get the picture. We know we’re small potatoes, don’t we, Hannah?”
Hannah howled in response.
“You know what I mean. You like it there, and that’s great for you. But I’m just not a small-town kind of girl…”
“You’re far from small-town,” Annalise said.
“And besides, I’m not speaking to my mother,” I said, explaining what a bitch she had been upon hearing my news.
“Why don’t you go to London and stay with Ethan?” she said, referring to Ethan Ainsley, our high school friend who was in London, writing some book.
The second she said it, I knew it was the answer. It was so obvious, I marveled that I hadn’t thought of it first. I would sublease my apartment and head off to jolly ol’ England.
“Annalise, that’s a marvelous idea,” I said, imagining everyone catching wind of my transatlantic move. Claire, who fancied herself such a world traveler, would eat her heart out. Marcus, who had yet to call and check on me, would be filled with guilt and second-guessing when he discovered that his baby was going to be born thousands of miles away. Rachel, who had always been closer to Ethan than I, would be jealous of my intense bonding with her dear childhood pal. Dex would wonder how he could have ever let such an independent, adventurous, gutsy woman go.
It was an idea whose time had come. I only had to convince Ethan to let me stay with him.
I had known Ethan since the fourth grade, when he moved to our town in the middle of the school year. There was always a flurry of intrigue when a new kid arrived, with everyone excited at the thought of fresh blood. I remembered Ethan’s first day well. I could still see our teacher, Mrs. Billone, resting her hand on his scrawny shoulder and announcing, “This is Ethan Ainsley. He comes to us from Long Island. Please join me in welcoming him.”
As we all muttered, “Welcome, Ethan,” I found myself wondering where this island of his was located—in the Atlantic or Pacific?—and how a boy from the tropics could have such fair skin and light hair. I pictured Ethan running around half-naked, shimmying up trees to collect coconuts for all of his meals. Had he been rescued by a search team? Sent to foster parents in Indiana? Perhaps this was his first day in proper clothes. I suspected that it was torture for him to feel so restricted.
At recess that day, Ethan sat alone on the curb near the monkey bars, writing in the dirt with a twig as we all cast curious glances his way. Everyone else was too shy to talk to him, but I summoned Rachel and Annalise and the three of us approached him. “Hi, Ethan. I’m Darcy. This is Rachel, and this is Annalise,” I said boldly, pointing to my timid sidekicks.
“Hi,” Ethan said, squinting up at us over his oversized, round glasses.
“So how far away is your homeland?” I asked him, cutting right to the chase. I wanted the full scoop on his exotic childhood.
“New York is about eight hundred miles from here.” He enunciated every word, making him sound very smart. It wasn’t the voice I expected from a native islander.
“New York?” I was confused. “But Mrs. Billone said you’re from an island?”
He and Rachel exchanged an amused glance—their first of many superior moments.
“What’s so funny?” I asked indignantly. “She did so say you’re from an island. Didn’t she, Annalise?”
Annalise nodded somberly.
”
Long
Island,” Ethan and Rachel said in unison, with matching smirks.
So it was a
long
island as opposed to a short one? That didn’t clear anything up.
“Long Island is part of New York,” Rachel said in her know-it-all voice.
“Oh. Yeah. Right. I knew that. I just didn’t hear her say
long
,” I lied. “Did you, Annalise?”
“No,” Annalise said, “I didn’t hear that part either.”
Annalise never made you feel dumb. It was one of her best qualities. That and the fact that she was always willing to share anything. In fact, I was wearing her pale pink Jellies on that very day.
“Long Island is the eastern part of New York State,” Ethan continued. His condescending tutorial made it clear that he didn’t believe me about not hearing the word
long.
That really got my fur up, and I instantly regretted any attempt to be nice to the new kid.
“So why’d you move here?” I asked abruptly, thinking that he should have stayed back on his faux island.
He reported that his parents had just divorced, and that his mother, originally from Indiana, moved back to be closer to her parents, his grandparents. It was hardly a glamorous tale. Annalise, whose own parents were divorced, asked him if his father still lived in New York.
“Yes. He does,” Ethan said, his eyes returning to his dirt doodling. “I’ll see him on alternating holidays and during the summers.”
I would have felt sorry for him—divorce seemed just about the worst thing that could happen to a kid—right up there with having to wear a wig after leukemia radiation treatments. But it’s hard to feel sorry for someone who makes you feel stupid for not knowing some insignificant geographical fact.
Rachel changed the subject from divorce and asked Ethan questions about New York, as if it were her idea to talk to him in the first place. The two rattled on about the Empire State Building and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the World Trade Center, all places Ethan had visited and Rachel had read about.
“We have big buildings and museums in Indianapolis too,” I said defensively, pegging Ethan as one of those annoying people who always say, “Back where I come from.” Then I steered Annalise away from their big-shot conversation over to a game of four square.
After that day, I didn’t give Ethan much thought until he and Rachel were placed in the academically gifted program called “T.G.” for “talented and gifted” at the start of the following school year. I hated the T.G. program, hated the feeling of being excluded, of not making the cut. I couldn’t stand the smugness of the T.G.ers, and resented them with a burning in my chest every time they trotted merrily down the hall to their mystery room and then returned, buzzing about their dumb experiments—like constructing clay boats in an attempt to hold the maximum number of tacks. Incidentally, Ethan won that contest, engineering a vessel that held nineteen tacks before sinking. “Big deal,” I remember telling Rachel. “I stopped playing with Play-Doh and clay when I was four.” I always sought to burst her bubble, insisted that T.G. really stood for “totally geeky.” And just in case it looked like sour grapes, I reminded Rachel often that I had only missed the T.G. test score cutoff by one point and that was only because I had strep throat the day of the test and couldn’t concentrate on anything other than my inability to swallow. (The part about strep throat was the truth; the part about one point was probably not—although I never knew for sure how far I had missed the mark, because my mother had told me that it wasn’t important what my score was, that I didn’t need the T.G. program to be special.)
So in light of my irritation over Ethan’s superiority, it was surprising when he turned out to be my first real boyfriend. It was also surprising because Rachel had had a crush on him since the day he arrived, while I was firmly in the Doug Jackson camp. Doug was the most popular boy in our class, and I was sure that he and I were going to become a hot-and-heavy item, until he taped a picture of Heather Locklear to his Trapper Keeper, announcing that he preferred blondes to brunettes. The sentiment put me in a huff and I decided to look for another candidate, perhaps even a sixth-grader. Skinny, pale Ethan was the farthest thing from my mind.
But one day, as I watched him search the card catalogue for Peru, I suddenly saw in Ethan what Rachel was always carrying on about. He was pretty cute. So I waltzed over and bumped into him on purpose under the pretense of trying to find a card on Paraguay, one drawer over. He gave me a funny look, smiled, and flashed his dimples. I decided right then and there that I would like Ethan.
When I delivered the news to Rachel later that week, I assumed she’d be pleased, happy that I was finally agreeing with her and that we’d have one more thing in common. After all, best friends should agree on all topics, certainly ones as major as who to have a crush on. But Rachel was not happy at all. In fact, she was furious, becoming strangely territorial, like she
owned
Ethan. Annalise pointed out that she and I had shared our crush on Doug for months, but Rachel wasn’t persuaded. She just kept saying that Doug was somehow a different case, and she stayed huffy and self-righteous, muttering about how she had liked Ethan first.
That was true enough; she did like Ethan first. But the way I saw it was this—if she liked him so darn much, she should have done something about it. Taken some real action. And by action, I didn’t mean writing his initials in the condensation on her mother’s car window. But Rachel was never one for action. That was my department.
So a few days later, I wrote Ethan a note, asking if he wanted to go out with me, with instructions to check a box next to
yes, no,
or
maybe.
To be fair, I included Rachel’s name as a fourth option. But at the last minute, I tore off that part of the note, reasoning that she shouldn’t be the benefactor of my get-up-and-go. Besides, I didn’t want to lose to Rachel when she was already beating me in so many other arenas. She was in T.G. after all. So I passed the note, and Ethan said yes, and just like that we were a couple. We talked on the phone and flirted during recess and it was all a tingly thrill for a few weeks.
But then Doug changed his mind, announcing that he liked brunettes better than blondes after all. So I dumped Ethan and put myself back on the fifth-grade market. Luckily, our breakup coincided with Ethan’s Loch Ness Monster obsession; it was all he talked about for weeks, even planning a summer trip to Scotland or Switzerland or wherever the thing supposedly lived. So he had another focus and got over me relatively quickly. A short time later, Rachel got over Ethan too. She said she was no longer interested in boys, a convenient decision because she wasn’t exactly being pursued by any.
So we all forged our way into junior high and high school. Annalise, Ethan, Rachel, and I formed a little clique (although I ran in more popular circles too) and none of us ever mentioned the fifth-grade love-triangle saga again. After high school graduation, I continued to keep in touch with Ethan, but mostly I did so through Rachel. Those two stayed very close, particularly during his divorce. Ethan came to New York often during his crisis, so much so that I wondered if he and Rachel might get together. But Rachel insisted that there was nothing romantic between them.
“Do you think he could be gay?” I’d ask her, referencing his close female friendships, his sensitivity, and his love of classical music. She’d say that she was sure he was straight, simply explaining that they were strictly friends.
So as I dialed up Ethan in London, I worried that he’d turn me down out of loyalty to Rachel, a sense that he had to take her side. Annalise loved us both equally, but Ethan clearly favored Rachel. Sure enough, when he finally called me back more than a week later, after I had left him two phone messages and sent him a well-crafted, slightly desperate e-mail, his hello was tight and tentative.