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“I’m familiar with the feeling,” I say.
“Well, that’s been my whole life,” she says. “When I was a kid, everyone thought I was so cool because I knew all sorts of games they didn’t and I was willing to teach everyone.”
“I remember that,” I say. I might smile, but when I open my mouth too wide, my lip splits open again.
“Do you remember you taught me all of them?” she asks.
“I still don’t see how this has anything to do with you torpedoing my reputation with nearly everyone I know,” I tell her.
She lifts the front of her shirt to check her abdomen for bruises, but I focused most of my aggression on that stupid, perfect face of hers. I bet she regrets ever getting those piercings. They, or more accurately, the skin which held them didn’t fare so well. “I was tired of being that person,” she says. “Every time I’d come home after school upset, you’d comfort me and tell me what I needed to do to fix whatever the problem was.”
“I didn’t see it before, but you’re right. Man, I had it coming for being there for you all the time,” I snipe.
“We are the exact opposite, you and me,” she says. “When I have an opportunity, I latch onto it, usually tight enough that I kill it. At the end of the day, I come back here to my sister’s place that I can’t move out of because I’m a woman in her late twenties that can’t pay her bills. Do you know how humiliating that is?”
“Then move out,” I tell her. “I’ve never forced you to accept anything.”
“That’s just it, though,” she says. “You’re always the one with her head on straight. You’re always the reasonable one. Yeah, I’m the chick guys I went to school with still get all nervous around, but everything always works out for you. The problem is you never grab onto something until you can’t have it anymore.”
“So you spread all that about me because you thought I was squandering an opportunity?” I ask.
“It sounds pretty stupid when you say it out loud,” Naomi mutters. Now she’s holding her top lip up and pressing one finger of her other hand against one of her incisors, saying, “I think my tooth is loose.”
“Yeah, it sounds pretty stupid,” I echo.
Naomi closes her mouth and washes her hands. She looks at herself in the mirror and attempts a smile, though it quickly turns into a wince. “Well, after the cotton balls and the cream and the makeup, I’d say I look positively awful,” she says.
“You’re welcome,” I answer.
“You don’t look too hot yourself,” she says. “In fact, I think you got the worst of it.”
Looking at us both in the mirror, I tend to disagree. She landed a few good head shots, but her body game is pathetic the way it always was. I don’t have to check my chest or stomach to know I don’t have any bruises there.
“So you wanted to cause me to break up with Zach because I wasn’t doing a good enough job ‘accepting the opportunity’ to be with him?” I ask.
“How many times did you say you didn’t think it was going to work out?” she asks. “Even when I was staying with you two at the beach house, you were still holding back and looking for an excuse to call it quits.”
“That’s not true,” I say. “When I first went to New York, yeah, I thought it was just going to be a two-week thing that I’d tell my grandkids about—minus the naughty bits. After that first night in the beach house, though, I was all in for the long term. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I was willing to find out.”
“Uh huh,” she says. “When you got back here the last time, was there any part of you that thought you’d see Zach again?”
“It’s different,” I tell her. “I even went out to dinner with him after he got here to hear him out.”
“You didn’t, though, did you?” she asks. “Come on, El. It’s not like you don’t tell me this crap.”
“You weren’t there,” I tell her. “He started going off about—”
“—stuff he couldn’t have known unless he’d hired a private investigator or bribed someone or something,” she says, completing the thought. “I get it. The problem with that is he was about to tell you how he knew all that, and rather than trust him or even listen to what he had to say, you just left. You were never really in this relationship. At first, yeah, I maybe told a few people a few things because I just didn’t want you to have him.”
“How sweet,” I mock as I grab the bottle of hydrogen peroxide and unscrew the lid. Holding the bottle over my right hand, I pour slowly, the clear liquid foaming as it comes in contact with the tiny, bloodless cuts on my knuckles.
“After a while, though, you’ve got to admit I was doing you a favor,” she says. “You wanted a way out, and I gave you one.”
I protest, “I didn’t—”
“The first thing you said when we got home was you didn’t know how long you could stand being back home if you were still going to have to deal with the fallout of dating Zach,” she says.
“Yeah, thatyoucaused,” I fire back.