Page 26

26

KIT

O vernight, I’ve gone from a life that was perhaps too full to one that’s entirely empty.

I’m unemployed. I’m no longer Blake’s girlfriend, nor am I Miller’s dirty secret. Although I guess, technically, he was the dirty secret, not me.

I spend a lot of time with Maren—Harvey is out of town for work right now, and she’s going to need to figure things out before she tells him. My mother is also around—surprising no one, she is rooting for Maren to find her soul mate and take life by the horns . This is one of the phases my mother loves: that moment in the story when all is lost. She enjoys being the plucky victim and having everyone tell her she deserves more. She’s enjoying it vicariously through Maren now, and while Maren isn’t entirely buying into my mother’s I am woman, hear me roar glee, she’s definitely in her optimistic phase: the quiet smile, the dreamy, infatuated thing in her eyes.

“Miller looked really good, didn’t he?” my mom asks us. “If I were ten years younger, let me tell you…”

“Let’s be honest, Mom,” I say with a sigh. “His age isn’t what’s stopping you.”

She laughs. “It sure wouldn’t in his case. At least for one thing.”

“Mom,” Maren and I say in unison. “ Ewww .”

And then Maren turns wistful while my entire heart seems to sink into my stomach like a dead weight. I miss him so much that I’m sick with it, and she’s convincing herself a little more every day that they were meant to be.

When I’m not with Maren, I’m talking to various people in the administration at UVA. I’ve had two very long conversations with advisors, establishing again and again the chain of events. If I can convince them I didn’t simply melt down from academic stress, I’ll then have to retake the exams. I unearth my old notes and try to study to take my mind off things, but it doesn’t quite work.

I miss Miller so much that it’s all I can do at night not to text him, that when I wake up in the darkness, there’s always a moment when I assume breaking up with him was a bad dream, and if I scoot backward an inch I’ll find him there, warm and solid and entirely mine.

The weirdest thing is that during all these nights…I don’t dream about Rob once.

* * *

“You sound sad,” my father says when we talk. “What’s this about?”

“Nothing,” I reply. “You know I hate New York in the winter. It’s just depressing here.”

“Your mother says you look too thin.”

“ My mother said I look too thin?”

He sighs. “No, actually she said she was jealous of how thin you’d gotten, which tells me you’re too thin. Why aren’t you eating? You’re not working for me anymore…hasn’t this made all your wildest dreams come true?”

I want to weep. I’m going to weep. Fuck .

“I’m really not in the mood for sarcasm, Dad.” I hang up before he hears me cry.

Dad

Kitty Cat, that wasn’t sarcasm. You’re not happy and it’s obvious, and I just want to know why.

I don’t answer him because what good could it do? Telling him the truth is guaranteed to only make things worse.

I go to Maren’s house the next day. She tries to make me a green juice and asks what’s wrong. My mother comes around and asks what diet I’m doing because she wants to do it too.

I don’t know how much longer I can keep pretending.

I’m pretending that I’m not miserable when I am, I’m pretending that I want to be in New York when I don’t, I’m pretending I don’t know what I want from life when I know exactly what I want from life—it’s just off-limits.

I spend a lot of time thinking about that fucking hair tie. She feels like a threat, the girl who left it behind. Was she the fallback he’s already returned to? Every time I picture it on his nightstand, then picture it missing…panic seizes my chest, as if it represents a ticking clock, the limited time I’ve got to tell Miller I was wrong when I can’t tell him I was wrong. Ever.

I meet Maren for lunch at the week’s end. Something has changed in her: she’s no longer fretting but she’s no longer hopeful either. “What’s up?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says with a forced smile. “I just think it’s going to be harder to leave than I thought. He’s going to be such an asshole.”

She’s not wrong, but… “You knew that from the start. What changed?”

She runs a finger over her lower lip. “I know it will sound ridiculous because I shouldn’t be letting my crush on someone be the determining factor in deciding whether I leave my husband, and it really isn’t, but hoping something might work out with Miller was like...the teaspoon of sugar I was taking with my medicine. A life raft. Something to feel optimistic about.”

I swallow. “Yeah, it’s probably best not to conflate the two things.”

“You know me. I start daydreaming and half the time I convince myself the thing has actually happened. It was nuts.”

Does that mean she realizes she’s not in love with him? Does that mean it would ever be okay for him to move on with me? “So you’re letting that whole thing go?” I ask.

She sighs. “I’m not sure I had a choice anyway. Miller’s seeing someone.”

My breath holds. “Cecelia Love?” I ask, and my breath is still holding while I wait, praying the ax isn’t about to fall.

She shakes her head. “Some astronomy professor who was in Germany for a few months but has been flying back and forth. I guess she’s coming home at the end of April.”

My eyes fall closed as I picture him saying he’d just arrived from a meeting in Germany. Pointing out constellations that no longer exist. Obviously she was the source.

Maybe it was all in my head, how good it seemed with us. The way it was so easy to picture our lives continuing on together and how certain I was that he was thinking the same things. Maybe I’ve been just as good at fooling myself as Maren is. But hearing this now confirms one thing: I was only surviving this because I wasn’t allowing myself to picture him with someone else.

And now I can’t picture him any other way.

After lunch, I walk. It’s technically spring now, but the wind is blowing, and the sky is a deep charcoal gray, warning of the snowfall expected tonight.

Is she here this weekend? Is she being pleasant and non-argumentative and making him realize what a bullet he dodged with me?

I am not the easiest person to love under even the best of circumstances. Eventually, he would have realized he’d be better off with someone sweet like Maren, someone less prickly, but I hope there’s some part of her he wishes was slightly more Kit-like.

It’s the exact sort of selfishness that makes him well rid of me.

The snow starts to fall and I stare upward, letting the flakes wash over my face. I wish it could’ve all been different. I wish I could figure out how to be happy without him.

I don’t think I can.