Page 80 of The Way I Used to Be

She throws her arms up and walks away, muttering to herself, “I can’t take it anymore. I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Fine,” I call after her, tossing my book down against the desk. “I’ll go out there even though it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of!”

By the time I shovel to the bottom of the driveway, the cold has infiltrated my core, but it’s invigorating somehow. I look out, squinting my eyes so that my vision blurs beyond the identical houses and cars and streets and trees, until I am the center of this frozen nowhere suburb-scape.

I refocus my eyes and turn around to look at the house. At the rate the snow is falling, it looks like I never even started shoveling. The cars are still blocked in, and my extremities now feel like they are about to fall off. And somehow, this satisfies Vanessa. “Thank you,” she says when I come inside with icicles dripping from my eyelashes.

“It doesn’t even look like I did anything.”

“That’s really not the point, is it?” She smiles, licks her index finger, and turns the page of her magazine.

“Isn’t it?” I ask, hanging my coat up on the hook by the door.

“Isn’t what?” she says absently.

“The point,” I reply, “of shoveling?”

“Oh. Well...” She places her finger on a word and looks up from the magazine, stares into space for a moment, squinting her eyes like she’s thinking of something to say to me. I stand there, in actual suspense, waiting. But then her eyes refocus on the dingy wallpaper, and she swats her hands in front of her face, like she’s shooing some annoying insect. She goes back to her magazine, never finishing.

I send myself to my room, lock myself in, crack the window, and light a cigarette. I’ve never smoked in my house before. I was always afraid they would smell it and they would be disappointed in me yet again. Nobody was noticing anything, though. She couldn’t even be bothered to finish a sentence.

After dinner Vanessa knocks on my door, asks if I want to help decorate the tree. I don’t answer. I close my eyes and cover my ears and will her to just please walk away. She doesn’t ask a second time.

As I sit on my bedroom floor smoking cigarettes—listening to the sound of the TV under my door, and the rustling of Christmas ornaments being unwrapped and unpacked—I have this intense longing to call Mara. To make up with her, and just say whatever words I need to say to put things back in place. But I know the only way to do that is to apologize to Steve first. I shake my head as I reluctantly dial his number.

It only rings once before he picks up.

“Steve, hey. It’s Eden.”

“I know” is all he says.

I pause, consider hanging up.

“Look, I’m sorry about the party,” I finally tell him.

Silence.

“Sorry if I was jerk,” I try. “I was messed up. Sorry.”

Finally he sighs into the phone. “It’s okay. You know, I get it.”

“Thanks, Steve. Well, I’ll talk to you—”

“So, what’s goin’ on?” he interrupts before I can say good-bye. “I mean, what’ve you been up to—all this crazy snow?” he asks awkwardly.

He wants to keep me on the phone.

“Not much,” I answer, suddenly realizing I kind of want to be kept on the phone.

“Yeah, me neither.”

Silence.

“Well, what are you doing now?” I ask him.

I RING THE DOORBELLat Steve’s house. I don’t know yet what it is I really want from him. I only know that I couldn’t stand to be in my house another minute.

“Hey!” He answers the door with that warm, shy smile that never fails to make me feel bad for not being nicer to him. I look at him and wish, for just a second, that I could be the kind of girl who could like him, really like him. Sometimes I wonder how hard it would be to pretend. “Come in, come in,” he tells me.