Page 13 of The Way I Am Now
“God, I’m starving,” Mara says, trying to break the awkwardness. “I hope it’s not packed.”
No one responds.
Cameron and Mara exchange a look, and then Cameron adds, “Dude, that second set was sick, wasn’t it?”
Nothing.
We pass through two traffic lights, and he’s still pouting, fuming, acting like I did something wrong.
“Will you say something?” I finally ask.
Steve turns to me now, looking at me for the first time. “You can’t just disappear like that.”
But I am, I think. I’m disappearing all the time. I’m disappearing right now. That’s all I ever do when I’m with you. But what I say is: “I didn’t disappear. I had to get out of there, and I told you that.”
He shakes his head like I’m not making sense.
“What?” I demand.
His eyes flick up to the front seat, and then he turns toward me, inching closer. “Did you plan to meet up with him tonight?”
“You’re actually asking me that?” I say, more than loud enough for them to hear too.
“Well, you can’t blame me if that all felt just a little familiar,” he says, still talking low, as if he doesn’t want to embarrassmein front of our friends.
It takes me a second to rewind all my sins of the past couple of years until I land on the memory he must be referencing. “Oh, so you wanna go there? Okay, let’s.”
That night is fuzzy, but I remember the highlights: We were at a dorm party, me, Mara, Cameron, and Steve. Mara had been pressuring me to give Steve a chance. But his sweetness as he talked to me in the crowded hall grew increasingly offensive the more I drank. Like he still thought I was the innocent little band geek he was friends with freshman year. And so I sent him off to get me another drink and hooked up with the first guy who looked at me. Until my brother showed up for some reason—those details are lost—and we had a screaming match in front of everyone. I was exceedingly drunk and terribly mean to everyone, I am told. When I relayed the story to my therapist, she said this sounded like my rock bottom. I can only hope that’s true.
“Edy?” Mara says from the front seat. “I’m sure he didn’t mean it like that. Right, Steve?”
I ignore her because he definitely meant it like that. “You do realize we weren’t even together when that happened, right?”
“Fine, never mind.” He grabs my hand. I snatch it away. “Forget I said anything.”
“Tonight, which is what we’reactuallytalking about,” I say, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “Josh saw me running out, and he came after me to see if I was okay.”
“You told me not to come,” he argues. “You said you were okay!”
“Obviously I wasn’t okay.” How does Josh know I’m not okay, but Steve—the one I see all the time, the one I’m supposedly in a relationship with—doesn’t? “You know that I’m having these anxiety attacks, which make me feel like I’m actually fucking dying, by the way, and that I wasn’t going to be able to make it through that fucking concert. And you pressured me to go anyway, and now you—”
He starts laughing but not in a ha-ha-funny way; in an angry, I-have-the-moral-high-ground way that makes me want to open the door and jump out of the moving vehicle just to not be sitting next to him anymore.
“What’s so funny?”
“You still didn’t answer the question.”
“And I’m not going to!”
“Guys!” Mara shouts. “I’m trying to drive, and you’re giving me middle-school flashbacks of my parents’ pre-divorce fighting.”
“Yeah, can you take it a little easy there?” Cameron says, and I’m about to argue with him until I realize he’s talking to Steve— for once not blaming everything on me.
The car is silent until we tumble into the parking lot over the potholes that threaten to tear Mara’s old brown Buick apart. She pulls into a free spot and slams the car into park, then turns around and says, “We’re going in and getting a table. You two can stay out here and fight or fuck or whatever you need to do. Either way, I’m going to order a banana split. Lock the car up when you’re done.” She tosses the keys onto the back seat, and they go in, leaving us here.
“So, I guess we’re fighting,” Steve says as if he didn’t start it.
“Well, we’re not doing the other thing.”
