F*ck Love
Page 54He grabs my wrist and pulls me out of the traffic.
“Don’t be rude to the middle-agers,” he says. “They didn’t even have microwaves when they were young, and that’s really, really sad.”
“Look, that’s not my fault,” I say, pointedly. “We lived without iPhone 6+. Sometimes life is hard.”
He grabs my shoulders and shakes me. “Stop making jokes. I’m trying to be serious.”
“Mmkay.” I rub my temples and squint up at the ceiling lights. Anything to not look at him. The hypocrite.
“Helena, I know you hate this stuff, but just bear with me for a minute. You rushed here with that small bag five months ago. You came to be with us when we needed you, and you took care of my little girl. There’s no one I’d trust her with more than you. I’ll never forget that.”
I clear my throat. “You’re welcome,” I say, shuffling my feet.
“I haven’t said thank you yet,” Kit says.
“And you don’t need to,” I rush. “I really should get going.” I grab my bag and head for the end of the line, but Kit grabs my wrist and pulls me back. I have a Ginger Rogers moment where I am suddenly full of grace and flair, and then I land against his chest with an Ooomph.
I board my plane, squeezing through the center aisle to get to my seat. I’ve never felt like this before. Usually I swallow my feelings, deal with them in the privacy of my own mind. I just gave up five months of my life to help someone who said I wasn’t as pretty as she was. What the fuck was that? I scoot into my seat, which is in the very back of the plane, and take a selfie. All of my selfies look shocked, sad, confused, or insanely happy. This is the very first angry selfie. It sits right next to FUCK LOVE. So, I call it FUCK BEST FRIENDS. At this rate I won’t believe in anything by the end of the year. Except maybe Greer, who is waiting for me at the airport, wearing a purple tutu and holding a unicorn balloon.
I hug her so tightly she yelps, then I take my balloon and plan out my future.
Fuck love, fuck Florida, Fuck Kit Isley and his prettier-than-me girlfriend.
Greer doesn’t like Della. She tells me this as we stand on the top deck of the ferry, drinking apple juice from paper cups and watching the sun set in shades of pinks and purples.
“How dare she,” she says. “Why is he with someone like that?” Greer sounds genuinely bitter. She’s spitting out one-liners aimed at Kit and Della, and it’s almost making me smile.
“You’ve never met her,” I point out. “She’s not all bad.”
“Oh sure,” she says. “But how many girls have we met just like her? They’re everywhere. They make reality shows about them now.”
“True,” I say. “But she was my best friend. I didn’t see her that way.”
“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?” I try to keep the offense out of my voice, but Greer knows me too well. She kneads my neck like she can rub away the insult.
“Had … had a blind soul. It’s waking up—to art, people … men.”
“Yeah? It’s kind of painful,” I say. “Like being dropped into ice water.”
“That’s the nature of the truth, though. What’s fun about being dropped into ice water? That’s why half the world walks around wearing rose-colored glasses, watching comedies and reading romance books.”
I look at her out of the corner of my eye. I like comedies and romance.
“If you’re such a realist, why do you dress the way you do?” I ask her. “You dress like a fairy, wearing the same color every day.”
“I dress the way I want the world to look. I’m living out my fantasy visually. But I’m not sheltering myself mentally.”
I always sulk for a few minutes after she makes sense. It’s not fair that she’s so pretty and so wise. And if I were dressing the way I wanted the world to look, it would be a beige bitch world. I’m wearing a tan hoodie because I suck, and because my soul is visually impaired.
“Who?” I ask. The wind is whipping her hair around. Strands of gray keep getting stuck to her purple lips. She reaches up to pull them away with lavender nails. I back up slowly as she speaks, trying to be inconspicuous.
“The people who blind themselves to the truth. They’re just trying to survive.”
I’m distracted for a minute, my finger suspended over the camera button on my phone. “Who wants to survive without truth?”
Greer shrugs, and her shirt slips off her slender shoulder. Perfect. “Maybe people who have had too much of it. Or people who have had too little. Or people who are too shallow to appreciate its hard edges.”
I take the picture, then lower my phone to look at her. Greer is the truth. Right now, she’s the truth to me. The one person who cares enough to let me know that I still have on my blindfold. If I were one of the three, I’d be the shallow one. My life hasn’t been an extreme of any kind. My childhood typically dysfunctional, but typically functional. I’ve been so very underexposed that I turned into a beige bitch. What happened to pink? In third grade, I liked pink.