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Crap. “Yeah. You?” But I already knew the answer.
“I listened to you!” she sobbed. “I listened to you and you told me I’d get in and I could have applied somewhere better for me. I didn’t even want to go to Elton—I let you talk me into it—”
“Then maybe it’s not so bad,” I said, torn between irritation and remorse. “You’ll get in somewhere you like better.”
“You’ve been a bad friend to me.” She hung up.
I reached George’s apartment about fifteen minutes later. When he opened his door in response to my knock, I said, “I got in,” and burst into tears.
He pulled me inside, shut the door, then sat down with me on the sofa while I told him about Heather. “She’s so unhappy. And it’s all my fault. I’ve ruined her life in every possible way. What do I do now?”
He gently brushed his knuckles against the tears on my cheeks. “Don’t panic. She’ll be okay.”
“You were right. You said she wouldn’t get in just because I wanted her to, that I should stop pushing her to apply there.”
He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t the I told you so type but we both knew it was true.
“I’ve lost my best friend. I had already hurt her and now she hates me even more.”
“You didn’t lose her. She loves you and she knows you love her. Just give her some time to recover.”
We sat like that for a while, my legs across his lap, my head on his chest. Just being with him made me feel better. I inhaled the salty-sweet scent of his neck (no cologne, just him, thankfully) and felt better. I wished I hadn’t had to hurt Heather to end up here, inside George’s neck, but I didn’t regret the outcome.
But then . . . I sat up suddenly and moved away from him. “You don’t seem all that happy for me,” I said accusingly. “About Elton, I mean.”
“I am,” he protested. “It’s great news. I’m not surprised but I’m happy for you.”
“Then why don’t you sound happy?”
He looked down at his hands. “Co
“Oh,” I breathed, suddenly understanding. I threw myself on him and pi
A day or two later, George showed me a list he’d made of schools that he thought Heather would like and could get into. “She said her college counselor wasn’t very good and had hundreds of kids to oversee, and her mother didn’t strike me as a clear thinker, so I went ahead and did some research. I could email her this. Do you think she’d be okay with that?”
“Print it up,” I said. “I’ll take it to her.”
“Really? You think it’ll be okay if you just show up?”
“I’m hoping that if we’re face-to-face, I’ll be able to convince her to forgive me.”
When I got there, her mother answered the door and said stiffly, “Oh, Ellie. What are you doing here?” Our last exchange had been when she asked me to stop calling Heather’s cell, so it was pretty awkward.
I asked to see Heather, and Mrs. Smith called out, “Heather? Come to the door, please.”
Heather came down the stairs and stopped short at the sight of me.
Her mother said, “You didn’t tell me you were expecting Ellie,” and Heather said in a faint voice, “I wasn’t.”
I slipped past Mrs. Smith—who hadn’t invited me in—and went right to Heather. I said, “Can I talk to you for just like five minutes? Please?” and she hesitated but then said a reluctant okay—she was incapable of being cruel—and led me up to her room.
Once the door was closed, I said in one breath, “I misled you and I also hurt you. I’m sorry in every possible way. I love you and I need you in my life. Can you ever forgive me?”
It was Heather. That’s the thing. Maybe someone else would have made me suffer a lot longer. But that wasn’t who she was. She was made to like people and I was her best friend. So she burst into tears and we threw our arms around each other and hugged for a while and I apologized about fifty more times, and pretty soon she was telling me it wasn’t my fault, that she understood, that she had made her own decision about applying and she knew it, and pretty soon after that, she was chattering away again, confiding in me about school and friends and her parents, just like always. Or almost like always—neither of us mentioned George, which meant things weren’t entirely normal between us. He was such a big part of my life now that I had to keep editing things I wanted to tell her. But the important thing was that we were friends again.
Later—after we’d left the house and gone out for cupcakes and more tears and hugs—we came back and looked up the colleges on George’s list. One was less than two hours from where I’d be in Co
“I’m over Elton anyway,” Heather said, leaning back against her headboard—we had curled up on her bed with the laptop. “If all the kids are like you, they’d be smarter than me and I’d just feel stupid for four more years. Anyway . . . it was always more your choice than mine.”
I couldn’t argue with any of that. And didn’t.
thirty-eight
Over the next few weeks, Aaron and Michael moved out of the hotel and into a huge and beautiful penthouse apartment in Santa Monica with a view of the ocean. Crystal kept the house. She and Michael were working out some kind of joint custody agreement, which for now mostly involved Megan’s carting the baby back and forth and having to take care of her in two different places. Crystal was going back to acting, Aaron said. He never saw her alone: one of the conditions of his getting to stay with his dad in LA was that he wouldn’t. He admitted to me that it was sort of a relief. He was over her.
Whatever Crystal felt about the whole thing remained a mystery: she was completely out of our lives. Mom and I did spend time with Mia when she was at Michael’s, though. She was still the world’s cutest baby, as far as I was concerned.
Aria
Right before Christmas, we finished collecting donations for the Holiday-Giving Program and handed out the presents at the a
Luke wasn’t able to come to the party, but even if some people came hoping to see him (thanks to Aria
As we were cleaning up at the end, Ben told me, a little uncomfortably, that he thought we should make Aria
And I’d be at college. She couldn’t bug me there.