Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [101]
“I was fine on my own and I learned to be proud of it,” she said. “But I forget sometimes how lonely it was. Even now, this awful lonely feeling comes over me. Like no one knows me. That I’m unknowable. I live my life constantly preparing for that moment when a person I love will look at me and realize I’m a stranger.”
She propped herself up on her elbow.
“It’s like I prepare myself to be disappointed, or to be misunderstood. That’s what worked about Michael and me. He made me feel safe, because he never looked that deep. If that makes sense.”
I told her it made sense.
After a long pause I said, “Zoë, I think I’m in love with Eli.”
It was the first time I’d heard her laugh in weeks. “Really,” she said.
She was less entertained when I explained he was not only attracted to me but had acted on the feeling.
“You think you’re attracted to him,” she repeated sarcastically when I’d confessed everything. “So that’s why he moved out.”
“It was only the one night.”
“Has he told Jillian?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
I begged her not to hate me.
“Why would I hate you?”
“Jillian is such a good friend. I guess I felt like betraying her was betraying you.”
“So you made a mistake. You made it right. He moved out, anyway. And you haven’t seen him since? Then it’s up to him to make things right with Jillian. That’s not your responsibility.
“I like Jillian,” she added. “Her various neuroses aside. But she’s not like you—we never had what you and I have.” She looped her arm through mine as she said this, an unselfconscious, automatic gesture. I realized Eli had been right about our friendship: She would never have hurt me wittingly.
“Eli,” she mused. “I would never have thought Eli your type.”
“Do I have a type?” I asked, more worried than curious. I was picturing youth pastors with crew cuts, who carried Palm Pilots on their belts and listened to early nineties’ Christian rock.
“I suppose saying a person has a type flattens them unfairly.”
Her own statement struck her as important. She was wired enough to elaborate, to take a little mental trip away from thinking another second about how to survive without her mother. She talked until I couldn’t stay awake, her voice even and analytical, her open eyes fixed on a thought she was determined to articulate. Something about her and Michael, about the fundamental flaw of their relationship, about the impossibility of loving someone wholly and sincerely.
“You should write a book,” I murmured.
“Based on the life of Zoë Walker?” she asked.
“I hear memoirs are all the rage.”
“All right.” She rolled over on her side. “But just remember you said that when you show up on page five.”
The next afternoon Zoë packed me a Zoë lunch: hummus and cucumber on rye with two organic Jonathan apples and a bag of dried pineapples. In the driveway she kissed my cheek good-bye. She made me promise to write at least once a day.
I hated leaving her in that house. As I drove home, the burden of unfinished work compounded the depression I’d felt since arriving in Chicago. Final grades were due Monday, and I hadn’t even made it through half the essays I had to mark. At this point, it was hard to care. In light of the past week’s events, very little I’d ever worried about seemed that important.
I tried to pray, but even the simplest prayer was impossible. Talking with Ashley about her sister’s death and then living two days beside Zoë’s grief had made me acutely aware of God in a way I’d never experienced before. This was a God silent and terrifyingly other, the unknowable force that knelt down to blow the dust in motion and then ascended back to His throne to watch the drama, the universe like a top set to the ground spinning. Particles blowing apart and cleaving, birthing suns, stitching babies, sprouting cancers. It was chance, the one missing gene; chance, the single cell that decided to stage a coup.
The impact of the accident woke