Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [102]
Each time she saw Eric’s remarkable face, each time he appeared at the door of her dorm room or came to meet her at Port Authority in New York, it all came back. The way he kissed her. The way he wore his pants, the way he stayed up all night getting her through her Spanish midterm.
But it became theoretical again after Eric told her about Mexico. He’d gotten a job as assistant director at their old camp in Baja.
“I’m leaving the day after classes end,” he’d told her on the phone in April.
There was no uncertainty in it, no question or lingering pause. There was nothing for her.
She clamped her hand harder around the phone, but she didn’t want to betray the chaotic feelings. She wasn’t good at being left. “When do you get back?” she asked.
“End of September. I’m going to stay for a month with my grandparents in Mulegé. My grandmother already started cooking.” His laugh was light and sweet. He acted as though she would be as pleased for him as he was. He didn’t fathom her darkness.
Sometimes you hung up the phone and felt the bruising of your heart. It hurt now and it would hurt more later. The conversation was too unsatisfying to continue and yet you couldn’t stand for it to end. Bridget wanted to throw the phone—and herself—against the wall.
She had somehow presumed her and Eric’s summer plans would unfold together in some way. She thought having a boyfriend meant you planned your future in harmony. Was it his certainty about her that made it so easy for him to leave, or was it indifference?
She went for a long run and talked herself down. It wasn’t like they were married or something. She shouldn’t feel hurt by it. She knew it wasn’t personal. The assistant director job was a windfall—it paid well and put him close to his faraway family.
She didn’t feel hurt, exactly, but in the days after he told her, she got that fitful forward-moving energy. She didn’t feel like hanging around missing him. If she hadn’t been caught by surprise, caught in a painful presumption, she probably wouldn’t have signed up for the dig in Turkey quite so fast.
Eric couldn’t expect her to sit around waiting for him. That was not something she could do. How long could she coast on having a boyfriend when that boyfriend planned to be away from May to late September? How long could they coast as a couple? She wasn’t a theoretical kind of person.
It was after the conversation about Mexico that she really started to wonder about these things. After that it seemed like for every guy she saw on her way to class, she had the feeling that her status as a girl with a boyfriend was something demanded of her rather than something she had very eagerly given.
Tibby glanced at the time on her register. There were four minutes left in her shift and at least twelve people in line.
She scanned in a pile of six movies for a prepubescent girl wearing sparkly silver eye shadow and a too-tight-looking choker. Were the girl’s eyes bulging or was Tibby imagining it?
“You’re gonna watch all these?” Tibby asked absently. It was Friday. Late fees kicked in on Monday. The girl’s gum smelled strongly of synthesized watermelon. As the girl swallowed, Tibby thought of fishermen’s pelicans, with the rings around their necks so they couldn’t gulp down their catch.
“’Cause I’m having a sleepover. There’ll be, like, seven of us. I mean, if Callie can come. And if she can’t, I shouldn’t be getting that one, because everybody else hates it.”
Were we like that? Tibby wondered while the girl went on to describe each of her friends’ specific movie requirements.
Now her shift was over by two minutes. Tibby cursed herself for having begun the conversation in the first place. She always forgot that catch-22 of question-asking.