Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [53]
I picture your spirit as a yellow, fluttering, buzzing, flying thing, and no matter how down you feel, it is in there. It is who you are.
Bridget’s anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and controlled it, whereas the sadness owned her.
It felt like a torrent so strong it could sweep her into the ocean, and not because she chose to go, but because she was powerless to resist it. Maybe that was what had happened to Tibby. Maybe she couldn’t help it.
“Why do you keep making that face?” Effie asked, sitting cross-legged on Lena’s bed. It was not yet four o’clock and Lena was running out of deflecting conversation topics.
“Why do you talk so loud?” Lena wondered if the close walls of her apartment felt as jarred and uncomfortable as she did being disrupted after so many weeks of solitary quiet.
“I’m not talking loud. I’m just talking.”
Lena didn’t argue. Effie thrived on arguments. Better to be flat boring than argue.
Effie’s phone buzzed every few minutes, but she seemed to have made a commitment not to answer it. She glanced at it constantly, though. “How’s that guy?”
Lena took a few extra seconds to answer. Words were like oxygen to Effie, and if Lena cut them off maybe she’d go home a little sooner. “What guy?”
“The guy who looks like the pot-smoking Scooby-Doo character.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The guy with the scraggly beard. The guy who makes sandwiches.”
Lena preferred to keep pretending she didn’t know, but the suspense could come to seem interesting if she wasn’t careful. “You mean Drew,” she said flatly.
“Yes. Exactly. Drew. What happened to him?”
“Nothing happened. He still works at the sandwich place. He’s still putting together work for a show.”
Effie shook her head impatiently. “Do you still go out with him?”
Lena sighed boringly. She pulled the laundry basket over and started folding. “I see him now and then.”
The truth was she’d seen him once since she’d gotten back, and that was to tell him she needed to take a break for a while, as though the relationship were strenuous in some way. It was the classic it’s-not-you-it’s-me conversation, and he had acceded without a fight.
“Do you hook up?”
No fireworks. No arguing. Lena shrugged.
Effie punched a couple of buttons on her phone and put it down again. “Honestly, I’m not sure which answer I’m hoping for. I hate for you to waste your time on such a loser, but it would be comforting to think you were actually having contact with another human being. Mom and Dad would be comforted by that, I know. Even Dad. I’m not kidding.”
No fireworks. Lena clamped her teeth together. Effie was the human equivalent of gasoline sprayed all over the kitchen. It was hard to avoid not only fireworks but complete conflagration.
“You don’t need to worry, Ef. I’m fine. I have human contact. You all should calm down,” she said calmly, boringly. “I teach two afternoons, one morning, and one evening a week. I spend time in the studio. I see other instructors and professors all the time.” Effie looked bored, so she went on. “I go to a demo or a lecture pretty much every week. I helped Susan, um, Murphy do this PowerPoint slide show.…” Lena was running out of material and she wished she had more. Effie’s eyes had drifted to her phone but she hadn’t picked it up yet. “I have lots of human contact.”
“Do you have any friends?”
It was so like Effie to cut her to the quick, to push aside her feeble maneuverings, to destroy her complacency, however lame. Lena swallowed and hoped her eyes didn’t show anything. “Sure.”
“I don’t mean old friends, but friends here. That you see.”
This was why Lena wished she had checked her messages and somehow derailed this visit. She wished her sister would go home. She wished she had never come.
“Sure,” Lena said again, bending down to pick up the laundry basket. She carried it over