asks. There is a choking noise in her throat. “You were sitting there laughing at me?”
I can feel a hard smile form on my face. I know that my expression is just going to fuel her suspicion, but I can’t help it.
“You’re hateful,” she says. “Really hateful.”
“I’ll be back at the hospital tomorrow,” I say.
I am smiling because I’ve finally figured it out. This moment has been a gift. Belinda, my enemy, has given me a gift. I have been expecting too much from my work. It is supposed to be hard and challenging and exhausting. I can’t expect it to be more, to mean more.
“Lila,” Weber says. He is looking at me with his mouth slightly open. He has never seen the real me before. And it is just as well, because I am back on track now. I am returning to my old life, a life Weber James doesn’t fit into. I know, with total certainty, that my time of weakness is over.
“We go to school together,” I say, in the same cold voice. “Belinda and I are classmates.”
“Classmates,” Belinda says, “but not equals. I’m sure Lila has told you that she’s number one?” She is in her purse now, punching her hand around the inside. She pulls out a compact mirror and opens it. She pats the skin under her eyes and then clicks the mirror shut. “Not that I care. I have to stop competing. My therapist told me that I need to stop competing. I’m destroying myself.”
Belinda stands up. She loops her purse over her shoulder. She addresses Weber. “Thank you for your concern. I’m going to use the restroom now.”
She walks away, her posture straight beneath her wrinkled, tucked-in T-shirt and shorts. Her sandals bang small clouds of dust around her ankles. I look down, and see that the chocolate ice cream cone has melted, running in brown stripes across my hand, down my arm, and splattering across my shorts.
I pick my letter up from the picnic table and use it to wipe the ice cream off my skin. The brown liquid covers the writing completely and my arm is left sticky but dry. I ball up the useless sheet of paper and throw it into the garbage.
“What the hell was that?” Weber says.
“I’m sorry, Weber, but we’re over. I mean it this time.”
He stares at me as if I’ve spoken in a foreign language he doesn’t recognize.
“I’m sorry I’ve been indecisive with you in the past. It was unfair of me to say I didn’t want to be with you and then show up at your door two hours later.”
“I understood that,” Weber says. “You were fighting yourself, Doc. You really wanted to be with me—”
I interrupt him. “I’m done fighting myself. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want you.”
The words sound cruel under the hot summer sun, but I tell myself that it is the sound of honesty. It is the sound of freedom.
“I don’t recognize you right now,” Weber says. “Your face is cold and scrunched up.”
“This is what I really look like.”
“I see,” Weber says. And I can see from his expression that he does. He sees me, and he turns away.
AFTER WEBER drops me off at the library, I get in my car and drive home. I make a beeline from the car to the shower. I feel exhausted and gritty with dirt. Gracie is waiting in my room when I come out of the bathroom dripping wet in a towel.
“For Christ’s sake,” I say. “Will you get out of here?”
She is sitting on my bed Indian style. She is wearing Papa’s cardigan for what must be the tenth day in a row. She is not handling Gram’s hospitalization well. She says, “I have to ask you for a favor.”
I am not comfortable. Gracie and I are not the kind of sisters who walk around in our underwear and borrow each other’s clothes. We grew up in a house where everyone got dressed behind his or her closed bedroom door, and we live in that kind of house now. “Can we do this later?” I say. “I have to call the hospital, so I need to get dressed. I’ve made my decision. I’m going back to school. I’m going to be a doctor.”
Gracie just stares at me, caught up in her own dreamy world. There’s no way she could understand needing to be somewhere, or job responsibilities, since she has stopped going to her