second or two, but then the smiles would disappear and she would go back to moping. She wasn’t even a shadow of herself. But then Ben showed up, and he kept prodding her, teasing her, making little jokes with her, and then she started smiling again for real. He was…” Sam clears his throat. “He was special. To her, to me, to everyone. The kind of special that doesn’t come around twice. He made her happy. She made him happy.”
It feels wrong to hate a dead man, but irrationally, I want to hit something. To be more specific, I want to hit Ben Ellison. “I’ll be there to pick up the pieces.” Of course he had been there.
Sam’s staring at one of the paintings on the wall and twirling the stem of the glass in his hand carelessly. He eventually turns to me with a wistful smile.
“Ben and I developed a little bromance, drinking beer and teasing Hallie and staying up all night to ponder the mysteries of the universe. We were young, but we weren’t, you know? Sometimes, it felt like we were a hundred years old, and everything since has just been aging backwards. I thought maybe life was going to be one long series of late-night conversations with a few bong hits sprinkled in to liven things up a bit.”
Sam’s poetic waxing about Ben Ellison isn’t improving my mood. He seems to sense my impatience, and he revels in it, in making me squirm.
“Ben managed to talk Hallie into transferring to his school in Ohio, and I was glad for it. Anyone could see where the two of them were heading, and I thought, finally, Hallie was going to find someone who wasn’t going to crush her heart into a million pieces. And I managed to find myself a best friend. I thought that the three of us would have a million more nights like that. And I guess we did, in a manner of speaking.”
He looks upward for a second. Yep, I’m a douchebag. I try to remove all thoughts of hitting a dead man, but they’re still there, taunting me.
“You probably know what happened next.” Sam peers at me for a minute. “At some point, he made a move, or she did, and their happily ever after started.”
“Is this entertaining you, Sam? Is this fun for you? What do you want me to say? Sorry? I fucked up? I did. And I am fucking sorry.”
He watches me closely as I stare at the candy wrappers in the corner. I reach down and pick a stray one up and twist it between my fingers.
“Ben was my fucking best friend and he was a prince of the human race, a real goddamn American hero, even before the bus.”
“Clearly. And I’m an asshole.”
“Maybe.” Sam looks at me contemplatively and shakes his head. “Jensen, I wasn’t going to tell you this, but I think you need to know. Even as I was standing up there with my best friend on his wedding day, waiting for my other best friend to come out all smiling and happy in a long, white dress, I thought that you were going to come and screw it all up for her. I was just waiting for the minister to say, ‘And if there’s anyone here who has just cause for why these two should not be wed.’ I really thought that you were going to show up on a white horse to steal her away. But you never came. And they got married and got themselves a little house and…”
He lets the sentence trail off, lost in thought.
“It sounds like they were the perfect couple,” I say, bitterly. “And we all know that I’m not the knight in shining armor type. Even if I had shown up, ready to make my objection, I would have ended up with egg on my face.”
“Come on, man.” Sam slams his glass down on one of the side tables in frustration. He gives me a long, cold stare. “Seriously?”
“Tell me, Sam. You’re standing there, telling me how happy they made each other, that Ben Ellison was the once-in-a-lifetime kind of guy. And you’re actually trying to tell me that you were worried that my drunk ass would have waltzed in there and fucked everything up for the two of them? That’s bullshit, and we both know it. I’m the second choice for her now. It was probably always Ben that she was in love with. I’ve thought that