Rules for Being a Girl - Candace Bushnell Page 0,67
direction her face is almost as white as the clapboard on the front of the house.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her eyes filling so suddenly with tears that I can’t keep from gasping. “Marin. I’m so, so sorry.”
Right away I shake my head. “Hey,” I say, holding my hands up, palms out in shocked surrender. Our friendship has felt like one bizarre, inexplicable missed connection after another lately. But I wasn’t prepared for this. “It’s . . . okay.”
“It’s not!” she says, and she’s up off the swing now, pacing across the porch. “It’s a lot of things, Marin, but it is definitely not okay.”
“Chloe,” I say, curling my fingers around the edge of the porch swing. My voice is quiet. “What’s going on?”
Chloe shakes her head, her eyes flicking to her car in the driveway like she can’t decide if she wants to dive behind the wheel and peel away into the sunset or just take off on foot and never, ever stop. I know that look—I’ve seen it in the mirror a lot lately—but in the end she just sits back down beside me, clearing her throat like she’s preparing to give testimony in a courtroom. She takes a deep breath.
“I thought he loved me,” she confesses, then immediately digs the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, rubbing until her mascara smudges. “Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m saying that out loud right now. I sound like a fucking idiot. I thought he loved me.”
“Who?” I ask—even though I already know, in some secret part of my brain. Maybe I always did.
Chloe rubs her thumbs underneath her eyes, wiping the mascara away. “Who do you think?”
It started in October, she tells me. He took her to his apartment, in the Victorian house with the built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. He wanted to lend her a book. They listened to records; he cooked her pasta. She told her parents she was at the library.
He told her she had an old soul.
“When you told me what happened between you guys I just kind of lost it,” Chloe admits. “The way you described it, him being a creep—it didn’t feel like that to me. Or not at the time, at least. I thought we were . . . a couple.” She rolls her eyes and another tear slips down her cheek. “We did couple stuff. Like—I went with him to the Cape back in the fall.”
My eyes widen. “You did what?”
“Can you not?” Chloe shakes her head. “I know now it was stupid.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid,” I promise. “I just—what, to a hotel?”
She shrugs. “His family has a house.”
“Of course they do.” I run my fingers through my hair. “I’m sorry. I’m being an asshole. I just—when?”
“The weekend I told you I was with Kyra.”
“Oh my god, I knew there was no way you were voluntarily spending a weekend with her!” For a moment I’m weirdly, horribly vindicated—that I knew her that well, at least, that I wasn’t totally fooled—and then I realize how messed up that is. “What did you tell your parents?” I ask.
“School trip,” she says miserably. “I made a fake permission slip and everything.”
“Weren’t you worried I’d say something to them about it when I was at work?”
“Are you kidding me?” Chloe exhales sharply. “I was terrified. It was all I could think about all weekend, only I didn’t want to tell him that, because I didn’t want to remind him—”
“That you’re seventeen?”
“All right!” Chloe explodes, shocking us both into silence for a moment. When she speaks again her voice is barely more than a whisper. “After you went to his apartment . . . he told me he’d just tried to be nice to you.” Her nail polish is mostly gone by now, pale pink dust scattered across her lap. “Like, that it was this totally harmless thing, and you’d gotten the wrong idea, or whatever. But then he broke up with me.”
“And that’s why you were so pissed?”
Chloe nods. “He said it was too dangerous now, and I blamed you,” she admits. “I’m sorry, I know it’s like I’ve never seen a movie or watched a TV show or read a book in my entire life, but I just . . . I did. I thought this was different, and I blamed you. I felt like you took him away from me.”
“I get it,” I say. “I mean, it sucks, but I do.”
“And I hate telling you this, but