Guy.”
“What guy?”
I pursed my lips and leaned in to intensify my look. Then I said slowly, “The Guy.”
Alice frowned a second, then said, in recognition, “The Guy?”
I gave an unmistakable nod, like Bingo.
“The the Guy? The one who drove you out of California?”
“I beg your pardon. I drove myself.”
“But he’s the one from your old school? That you were obsessed with?”
“Not obsessed.”
Alice squinted at me. “Pretty obsessed.”
“It was not an obsession. It was a healthy, red-blooded American crush.”
Now Alice was trying to remember. It had been a while—a lifetime, really—since we’d talked about it. “Didn’t you snoop in his diary?”
“I wasn’t snooping, I was feeding his cat while he was out of town.”
“But you read his diary.”
“Well, he left it lying open on the kitchen table. You could argue that on some unconscious level, he wanted me to read it.”
Alice gave me a second to decide if I could stand by that statement.
“Plus,” I went on, “it wasn’t a diary. It was just a notebook.”
“A notebook full of private thoughts.”
“We all have private thoughts, Alice,” I said, as if that was somehow a good point.
“You shouldn’t have taken that cat-sitting job in the first place,” she said.
“What was I supposed to do? Let his cat starve? It was declawed and missing a tail.”
“It wasn’t even his cat. It was the girlfriend’s cat.”
“I didn’t know that at the time.”
Alice gave me a look then that was part affection, part scolding, and part Give me a break.
Anyway, there was no point in continuing the denials. She knew the whole story. I had read his notebook that day all those years ago while he was on vacation in wine country about to get engaged—or that was the rumor anyway. And I hadn’t just read the one page that was facing up on the table, either. I had grabbed a pair of kitchen tongs from the drawer—as if not touching the pages with my fingers somehow made it less awful—and used them to turn every single page, searching for clues to his soul like some kind of love-struck Sherlock Holmes, and careful, like a crazy person, not to leave any fingerprints.
What can I say? It was a low point.
A very low point.
And, actually, it became a turning point.
Before that moment back then, I’d been infatuated with Duncan Carpenter for two solid years. Big-time infatuated. Hard-core infatuated. Infatuated the way teenage girls get infatuated with pop stars. If he’d had song lyrics, I’d have memorized them; if he’d had merch, I’d have bought it; and if he’d had a fan club, I’d have been the president.
Of course, he wasn’t a pop star.
But he was, you know … a celebrity of sorts. In the world of private, secondary-school education. In our tiny little sliver of humanity, he was a big deal. He was the pop icon of our teaching colleagues, for sure.
And for good reason.
He had a big, friendly smile filled with big, friendly teeth. He was handsome without trying. He had a magnetic quality that was almost physical. If he was in a room with other humans in it for any amount of time, there’d be a group of them gathered around him by the end. He emitted some kind of sunshine that we all wanted to soak up.
Me included.
Me especially.
But I was terrible around him. I was the worst possible version of myself. All the longing and desire and electricity and joy I felt whenever he was anywhere near me seemed to scramble my system. I’d freeze, and get quiet and still and self-conscious, and stare at him, unblinking, like a weirdo.
It was uncomfortable, to say the least.
When I’d first met him, he was single—and he stayed that way for one long, beautiful, possibility-infused year as I tried to work up the nerve to sit at his table at lunch. A year that slipped by fast, and then suddenly, before I’d made any progress—boom!—a perky new girl from the admissions office just brazenly asked him out.
Their assigned parking spots were next to each other, apparently.
It was front-page teacher news, and the grade-school faculty were by and large offended. Wasn’t it a little uppity to just swoop in and start dating whoever she wanted?
Apparently not.
Soon, they were exclusive, and then they were serious, and then, barely a year to the day after she’d first asked him out, they were moving in together. Rumor had it she’d been the one to ask him. A move I would’ve admired for feminist reasons if it had been any