There probably was a point after the breakup when Stuart told this story all the time, but he clearly hadn’t done it in a while. He was out of practice. His expression didn’t change a lot—all of his emotion seemed to come out of his hands. He had stopped wringing them, and now they shook, just ever so slightly.
“Addie finally walked her outside to talk her down,” he said. “That’s how it all ended. And I got a latte, on the house. So it wasn’t a total loss. I became the guy who was famously dumped in public when his girlfriend cheated with the Cougar. Anyway . . . I had a point in saying all of that. My point is, that guy . . . ”
He pointed accusingly at the phone.
“ . . . is a dick. Although that probably doesn’t mean much to you right now.”
My memories of the last year were playing back through my mind at super-speed, but I was looking at them all from a different camera angle. There I was, Noah holding my hand, one step ahead of me, pulling me through the hall, talking to everyone else but me along the way. I sat with him in the front row at school basketball games, even though he knew that ever since I’d gotten hit in the face with a wayward ball I was scared of those seats. But still, we sat there, me frozen in terror, watching a game that never interested me to begin with. Yes, I sat with the upper-echelon seniors at lunch, but the conversations were repetitive. All they ever talked about was how busy they all were, how they were building their résumés for their college applications. How they were meeting with recruiters. How they were organizing their calendars online. Who was recommending them.
God . . . I’d been bored for a year. I hadn’t talked about myself in ages. Stuart was talking about me. He was paying attention. It felt foreign, a little embarrassingly intimate, but kind of great. My eyes filled up.
Seeing this, Stuart braced himself and opened his arms a little, as if inviting me to give up my efforts to contain myself. We had inched marginally closer together at some point, and there was an expectant energy. Something was about to give. I felt myself gearing up to start bawling. This made me angry. Noah didn’t deserve it. I was not going to start crying.
So I kissed him.
I mean, really kissed him. I knocked him backward. He kissed me back. A good kiss, too. Not too dry, not too wet. It was a bit on the frantic side, maybe because neither one of us had done the mental preparation, so we were both thinking, Oh, right! Kissing! Quickly! Quickly! More movement! Deploy tongue!
It took us about a minute to recover and settle into a slightly slower pattern. I felt myself kind of floating away, when there was a huge stomping and crashing and yelling from downstairs. Apparently, Debbie and Rachel had chosen this moment to tie up the sled dogs and return from their personal Iditarod through the streets of Gracetown. They tromped back inside in that ridiculously loud way you do when you come out of snow or rain. (Why does wet weather make you louder?)
“Stuart! Jubilee! I have special cupcakes from Santa!” Debbie was screaming.
Neither of us moved. I was still leaning on top of Stuart, essentially pinning him down. We heard her come halfway up the stairs, where she must have seen the bedroom light on.
Again, the normal parent reaction would have been to say something like, “You had better come out here this moment or I am releasing the tiger!” But Debbie was not a normal parent, so we heard her giggle and creep away, saying, “Shhh! Rachel! Come with Mommy! Stuart is busy!”
Debbie’s sudden appearance in this scene made my stomach turn. Stuart rolled his eyes back in his head in agony. I released him, and he jumped up.
“I should go down,” he said. “You okay? Need anything or—”
“I’m great!” I said, with sudden, insane enthusiasm. But Stuart was by now well used to my tactics, my attempts to make myself look sane.
Quite sensibly, he bolted from the room.
Chapter Twelve
Want to know how long it took me to break up with my “perfect” boyfriend and make out with a new guy? It had taken . . . wait for it . . . twenty-three minutes. (I noticed Stuart’s clock when I first picked up the phone. It wasn’t like I had a stopwatch.)
Much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t hide upstairs forever. Sooner or later, I was going to have to come down and face the world. I sat on the floor in the doorway and listened as closely as I could to what was happening downstairs. Mostly, all I could hear was Rachel banging on some toys, and then I heard someone go outside. That seemed as good a cue as any. I quietly hit the stairs. In the living room, Rachel was noodling around with the Mouse Trap, which still sat out on the table. She gave me a big, toothy smile.
“Were you playing with Stuart?” she asked.
The question was loaded. I was a filthy, filthy woman, and even the five-year-old knew it.
“Yes,” I said, trying to keep some dignity. “We were playing Mouse Trap. How was the snow, Rachel?”
“Mommy says that Stuart likes you. I can stick a marble in my nose. Wanna see?”
“No, you probably shouldn’t—”
Rachel stuck one of the Mouse Trap marbles right up her nose. She extracted it and held it up for examination. “See?” she said.
Oh, I saw all right.
“Jubilee? Is that you?”
Debbie appeared at the kitchen door, looking flushed and well exercised and very damp.
“Stuart just went across the street to help Mrs. Addler shovel her path,” she said. “He saw her struggling. She has a glass eye and a bad back, you see. You two have a . . . nice afternoon?”
“It was fine,” I said stiffly. “We played Mouse Trap.”
“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” she asked, throwing me a terrible grin. “I have to go give Rachel a quick bath. Feel free to make yourself some cocoa or whatever you like!”
She stopped short of adding “ . . . future child-bride of my only son.”
She rounded up Rachel with a pointed, “Come on, we can go upstairs now,” leaving me to the hot chocolate and my shame and misery. I went to the living room window and looked out. Sure enough, Stuart was out there, lending a glad hand to his neighbor in her moment of need. He was just getting away from me, of course. It only made sense. I would have done the same thing. It was perfectly reasonable to deduce that I was only going to get worse. I would keep spiraling down, sinking deeper and deeper into a mire of rash and largely inexplicable behaviors. Like my jailed parents before me, I was a live wire. Best to go and shovel a few tons of snow for a glass-eyed neighbor and hope I went away.