Nobody in Particular(65)

“Quite right,” I say. “That’s what I meant to say. I’m homophobic, unfortunately.”

“I was trying to convince you to stop shutting her out and show her some empathy before you messed up your friendship with her forever.”

“Your feedback has been well-noted, and I’ll take it into consideration.” Feeling ill, I take a step toward leaving, but Molly grabs at my forearm.

“Rose, I didn’t know,” she says, and it’s the first time she’s spoken to me with any measure of kindness in months. That alone is enough to make me linger. I look at her, and she’s soft and earnest.

“Can we sit?” she asks, and I nod. Together, we move to the sage velvet love seat and take our places side by side. Molly leans her elbows on her knees. I let my back fall against the couch.

“You and Danni?” she asks.

I suppose there’s no point trying to deny it now. I dug myself well and truly into this hole, and now I’m stuck sitting in it. “Mm.”

“For how long?”

“Not too long.”

Not long enough.

“So you’re…”

“A lesbian.”

Molly shakes her head. “I had no idea.”

“Well, I didn’t tell you.”

“Is this new?”

“Me being queer?”

“You coming out.”

“I haven’t come out. Danni found out incidentally.”

“How?”

“I kissed her.”

“Oh. That’d do it.” Molly taps a nervous foot on the rug. “I was just wondering, I guess. I just mean that, if you’d been telling people, it wouldn’t surprise me if I didn’t get told.”

“Admittedly, you wouldn’t have been high on my list,” I say to the ceiling.

“Yeah. I can understand that.”

I purse my lips and grit my teeth and squeeze my hands together and tumble out with, “I still don’t understand why, though.”

Molly blinks. “Why you’re lesbian?”

“Why we stopped being friends.”

“Oh.”

It feels like squeezing an empty bottle in the hopes of finding a missed drop of water, but I have to ask again. Just one more time. “I don’t understand what I did that was so toxic,” I say. “Perhaps if I did, I could work on it, at least. Even if it’s too late for the two of us. But you haven’t always hated me, so for the last time, what, exactly, did I do, Molly?”

She shifts uncomfortably, refusing to meet my gaze. “You disappeared.”

“I disappeared?” I ask, incredulous. “I was right there the whole time. You’re the one who vanished. A little more every day, and at first it was too subtle to comment on without sounding pathetic, and then suddenly it was too far gone to address. It was quite impressive, really.”

Or it would have been, if it hadn’t been quite so devastating.

“You were there physically, but you were not right there,” Molly says, looking straight ahead. “You never checked in on me. If I checked in on you, you changed the subject. If I tried to talk about Oscar, you changed the subject. If I tried to talk about how I was doing, you changed the subject. And you were fine. He was supposed to be your friend, and you watched him die, and you didn’t care even a little. The only thing you cared about was making sure you looked good in the public eye. I needed you,” she chokes. “I tried to come to you so many times. And I might as well have been telling you about a foreign news story or something for all you cared. Our friend died, Rose. And you and I were there when it happened. You should’ve been the person I could speak to the most about it. But you completely shut me out. I was crumbling, and you just watched me.”

I remember the day after Oscar died as clearly as if I were living it now. We all left the lodge that night, and I flew back home. Here. There was a flurry of activity as my parents spoke to me, together then individually, as well as meetings with William. My bodyguard, Elizabeth, was fired early that afternoon, because of me. Adults flew from room to room talking in urgent voices, concocting plans, composing statements. I remember walking to my bathroom, staring at my reflection in the mirror and urging myself to cry. It felt as though I should cry—both because of the ache in my chest that longed to be released, and the general sense that it was disrespectful to Oscar’s memory not to cry. But no matter how urgently I willed it, the tears never came.

I remember how loud my body seemed. My beating heart was a booming bass drum, my breaths were a howling wind, my parched lips stuck together and pulled apart with a dry ripping noise. Like Velcro, I remember noting.

Eventually, I gave up. Then I wandered to the study, pulled every book off the shelf, and placed them back one by one in alphabetical order.

I have no defense, because I’m sure Molly is correct. There’s much I can’t remember after that first day—the following weeks, and even months, are a blur with only a few snatches of clarity here and there—but I believe every bit of it. I’m sure I changed the subject away from Oscar as often as he was brought up, because my mind all but ceases to function when I remember him. I’m certain I never invited Molly to talk about him, or her grief, for the very same reason. As for my reputation—yes, I did focus on that, absolutely. It was the one thing I had any semblance of control over—the only thing I had any hope of fixing—while everything else lay in shattered pieces at my feet.