“No,” I say. “Just busy.”
“Molding impressionable young minds?”
“Sure,” I say. I tuck my feet underneath me, making myself as small as possible. I feel safer this way.
“So you weren’t ignoring me?”
“No,” I say. “I’m actually busy. New job. New apartment. New friends.”
“Other teachers?”
“No,” I say. “They’re all pretty cliquey.”
“It is high school.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Good you’re making friends, though.”
I don’t know why I called him. Was it to hear his voice? Was it to figure out why he’s been trying to reach me? Was it to ask him if it’s really too late to fix this? To repair our relationship, go back to how it was at the beginning. Get the spark back. Have sex on the living room floor and afterward snicker at our carpet burns.
Can I? Should I? Ask if we can go back to the start? Be more assertive, push harder like I know I should have that day in April.
“I thought you might have seen . . . ,” he says.
“Seen what?”
He doesn’t respond, and enough time passes that I feel it necessary to pull the phone away from my ear to check that the call didn’t get disconnected.
It didn’t.
Finally, he says, “Tell me more about what you’ve been up to.”
“Um . . . ,” I say. “I’ve been hanging out a lot with my friend Sophie. She’s . . . she’s a really interesting person.”
“Cool, cool,” he says. He sounds distracted.
“Samantha.”
“Andy.”
These are the names we use when one of us is testing to see if the other person is actually listening.
“What’s going on?” I ask him. “What’s going on with you?”
“I’ve got a new archnemesis,” he says. “I call him the Middleman. He goes around eating all the cream out of the middles of Oreos. Then he reseals the packages and puts them back on the shelves.”
“What a monster.”
“The worst this city has ever seen.”
I could go on, indulge in the back-and-forth, but I really don’t feel like it. I’m too sad.
“I meant, what’s been going on with you? Alter ego. Otherwise known as Sam.”
“Oh, oh,” he says. “Right. Sam.”
“Yep.”
He takes another long pause. He exhales. It’s the kind of exhale that precedes bad news. You know it when you hear it. The sound echoes in your bones.
“Annie,” he says, “the reason I’ve been trying to get in touch with you, and why I thought you might be ignoring me, is I posted some pictures.”
“Okay. On what. Myspace?”
Sam and I were never particularly active on what we jokingly called “the Internets.” We both have dormant Facebook pages we use for occasional stalking of former classmates and tracking birthdays, but we were never the type to post updates about what was going on in our lives or to seek out new platforms.
“No,” he says. “Actually, I didn’t post. I got tagged.”
“Okay.”
“There’s a picture of me with a girl.”
“Okay.”
“We’re together in the picture. It’s a picture of us together. I thought maybe you saw it.”
“I didn’t,” I say. But . . . I’ve got my laptop now. So . . . in a matter of seconds, that will change.
“I thought maybe it upset you. I wouldn’t have put it up myself.”
“Yeah,” I say.
It’s on his Facebook. Tagged from Instagram? A picture of him looking at the petite redhead who is sitting on his lap, looking back at him. Her hand is on his face. His hand is on her ass. Their noses are almost touching. Their foreheads are touching.
There’s nothing to interpret.
The photo is a bomb I’ve just swallowed. I’m listening to the faint tick, awaiting the inevitable explosion.
Pretty soon, any second, I’ll be blown to smithereens. It’ll hurt so bad I won’t know what to do.
“I would rather have told you about it first,” he says.
“You are telling me about it,” I say. “I didn’t see it. You’re telling me. Now I know. I’m hearing it from you. There’s a picture.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I wanted to tell you about Shannon.”
Shannon.
“Okay, well, I mean, how long has this been up? Like, I’m sure there were still some people who didn’t know we weren’t together anymore. And this is how they found out probably,” I say. “I mean, it’s a little disrespectful. You’re friends with my dad on Facebook.”