I told Michelle as much. She listened, the furrow in her brow deepening with every word. Then she scowled.
“Why do you feel this way about yourself?” she snapped. “Like you’re not enough, or something?”
“I don’t think I’m not enough,” I said plainly. “I think I’m too much.” A door slammed shut in the distance, and I winced, wondering if our absence had been noted. “I . . . Never mind. We should get back to the workroom before Gwen realizes I’m gone.”
Michelle looked at me like I’d grown a second head.
“Um, no we shouldn’t, because what the hell, Angie,” she said. “You realize he can just like you, right? That it doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that?” When I didn’t say anything, she crossed her arms. “I wish you’d just told me that you weren’t interested in him or something. That would be way less depressing.”
Depressing or not, it was true, and I wasn’t about to apologize for my reality.
“It’s fine,” I muttered. Then I looked her in the eye. “I’m fine. Ricky and I are friends, and we are just going for a nice day at the spa together. Just like with the girls.”
“Fine,” Michelle said. “Just . . . if you do like him”—she held up a finger when I opened my mouth to protest—“I said if—then can you not do that thing you always do? Where you let yourself live in limbo to stop yourself from getting hurt? It’s different if you actually want to be his friend, but if you’re mucking around in no-man’s-land just because you think that it’s safer there, I’m going to be pissed. Because you’re too grown for that now, and I’m too busy to help you pick up the pieces when it inevitably doesn’t work out.”
I recoiled.
“What do you mean, what I always do—”
Before I could demand an explanation, Michelle marched ahead of me and into the workroom. Through the sliver of the open door, I could see Gwen waiting for me, clicking her pen menacingly. I groaned. It was going to be a long shift.
Thirteen
Ricky pulled up outside my apartment the next day at two o’clock sharp, his face lighting up in a smile that put his dimples on full display. For the twenty-four hours since Michelle had accosted me in L&D, I’d turned her words over in my head. Mucking around in no-man’s-land? Michelle and I had known each other for six years （and as many heartbreaks, given my tendency to fall for every man who could keep up a conversation with me） and she had never accused me of contributing to my own misery. And yeah, Michelle had a penchant for the dramatic, but she was also frighteningly astute. I would have asked her for clarification, but Gwen was on me like white on rice, and so I never got the chance.
“Congratulations!” Ricky said when I popped the door of his car open.
“For what?” I asked, clambering inside.
“For making it to the weekend without murdering La Diabla,” Ricky said.
I groaned, throwing my bag into the back. It landed with a thud; Ricky had suggested I bring my books to the spa. It’s a whole day affair, he stressed. You might want to get some reading in. Nothing medical though—you’re relaxing, remember?
“Ugh. You’re right. I deserve a medal,” I said. “You know what she said to me yesterday after you left?” I brought the pitch of my voice up a few octaves and talked through my nose. “‘You med students are always soooo slow. Why haven’t you gotten me gauze yet? Come on, chop chop!’”
Ricky took his eyes off the road just long enough to give me an incredulous look.
“And you didn’t chop chop her upside her head?” he asked, shaking his head in disappointment. “But what of your dignity, Angela?”
I snorted, then dropped my seat back. Ricky never seemed to mind long, tangential stories about my day. If anything, he egged them on, picking up on loose threads from prior conversations and inviting me to expound on them. I never felt like he was humoring me, or simply waiting his turn to talk about himself. But of course, he was like Markus—a girl’s guy, a grandma’s boy, used to the kind of aimless chatter Frederick had once described as exhausting. And yeah, it was nice, but I couldn’t just give him brownie points for, gasp, actually being interested in what I had to say.
“Seriously,” Ricky was saying, incensed. “It’s nuts that they can just talk to you like that without any consequences. She grades you, right? Have you talked to anyone in your school’s administration about her?”