She snorted. “So on-the-nose, right? Looking back, that must’ve been a nom de plume.” When Kristen spoke again, her voice was soft. “I just want you to be happy. And healthy. You should do whatever you need to do to make that happen.”
But I did see her point. “I know you’re right. I can’t think straight. I’m still processing.”
“It will get easier, I promise. And until then, I’m totally here for you, anytime, day or night. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to talk about it, so I didn’t bring it up, but I’m here.” Bubbles back in her voice: “I can totally be your Dr. Brightside.”
“How does nothing get under your skin?” I tried to say it playfully but landed somewhere between hurt and jealous.
“I don’t want you to think I’m not listening. I hear you, I swear I do.” She infused the words with urgency, and I found myself nodding. “I’ve been struggling since then too. Of course I have. But what always grounds me is knowing you’ve got my back, no matter what. And I’ve got yours. We’re here for each other. Right?”
I didn’t yet know how much she meant it. How, in the weeks and months that followed, she’d call me every single evening—her morning, before work—to check in, to ask how I was feeling, to talk me down or champ me up or catch me off guard with something so funny I couldn’t help but feel like me again. On weekends she stayed on video calls with me for long stretches—once her entire night, a full ten hours—and watched movies with me, ordered food for me, sent services to pick up my laundry and clean my sad, sticky kitchen and do all the things she’d do in person if she could. I knew if she were there she’d be spooning the udon down my throat, tenderly washing my hair and clipping my nails. When she said she’d be my Dr. Brightside, I didn’t yet grasp how she’d save me, piece me back together yet again.
But I knew that she meant it—that she was there for me, come hell or high water. A sob rose and I cleared my throat. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” I told her, tear-stained and almost catatonic in my darkened living room.
She chortled. “Let’s hope we never have to find out.”
CHAPTER 4
“So I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.” Kristen set down her fork and leaned her elbows on the table.
I took a sip of my Carménère, grassy and dark. Chilean wine was consistently delicious. “Oh yeah?” Funny—I was just about to tell her about Aaron.
“I didn’t want to bring it up right away. I wanted to…feel you out first, I guess. But I’ll just come right out and say it.” She spread her palms and I watched them, slow-motion, how her fingertips flared. My innards compressed. It has to do with Cambodia.
Then she pierced the dramatic pause: “I think we should travel the world for six months. Starting this summer. Your summer.”
It didn’t sink in. Like she’d spoken rapid Spanish and now stared expectantly. “？‘Travel the world’？”
“You have tons of money saved from your cushy cat-food job,” she went on, “and I was thinking of taking a sabbatical at work. My sublet runs out in June. I’m totally serious, Emily. We could do this.”
I shook my head. It was strange enough to imagine Kristen on the underside of the globe, the lilt of her sentences morphing, a thick “roight?” peppering her speech. But Kristen was a trailblazer, an adventurer. I, stable, dependable Emily, simply paid her exciting world the occasional visit. Could I really put my life on hold now, when I was about to turn thirty and finally, finally seeing someone I liked?
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, which people only say when they’re about to insult you, “but what’s keeping you? You’re not tied down—you don’t have snot-nosed kids and a boring husband or a career that feels like your calling or a family you’re close with. Right?”
I bit my lip. She was mostly right: no siblings, a mom and stepdad in St. Paul, a dad and stepmom in northern Iowa, all out of touch for months at a time.
Kristen and I had bonded over this in college: While all our classmates seemed to call their mothers once a day, at minimum, we rarely spoke to our guardians. Around then, I started to realize why—I noticed how casually cruel my parents could be, dismissive and self-centered. Kristen’s grandparents, Nana and Bill, had raised her after her parents died when she was twelve, and though the couple always seemed nice enough when I met them, Kristen claimed Bill was a tyrant and Nana a ball of anxiety.
Kristen glanced around the restaurant and then hit me with a sparkly-eyed smile. I caught her exact meaning, best-friend telepathy: This could be our lives. Traversing the world together. Discovering wild corners of civilization, bathing ourselves in landscapes so surreal they belonged in space operas.
But: Aaron. Not that I should plan my whole life around someone I’d only been on four dates with. But.
She leaned forward. “I remember back when you and Ben broke up, you were like, ‘This is it—now my life can be huge. As expansive as I want it to be.’？” Her hands shot out. “But…I know it’s different for me because it’s my hometown, but is Milwaukee really where you want to be?”
“I love Milwaukee. Unlike you, I really do love living there.”
“But you were the one who made it sound like an expansive life meant leaving the Midwest.”
“Hmm.”
The waiter appeared and Kristen asked what beers they stocked, and I tugged at a thread coming loose from my placemat.
The breakup with Ben: a knife in my psyche’s tenderest flesh. Banished to Kristen’s apartment, discombobulated and glum. At the time, my friend Angie, a plucky redheaded linguistics major I’d met in chess club, had shared the burden of nursing my broken heart, stepping in with ice cream and sympathy when I needed a break from Kristen’s screw-him MO. When, a few weeks after the split, Angie suggested it would be nice to go home for Christmas and have my mom “dote on me,” I burst out laughing.
“When I told her we broke up, all my mom said was ‘Huh, I was just starting to like Ben.’？”
Angie’s jaw dropped. “She didn’t, like, ask what happened?”
“Why would she?” My folks, who’d divorced when I was a teenager, had met the physical requirements of Acceptable Child Rearing to a T and, come college, seemed relieved they no longer had to attend to my comings and goings.
Angie considered. “Well, I don’t know what she’s talking about—we all hated him.”
I stared at her for a moment. Angie’s verdict—something I’d known for weeks—still burned, the secret everyone at school had been keeping from me practically since freshman orientation. Everyone but Kristen.
At home the next week, my scalp prickled with wonder as neither my mom nor my stepdad mentioned Ben on day one, day two, day three. The topic of my long-term boyfriend grew shy and conspicuously quiet in my mind, like an empty cemetery. Kristen and I spent the next two Christmases on our own in warm places: Fort Lauderdale, then Puerto Rico. The trips were Kristen’s brilliant idea, sun-splashed jaunts that cemented her spot on my personal family tree, the one that matters: the Family You Choose. Your folks don’t give a crap about your feelings, she’d pointed out. Why do you owe them your time?