By Design - Jayne Denker Page 0,2
since elementary school—and she still did, even now in their “old age,” which was mumble-mumble-mutter-something past thirty. Trish was her lifeline, her floaties. She’d keep Emmie from sinking under the weight of her residual sorrow.
“Precisely.” Emmie headed back toward the living room, beating her friend to the remote by inches. “My house, my remote,” she declared. “My wallow,” she added for good measure.
As the shadows lengthened in the living room, Emmie and Trish sank lower and lower into the sofa, and Emmie’s spirits dipped accordingly.
“I dunno,” she mumbled, her wineglass tipping sideways in her hand at a precarious angle. Trish wordlessly righted it. It promptly tipped again, but less so. Trish let it be. “I don’t get it. I feel like I’m missing something.”
“You want your mommy.”
“You know what, though?” Emmie turned her semi-focused chestnut eyes up to her friend. “I don’t. I mean, I miss her, but she raised me right—to be self-shuff...shelf-shuff...independent.”
“She did do that.”
“When I thought I wanted to join Pee Wee football, she didn’t talk me out of it.”
“Yeah, a few drills at practice did that.”
“She convinced me to take AP Calculus. Don’t know how she pulled that off.”
Trish snickered. “Thought you were gonna jump right out the classroom window at least once a week. Sometimes twice.”
“She told me I wasn’t a freak if I didn’t have a date to the prom.”
Now Trish laughed outright. “Rick loved having both of us as his dates. His friends thought he was going to get a threesome at the end of the night, and he let ’em think it.”
“She was so happy when I got into Westfall College. She got choked up whenever she talked about it. For, like, and entire year.”
Trish nodded fondly.
“Oh—remember when she kept hammering at me about Billy Joosten, in college? Told me a thousand times not to go out with him. She was convinced he was a psychopath.”
“She was pretty much right.”
“Hey, he was never formally charged with anything.”
“They’ll find the bodies one of these days. You mark my words.”
“She…she gave me the down payment for this house.”
Emmie and Trish sighed, cherishing their own favorite memories of Jennifer Brewster.
“She was a great mom,” Trish said after a while.
“She was. And I feel like I’m letting her down.”
“Oh, you are not.”
“Yuh-huh. She always wanted…” At this Emmie felt her throat constrict; she couldn’t get any more words out.
“More,” Trish finished for her. “She wanted more for you.”
“And I don’t have even half of what she had.”
“Don’t tell me you want marriage and kids and all that crap.”
“Not just for the sake of having them, no.”
“Because I did that for the both of us.”
“And you did it well.” Emmie toasted her.
Trish and Rick had dated all through high school and college. Their boys, Justin, eleven, and Logan, six, were mostly polite and well behaved and only slightly insane—just the usual boy-type madness, which included shouting at the tops of their lungs from morning till night and leaving lots of Legos around. “But…remember when we were younger, like twelve?”
“Ayup. You had bad hair. I had too many freckles. I still have too many freckles,” Trish murmured, suddenly engrossed in her forearm.
“Remember the feeling we had, that the world was wide open, that anything could happen at any minute? That we were on a big adventure?”
“Yeah...”
“What happened to that? Because now it feels like...things are closing in...and...and...” She drifted off, not sure what she was trying to say.
“Are you going to throw up?”
“No,” Emmie scoffed, slapping her friend’s wrist, not noticing the wine finally sloshing out of her glass. “But I feel like there’s something I should have done. Or should be doing. I just don’t know what it is….Hey!” she burst out, making Trish jump. “Do you remember Juliet Winslow?”
“Oh my Goooddd!” Trish drawled, laughing.
“I know, but seriously...” Emmie refilled Trish’s glass, and her own, all the way to the rim. “Remember her? She had everything. She was...”
“Perfect,” Trish finished for her.
“Like Venus on the half shell,” Emmie agreed wistfully. “Barbie doll—blonde hair, blue eyes, skinny. Smart, talented, sporty. Not one flaw. Plus she was nice, remember? Damn, you couldn’t even hate her, she was so nice.”
“What happened to her, anyway?”
“No idea. See what we miss when we blow off reunions?”
“No regrets.”
“I wanna know,” Emmie said abruptly.
“What’re you hoping for—that she stayed perfect, or that she peaked in high school and then crashed and burned?”
Emmie thought for a drunken moment. “I’m not sure.”
Both friends fell silent, reflecting on Juliet, the high priestess of high school. Then Emmie