At the next intersection, I glance over at her. She’s still ignoring me, hiding behind the curtain of her hair. Loosed from its braid, it blows around her face, rippling like sand dunes on a windy day.
God, she’s beautiful.
God, she must hate me.
I should be happy my plans to push her away are working so effectively. But I’m not happy. Just the opposite. The prospect of losing the best thing in my life has opened up a bottomless pit inside my gut. Each moment we’re at odds gnaws a little more into my stomach lining. And there’s nothing I can do to make it better.
Creating some distance between us is the smartest option. The only option. But now that the ball is rolling, I can’t help second-guessing myself. I can’t help wishing that any moment now, she’ll look over at me and murmur, “It’s okay, Arch, I forgive you.”
I sigh.
Josephine Valentine is not, by nature, a forgiving person. She’s known to hold grudges. She gets angry at authors for killing her favorite characters, then refuses to read another word they write. (George R.R. Martin has undoubtedly received hate-mail from her.)
She still talks trash about the guy who cut her off in line for the gondola when we went snowboarding last season. Same for the girl in the Bentley who stole our parking spot on the first day of school.
She boycotts a certain coffee shop downtown because a barista there once made a racist crack about the soy milk request for my latte.
YosoyArcher. Haha!
Jo almost threw the aforementioned latte right in the hipster’s face. I had to drag her out the door, kicking and screaming like a feral cat the whole way. To this day, whenever we walk by that place, she blatantly glares through the display window, making it clear all is not forgiven.
But…
She’s always forgivenme.
We’ve had fights before, of course. I’ve pissed her off plenty over the years. You can’t be best friends since birth without a few epic blowouts.
Age eight: broke the arm off her favorite American Girl Doll in an ill-advised round of tug-of-war. Cue all of my allowance, up in smoke.
Age ten: went fishing with my older brother and failed to invite her. Cue meltdown of unmatched proportions.
Age twelve: refused to partner with her in the local talent show for a mediocre rendition of “Defying Gravity” from the musical Wicked. Cue first — but not last — “I hate you, Archer Reyes!”
She’s pissed me off plenty, too, don’t get me wrong. There was the time, at thirteen, when she hijacked her father’s boat and crashed it into a sandbar, nearly getting us both killed — not to mention grounded for an entire summer. At fifteen, when she barged into my bedroom without knocking and caught me red-handed — literally — watching porn. At sixteen, when she showed me one of her baffling sewing patterns and proceeded to call me a “low-brow jock with no appreciation for design.” And just a few months ago, when she insisted I only entertain baseball scholarship offers from schools within a two hour drive of Brown — which just so happens to be where she was accepted early-decision, and plans to attend this fall.
But this fight feels different.
Itisdifferent.
Deep down, even if I want her to forgive me, I know she shouldn’t. It’s safer for her to be out of my life — at least, for the foreseeable future. Safer if she hates me so much, she can’t stand to be in the same place at the same time.
Despite all previous efforts to push her away — dodging her in the halls, sitting at the jock table at lunch, jamming my schedule full of baseball practices and hours at the batting cages and yes, even my teammates’ lame parties on the weekends — she hasn’t gotten the hint. Hasn’t backed off in the slightest. The busier I get, the more determined she becomes to make time together: arranging Sunday afternoon sails, showing up at my door, ambushing me as soon as she hears my truck rolling down the driveway.
Turns out, cutting Jo out of my life is harder than cutting off a limb. She won’t let go. Not without extreme measures.
For instance, blatantly screwing another girl.
If I could physically avoid her, I wouldn’t have to take things so far. Given that we live on the same property, that’s basically impossible. Jo has a way of making a even a three-acre estate feel intimate. She spends more time in my tiny bedroom than she does her own waterfront suite.
We pull up to the wrought iron gates that mark the start of the private drive. I punch in a code on the small electronic keypad and they swing inward with a metallic clang. Pulling the truck off asphalt and onto imported pea-stone, I creep up the driveway slowly, so as not to wake anyone.
After a moment, Cormorant House comes into view. It’s impressive, even after all this time — a sprawling, twelve-bedroom stone mansion perched on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic, complete with a full guest cottage, in-ground swimming pool, boathouse, private dock, and separate staff quarters. Built in an opulent châteauesque style, it’s been a Valentine property since Jo’s ancestors struck industrial gold in the Gilded Age, building the country’s first ever railroad— though, her father only inherited it twenty or so years ago.
For almost as long as her parents have occupied it, mine have maintained it. Though everyone has always been careful not to use the word “servant,” instead throwing around euphemisms — “housekeeper” for my mother, “handyman” for my father — I’ve known since I was no more than three that the Reyes clan could never afford to live in this house, this zip code, this very town on our own.
We exist here at the behest of Jo’s father. Were he to simply snap his fingers… we’d be out on our asses, exiled from the the only home I’ve ever known before the ink on my parents’ severance check was dry.
Rounding the circular driveway, I slow to a stop at the front walk and turn off the engine. Jo makes no move to get out. For a moment, we sit in total silence. I have to curl my hands around the steering wheel to keep from reaching for her, from crushing her against my chest in a hug — the kind we used to give each other without a second thought, back when things were so much simpler.