Why Can't I Be You (12 page)

I
woke up a
few hours later, in one of the patio chairs, with a crick in my neck and dew on my face, and was generally damp and creaky all around.

Thankfully when I got down to the conference, most of the other attendees looked like they’d had a pretty rough night. Kyle’s face was pale, and when he turned the projector on to do another PowerPoint, he winced as the light hit his face.

While Kyle talked about creating the right voice for a blog, I wrote down everything I knew about Jessie Morgan in my notebook, hoping that something would give me a clue about why she left and what I should do.

• Boyfriend: Fish
  
• Best friend: Myra
  
• Class president—tube top?
  
• Smoker
  
• Slutty dresser
  
• Fake green contact lenses
  
• Got into trouble with Robbie all the time. What kind of trouble?
  
• Went to the bathroom, never came back. Alligators in the sewer?
  

I made myself laugh out loud. Kyle looked in my direction. I covered my mouth and pretended to cough. When he looked away, I drew a big, toothy alligator on the page, and then a sewer pipe, and then the entire plumbing system of a high school and the route the alligator would take to grab Jessie Morgan and bring her down to his underground sewer-pipe lair, like a crocodilian Phantom of the Opera. Then I drew Jessie Morgan wearing a tube top and sitting in a gondola with an alligator dressed in a white half mask and a cape pushing them along the sewer with a pole.

I can’t say I heard a single word Kyle or Michael, the next presenter, said. In fact, I hadn’t even noticed when Michael switched places with Kyle, but at least it looked like I was taking notes.

When I finally did look up, the PowerPoint slide read, “Mistakes to avoid” in big letters across the screen. I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking Michael, who had hair like a salt-and-pepper helmet, which mistakes we should embrace.

The longer I stayed in PR, the less faith I had in the abilities of PR execs to actually communicate, and the less I wanted to be one. The main focus of my job was preparing for the launch of a forty-proof alcoholic energy drink called Ivolushun, which was being marketed specifically to college kids, steroid-happy gym rats, and hipsters who would hopefully find something ironic about it.

The week before I left for Seattle, we had a meeting with the Ivolushun brand coordinator, who came into the office wearing a slim-cut maroon suit and about three bottles of drugstore cologne, and said, with a straight face, “We’re not legally allowed to call it an energy drink, so the campaign needs to convey energy without actually using the words ‘energy,’ ‘energetic,’ or ‘energified,’” as if he actually believed “energified” was a word.

It was easier to think about Jessie Morgan than it was to question my entire career path, so I went back to my notebook and listed things I needed to learn about Jessie.

• Find out where Jessie applied to college.
  
• What would she have majored in?
  
• How long did she date Fish?
  
• WHY DID SHE LEAVE?
  

At lunch, when I should have been mingling and making great corporate connections, I grabbed a sandwich and snuck out to the reunion room to look at Jessie Morgan’s picture again. I hoped I’d find some clue about who she might be now, but there was nothing. Her senior quote was, “The only thing we have to fear is . . . spiders.” She was voted most likely to rob a bank. And she was supposedly in the photography club, but she wasn’t in the photography club picture.

I sat on the table, ate my sandwich, and stared at all the faces. I tried to come up with the equivalents from my high school. Roy Dillard would have been Michael St. James. Katie Lewis was a dead ringer for Mary Colby. Jake Wooster was—

“Hiding out?” I hadn’t even heard Kyle come in, but there he was. I blushed, hoping he hadn’t been there long. When I get caught up in my thoughts, I tend to make faces as if I were having a conversation with someone, even though it’s just me and I’m not saying anything out loud. Not an attractive habit.

“Taking a break,” I said, wiping my mouth to make sure I didn’t have any crumbs or mayo stuck to my lips.

“Rough night?

“Long one, at least,” I said.

“So did you go to high school here?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I said, for lack of a better answer. My brain was slow and fuzzy from staying up so late two nights in a row.

“Well, that’s why I asked.”

“Mmm.” I raised my eyebrows and smiled.

He stared at me like he wasn’t quite sure what to say next.

“How about you,” I said. “Did you have a rough night?”

“Oh,” he said, rubbing his head, “it was a great night. It’s the morning that got rough.”

“That’s usually how it goes,” I said, even though I was the kind of girl who was in bed by eleven more often than not. He didn’t have to know.

“So,” Kyle said, pointing at all the pictures on the walls. “If I look, will I find you up here?”

I shrugged.

He walked over and leaned against the table where I was sitting and flashed me that purposefully shy smile again. “Think you’ll come out with us tonight?”

“That remains to be seen,” I said, and picked a slice of onion out of my sandwich.

It’s funny, because I pretty much threw myself at Deagan. Once he showed the slightest bit of interest in me, I jumped in and did all the rest of the work. I invited him places and schemed and tried so hard to get him to like me. But withholding the most inconsequential bits of information from Kyle seemed to be driving him crazy.

“You know,” he said, “it’s good team building. Going out with the group. You’ll make some connections.”

“Huh,” I said, laughing, “is that what they’re calling it these days?”

“Oh,” he said, holding his hand to his chest, in a gesture of mock seriousness. “You think I’m hitting on you?”

“You are,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ve got you figured out.” I don’t know where the confidence was coming from. It was like Jessie Morgan had taken over my brain in some kind of bad body-swap movie. Or maybe I was too tired or too caught up in the Jessie drama to care.

“You do?” Kyle said.

“Maybe.” It was stupid, the way I was playing with him. I wasn’t really interested. I liked feeling like I had power. Like if I wanted to, I could get a guy like Deagan to throw himself all over me. It didn’t fix anything, but it made me feel better.

“Well, if we don’t catch you in the lobby tonight, we’re headed to a place called Finaghty’s in Snoqualmie.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

“Just say yes,” he said. “Come with us.”

“We’ll see.”

He smiled and shook his head at me. “Well, I should head back in. Michael is starting up again in five minutes. Don’t be late. I’ll give you detention.”

“If I’m late,” I called after him, “I’ll make sure I have a hall pass.”

I was the last one back to the conference room, and a girl named Stacy, from San Diego, had taken my seat up front, across from Kyle. Mostly, I think, she sat there so she could force Kyle to pay attention to the way her boobs erupted from a black satin pushup bra, straining the buttons of her thin white shirt.

I sat at the far end of the table, opened my notebook, and wrote.

• Afraid of spiders
  
• Photography club
  

When I looked up, Kyle was watching me. He smiled when my eyes met his.

I added some torches to my alligator drawing.

“So, I’ll see you later,” Kyle said, when the lecture ended and everyone was filing out of the conference room.

He was so cocky. Like he knew he could have me if he wanted me. And I hated to admit it, but if I went out with them, he probably could. Because I liked feeling chosen. I liked that even though Stacy had her cleavage on full display, Kyle was looking at me. Kyle was asking me to come out with him, and that was exactly why I couldn’t go. I couldn’t be that girl anymore—the one who waited to be chosen. I was sure Jessie Morgan never waited around for anyone to choose her.

I
went to my
ten-year high school reunion. It was about two months before I met Deagan. I got brave and asked this guy, Noah, who I worked with, to go with me. Kind of like a friend thing, except I liked him and I guess he didn’t know that. He met some girl at a nightclub the weekend before, and they did that annoying thing where they started acting like they were totally in love immediately. He told me she was jealous of me, “Even though we’re just friends.” So at the last minute I ended up dateless.

In high school the closest friend I had was this guy named Mark Reed, who sat at the same lunch table with me, mostly because we weren’t wanted anywhere else. He had thick glasses that made his eyes look bigger than they were and orange freckles across his cheeks. Sometimes we’d do our chem homework together, and I’d share my pretzels with him.

He asked me out once. We’d been letting our legs touch under the table at lunch for, like, two weeks, when he finally asked me to go to the movies with him. But my mom was on a bad streak. I worried that if she found out I had a date, she’d go ballistic and call me a slut, like she did when some guy from the swim team prank called our house, pretending to be my boyfriend, during freshman year. Or she’d get manic and want to micromanage every single thing about the situation. Either way, I worried Mark would somehow end up getting hurt, and I liked him too much to let that happen.

I told Mark that I only liked him as a friend. “I just don’t like you that way,” I said. It was probably true. I didn’t have any burning desire to kiss Mark or be his girlfriend, but I was sad to pass up the chance to secure him as my friend. To lock it down.

He moved his knee away from mine. “Oh,” he said softly, blinking. “I’m sorry.” His glasses magnified the red creeping into his eyes. “To put you on the spot like that.”

“No,” I said. “It was nice of you.”

Even his freckles looked sad.

We still did our chem homework at lunch together for all of sophomore year, but he kept his legs directly in front of his chair, and if my knee happened to knock into his knee, he moved his leg away immediately. Junior year, we had different lunch periods and drifted apart. I ate alone in the library, hiding my baggie of pretzels in my lap and popping one in my mouth when the librarian wasn’t looking. Instead of real friends, I had Jane Austen and Willa Cather. I read my way through at least a third of the alphabet by the time I graduated. I took notes on the characters as I read, and at night, after I finished my homework, I painted them. My bedroom walls were covered with watercolors of Antonia, Emma, Anne with an
e
, Jo March, Jane Eyre, Scout, and Pip, the way other girls taped up torn pages from magazines and made photo collages of their friends.

Still, I thought, the one person it would be nice to see, the one reason for going to my high school reunion, was Mark Reed. He was always nice to me. He was probably doing interesting things now.

Plus my braces were long gone, my hair wasn’t as frizzy, and my skin had cleared up. I bought myself a new dress, and I felt like it would be nice to go and feel all grown-up. To feel like I’d moved on from all the bad stuff. To feel different. But when I got there, on a big board in the lobby with photos of people who weren’t able to attend, there was a picture of Mark Reed. Filled out and acne-free, wearing a tuxedo, walking on the beach at sunset with his beautiful bride.

It wasn’t like I’d hoped Mark and I would somehow fall madly in love or anything, but the fact that he had moved on and grown up so much that he didn’t even feel the need to go to the reunion so everyone could see how different and handsome and successful he was made me feel lonely and left behind.

Carla Carrigan talked to me for twenty minutes about her home-based cosmetic-sales business, until she realized that I wasn’t the girl who sat behind her in senior year social studies. “Oh no. Wait, that was Jenny Mulligan,” she said, smiling at me like I was some kind of freak who wasn’t worthy of hearing her new lip-gloss sales pitch. “Oh, you know, I think that’s Julia and . . .” She didn’t even finish her sentence. She just walked away.

I stared at people I’d barely known reuniting with people they’d actually cared about. I stood around listening to Ace of Base, drinking ginger ale, and eating cheap cheese on stale crackers, until the pathetic reality of my high school existence made me so overwhelmingly sad, so overtly aware of what I had missed, what was normal, what my mother never let me have, that I couldn’t stand it anymore. I worried I might scream or burst into flames or, worse, start crying. So I left. I decided there was no point in standing around waiting for someone to recognize me. No one knew who I was. No one cared.

On my way out, I ran into the Four Amigos. There were still four of them without me, because Rachel, Sheila, and Rachel K. adopted Jodie Moorehouse when she moved to our district from California, and they were all dying to learn how she got her hair so sun streaked and straight. Plus I think they realized that if they were friends with Jodie, when all the boys watched her, they would also be looking in the general direction of Sheila and the Rachels. Even when my mom was on a good streak, I had never brought that much attention to the table.

Jodie held her camera gingerly in her perfectly manicured hands, trying to get the other three to pose for a picture.

“Jenny Shaw?” Sheila said, as I walked past them.

“Hi, Sheila.”

“Jenny. You look fantastic. I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Thanks,” I said, because I had never learned the right way to address a backhanded compliment.

“Come on, girls,” Jodie said. “Do the thing.”

Sheila and the Rachels put their arms around each other and kicked their legs up like they were Rockettes.

“Oh, wait,” Sheila said. “Jenny . . .”

And for a split second I thought maybe they wanted me in the picture with them. The original Four Amigos. Maybe that summer we all spent together actually meant something to them too.

“Jodie,” Sheila said, “Jenny can take the picture. Get in here!”

“Do you mind, Jenny?” Jodie asked. It was one of those questions that wasn’t really a question. “We haven’t all been together like this in, what? Six months? It’s crazy!”

So I took the picture. I didn’t even do anything snotty like cut Rachel K. out of it or wait until Sheila was doing that funky “the flash is coming any second” kind of blink. I took a nice picture of them. It’s not like their friendship was there to hurt me. It’s not like I’d earned a place in their picture. I hadn’t been there to get ready for prom together. I hadn’t helped them nurse breakups with ice cream. I wasn’t a part of their group, and I’m not even sure if I wanted to be. I didn’t think they were the people I would choose as friends now, if I could, but feeling excluded made my throat tighten and my eyes water, even though maybe I was supposed to be too mature for those kinds of feelings.

“Great! Let’s get one more!” Regular Rachel said. “How about one where we’re all Charlie’s Angels?” She clasped her hands together with her index fingers out like she was holding a gun.

“That’s cheesy,” Rachel K. said.

“Oh,” Sheila said, “let’s just get a nice normal picture.”

Then Jodie said something, but I don’t know what, because I’d rested her camera on the table behind me and walked away before any of them noticed.