Burning The Map. Laura Caldwell
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The concierge, a different one from the night before, raises his eyebrows as I burst into the lobby. I give him a quick half smile, feeling undressed and dirty from his leer. Rather than wait for the elevator under his scrutiny, I take the stairs two at a time.
When I open the door, the room feels dark and cool. Kat is sleeping in a little pink T-shirt on top of her sheets. She seems to be without Guiseppe, but one can never be sure where guys are lurking when Kat’s around. Lindsey, though, is wide-awake. She’s sitting on her bed, headphones stuck in her ears, a Scott Turow novel resting on her knees. She’s studying it with intense concentration, as if she’s reading an ancient scroll depicting the hidden tomb of a pharaoh.
“Hi,” I whisper, waving my arms, trying to catch her attention and avoid waking Kat, although the fact is that Kat could sleep through an avalanche.
“Sin,” I say a little louder. “Sorry I’m late.”
I cross the room and stand right next to her, but she won’t look up from her book. She’s ignoring me. I feel my stomach drop.
I despise fights. I suppose it has something to do with the utter lack of conflict in my family. Even now, in the midst of their problems, my parents rarely duke it out. Instead, they stifle, pout, avoid and cry a lot. I guess I just never learned to do confrontation well, which is one of the reasons why I’m so nervous about practicing law. Litigation is inherently confrontational, a world of egos and bullshit and fighting for fighting’s sake. I didn’t really choose to go into it. Instead, it seemed to choose me during my summer associate position, when the firm kept pairing me with the trial group, telling me that my outgoing personality was perfect for it. Maybe, but I’m not well-suited for clashes with friends.
I nudge Lindsey with my knee, and she finally looks up at me, clicking off her Walkman with a punch of her finger.
“Where were you?” she says, her voice hard and demanding, and it hits me that Sin should be the trial lawyer, not me. She’s much better at intimidation and interrogation.
I try to ignore her tone. “I’m so sorry I’m late, but you won’t believe it. It’s the best story. We—”
“You were supposed to meet us here at midnight,” she says, interrupting me. “Last night.”
“I’m really, really sorry.”
She gives a short, bitter laugh that sounds like gunfire.
“We fell asleep,” I say, wanting to make this better, to tell her all about my night, but she shoots me a look that could wither roses.
All at once, my natural inclination to avoid conflict dissipates. She had reason to be worried when I didn’t come home last night, maybe even to be annoyed, but she’s ruining the first honestly good mood I’ve had in months.
“What?” I say, my voice a fierce whisper. “How come Kat gets to pick up every guy from here to Munich, but when I meet one person, you act like the Gestapo?”
Our voices have roused Kat, who sits up on her cot, watching us in silence. I wonder for a second if she heard my comment and is pissed off, but I dismiss the thought. If there’s anyone who hates confrontation more than me, it’s Kat. Like me, she probably gets this trait from her parents. After they divorced, they both kept a room in each of their homes for her, but they were more interested in dating and their careers than they were in Kat. She’d tried to scream and yell, she’d told me. She’d thrown some fantastic tantrums, but the parent of the moment would simply ship her back to the other like a UPS package. Kat doesn’t scream or yell much anymore.
Now she sits on her bed, biting a thumbnail, and I can almost imagine her as a little kid with her thumb in her pretty mouth.
“Well, for one thing,” Sin says, “you have a boyfriend.”
“I’m well aware of that,” I say in a haughty tone. How dare she remind me?
“And for another thing, Kat always comes home when she says she will. She’s around when you need her. She’s a friend.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just that…” Lindsey stops, pursing her lips as if trying to gather the right words in her mouth. This makes her look like my mother right before she’s about to lay some doozy of a revelation on me, like how she’s started masturbating again after a twenty-year hiatus.
“It’s just that what you did last night,” Sin says, “blowing us off—it’s basically what you’ve been doing for the last two years.”
Her words hit me like a slap. I sense some shred of reality there, but it seems like an overstatement, a gross generalization.
“I’ve never said I’d be somewhere and didn’t show up.”
“No, maybe not like that, but you’ve been avoiding us since you started dating John. You never call. You never have time to go out with us anymore. And when we finally do get together, once in a great while, it’s like you’re not really there. You’re just different. You’re not like you used to be.”
I can’t believe she’s saying this. Maybe I’ve been a little detached lately, but I’ve been studying for a goddamned living. My life hasn’t exactly been a Martha Stewart picnic.
I turn to Kat. “Is that what you think, too?”
“Oh, honey.” She rises to come to me, putting her arm around my shoulders. “It’s just that we wish you were around more. We wish it was like the old days.”
“That’s not fair,” I say, jabbing a finger at Lindsey. “You haven’t been around all that much either, you know.” Lindsey’s been putting in ten-to twelve-hour days and lots of weekends at her ad agency. She wants to make vice president within the next year and be the youngest VP ever.
“That’s true,” she says, “but I’m going to change that. I have to.”
“Well, things will never be exactly like they were in college, and you can’t expect them to be.”
“Maybe it’s not fair, sweetie,” Kat says, “but what Sin’s talking about is true. You’re not the same person we used to know. I mean, I know you’re in there somewhere.” She squeezes my shoulders. “I just haven’t seen you in so long, and when I do get to actually go out with you, it doesn’t seem like you’re having much fun.”
“I had fun last night.” I shake her arms off me.
“It’s okay,” Kat says. “We just miss you.”
I know what she means. I miss me, too, sometimes. I drop my head in my hands.
But as I sit there, some realization dawns. I raise my face. “Wait a minute. You’ve felt like this for two years, and you’ve never said a word?” I’d been a tad mopey for a while, particularly this summer, but they’re talking about two years. The whole time I’ve been dating John.
I leave Kat’s side and walk across the room to the window. Across the way, I see a couple on their terrace reading papers, eating grapefruit.
I turn back to Kat and Sin, sitting side by side. It’s me against them right now, and I hate it.
Kat looks down, then back up at me. Sin shrugs. “We knew you were in love with him.”
“You’re supposed to be my best friends. How can you be pissed off at me for years and not say a word?”
Kat blinks a few times like a stumped contestant on Jeopardy.
“We were just hoping it would go away,” Sin says.
Her words feel like a betrayal. All this time, I keep thinking. All this time they’ve been holding it back. We used to be the kind of friends who said anything and everything to each other, the minute the thought occurred to us.
“Hideous,” Kat would say when I came down the stairs of the sorority