“You’ll have to ask Victor about that,” he’d told me.
“Okay, how do I do that?” I’d asked, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. It wasn’t Yaron’s fault he worked for a complete ass.
Yaron had just shrugged. “If he wants to be in touch, he’ll be in touch. Meanwhile, my instructions are to make sure you stay here until he says otherwise.”
So no, that conversation hadn’t made me feel great about myself. I was basically wiling the months away until Victor felt like paying me a visit. Hopefully, Lena could make do with phone calls until then.
“Ah, actually, I won’t be here this fall,” Lena answered. “I got into med school last minute.”
I paused in the middle of taking another sip of wine. “What? Where?”
Lena and I had applied to all the same programs our last year at Mount Holyoke, and as far as I knew, she hadn’t even made the wait-list at any of them.
“Kind of far away,” Lena admitted. “Out in California. Get this. My dad applied for me behind my back! It’s so crazy that I actually got in.”
I wanted to be happy for Lena, but…
“That’s really far away. What is Keane saying about you going to school all the way out in California?”
As it turned out, I had totally been right about something going down at spring break. Lena had hooked up with Keane, this college hockey player she used to know back in high school. It ended badly, but then he got drafted by the Boston Hawks and begged her to forgive him when they ran into each other at the place where she was interning that summer.
She’d forgiven him, alright. And from what I’d heard on our calls which I deliberately kept one-sided, it had been a total summer of love. I’d never heard Lena sound as happy as she had these last three months, dating her crazy hot hockey player.
The truth was, I’d been kind of jealous that she’d unexpectedly started living her best life. Her romance with Keane was going great, and she adored her internship at this therapy collective, called the Institute for Better Boys. She’d even started talking about letting go of her father’s med school dream and applying to a few grad programs to pursue a degree in child psychology.
So, I really didn’t understand why she was so hot to leave all that behind for med school in California.
“Oh, Keane…” Lena’s voice became a lot less cheery. “I broke up with him.”
“You broke up with him?” I repeated. “Why? He’s been so great to you. Plus, he’s, like, famous and insanely hot. Are you out of your mind?”
“No, just the opposite. I’m being practical. I mean, Keane and I don’t really make any sense. He’s this big deal hockey player, and I’m just me. I doubt we would have lasted much longer, even if I had stayed in Boston.”
Anger surged through me. “What? How can you say that?”
It was like Lena was writing a revisionist history about what had gone down this summer. Unlike her college boyfriend, Keane had treated her like gold. Even though he was a professional hockey player, he’d made her a top priority. Also…“You two were so happy. Do you think those kinds of relationships just happen all the time?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it one way or the other,” Lena answered, her voice careful like she was talking to one of the kids with mental health issues at her internship. “I mean, I’m only twenty-two. I shouldn’t be thinking about relationships right now. I should be thinking about my career. Like you.”
“No, not like me,” I insisted. But then I had to stop because how I was supposed to conclude that argument. With the truth that I wasn’t interning in New York on the cusp of medical school because I’d been revenge married to a Chinese gangster who thought I’d betrayed him?
Still, it made me so mad that she was just throwing her healthy relationship away. I ended up giving Lena an excuse to get off the phone just a few minutes later. And I couldn’t force any enthusiasm into my voice when I congratulated her on being accepted into med school before I hung up.
If I still had my freedom, I would’ve gone up there and talked her out of moving halfway across the country. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
Which made me feel like a shit friend.
That was why I decided not to answer the next time she called.
What was the point? It wasn’t like I could be the best friend she deserved from inside this prison.
So September, the first whole month I’d gone without talking to my best friend in the four years since we met at first-year orientation, came and went.
In October, I couldn’t take just cooking and drinking all the time. Cooking really nice meals and drinking really nice wines, to be fair—I’d leveled way up from Mike’s Hard Lemonade and pizza delivery. But no matter how much fine wine and food I threw at my situation, I couldn’t escape the gut feeling that I should be doing something more with my life.
So I opened Craigslist and started applying for jobs. The pickings were slim thanks to the recession. But luckily, I didn’t really need the money. I found a part-time position at this daycare center in Lower South Providence that paid just enough to be cool with the government. They were also okay with me only having a semester of work-study hours at Mount Holyoke’s campus childcare center on my resume as proof that I could handle taking care of kids. So perfect match.
I also joined a gym and got to work exercising off all the chub I’d accumulated in college and during my summer of cooking.
By the spring, I’d lost nearly 40 pounds.
I still wasn’t a size negative zero like some of the girls I went to school with in Japan. But Mom was over the moon. She gave me all the compliments on my dramatic weight loss. She even offered to fly out to New York to go shopping with me for new clothes. “I’ll pay, and you can show me around your med school!”
After a lifetime of constant criticism, it felt amazing and new to finally have her complete approval. Too bad only the losing weight part wasn’t a lie.
With a guilty heart, I answered, “I wish I could, mom, but I can’t take any time off to shop. Med school is brutal.”
She was a lot easier than Lena to put off when prioritizing studies over visits. But she asked for my address and my new size. “If I see something cute, I’ll send it to you. One of the ladies at my church buys all her daughter’s clothes. She’s in med school over at UT, and she never has time to shop either. I want to do something like that to help you.”
Ugh. I could not have felt any guiltier as I answered, “Um, I’m still trying to go down a few sizes. I don’t want to give up on my real goal because I have cute clothes that fit.”
“Great idea!” Mom agreed. Her voice was impressed as if I’d come up with a possible solution to climate change. “Get down to your best size, and then I’ll send you new clothes, and we will start looking for a husband.”
We. I was not looking forward to dodging her matchmaking efforts. Luckily, Mom honestly believed I had another ten to twenty pounds to go before I was pretty enough to catch a man. So I’d probably be able to put those conversations off for a few more months.
I didn’t tell her guys were already starting to pay me more attention.