When we broke up in April, it really did come out of nowhere. Yes, we’d had little fights here and there, but you could hardly even call them fights.
Like, there was this time Shay was having a party at her godmother’s country house. She invited a ton of people, and she said I could bring Jeremiah, too. We were gonna get dressed up and dance outside all night long. We’d all just crash there for the weekend, Shay said—it would be a blast. I was just happy to be included. I told Jeremiah about it, and he said he had an intramural soccer game but I should go anyway. I said, “Can’t you just miss it? It’s not like it’s a real game.” It was a bitchy thing to say, but I said it, and I meant it.
That was our first fight. Not a real fight, not like yelling or anything, but he was mad and so was I.
We always hung out with his friends. In a way it made sense. He already had them, and I was still forming mine. It took time to get close to people, and with me at his frat house all the time, the girls on my hall were bonding without me. I felt like I had given something up without even realizing it. When Shay invited me, that meant a lot, and I wanted it to mean something to Jere, too.
And there were other things, too, that annoyed me. Things I’d never known about Jeremiah, things I couldn’t have known from only seeing him in the summer at the beach house. Like how obnoxious he was when he smoked weed with his suitemates and they ate pineapple-and-ham pizza and listened to “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio and they would laugh for, like, an hour.
Also his seasonal allergies. I’d never seen him in the springtime, so I didn’t know he had them.
He called me, sneezing like crazy, all stuffed up and pitiful. “Can you come over and hang out with me?” he asked, blowing his nose. “And can you bring more Kleenex? And orange juice?”
I bit my lip to keep from saying, You have allergies, not swine flu.
I’d gone over to his frat house the day before. He and his roommate played video games while I did my homework. Then we watched a Kung Fu movie and ordered Indian food, even though I didn’t really like to eat Indian food because it gave me an upset stomach after. Jeremiah said that when his allergies got really bad, Indian food was the only thing that would make him feel better. I ate naan and rice and felt pissed while Jeremiah scarfed down chicken tikka masala and watched his movie. He could be really oblivious sometimes, and I had to wonder if it was on purpose.
“I really want to come over, but I have a paper that’s due tomorrow,” I said, trying to sound conflicted about it. “So I probably shouldn’t. Sorry.”
“Well, I guess I could go there,” he said. “I’ll take a ton of Benedryl and sleep while you write. Then maybe we can order Indian food again.”
“Yeah,” I said, sourly. “We could do that.” At least I wouldn’t have to take the bus. But I would have to go to the hall bathroom and get a roll of toilet paper, because Jillian would be pissed if Jeremiah used all her Kleenex again.
I didn’t know then that all of that was setting the stage for our first real fight. We had one of those screaming and crying kind of fights, the kind I promised myself I would never have. I’d heard Jillian have them over the phone, girls on my hall, Taylor. I never thought it would be me. I thought Jeremiah and I understood each other too well, had known each other too long, for that kind of fight.
A fight is like a fire. You think you have it under control, you think you can stop it whenever you want, but before you know it, it’s a living, breathing thing and there’s no controlling it and you were a fool to think you could.
At the last minute, Jeremiah and his fraternity brothers decided to go to Cabo over spring break. They’d found some insane deal on the Internet.
I was already planning on going home over the break. My mom and I were going to go into the city and watch a ballet, and Steven would be at home too. So I wanted to be at home, I really did. But as I watched Jeremiah book his trip, I felt more and more resentful. He was supposed to be going home too. Now that Conrad was in California, Mr. Fisher was pretty much alone. Jeremiah had said he wanted to go and spend some time with him, maybe visit Susannah’s grave together. We’d also talked about going to Cousins for a couple of days. Jeremiah knew how much I wanted to go to Cousins. He knew how much it meant to me. I’d done more growing up in that house than I had in my own. And with Susannah gone, it felt even more important that we kept going back.
Now he was going to Cabo. Without me.
“Do you really think you should be going to Cabo?” I asked him. He was sitting at his desk, hunched over the computer and typing away. I was sitting on his bed.
He looked up, surprised. “It’s too good of a deal to pass up. Besides, all my brothers are going. I can’t miss out.”
“Yeah, but I thought you were gonna go home and hang out with your dad.”
“I can do that over summer break.”
“Summer’s still months away.” I crossed my arms then uncrossed them.
Jeremiah frowned. “What’s this about? Are you worried about me going on spring break without you?”
I could feel my cheeks redden. “No! You can go wherever you want, I don’t care. I just think that it would be nice if you spent some time with your dad. And your mom’s headstone is up. I thought you wanted to go see it.”
“Yeah, I do, but I can do all that after school’s out. You can come with me.” He peered at me. “Are you jealous?”
“No!”
He was grinning now. “Worried about all the wet T-shirt contests?”
“No!” I hated that he was making this into a joke. It was infuriating, being the only one who was mad.
“If you’re so worried, then just come with us. It’ll be fun.”
He did not say, If you are worried, you shouldn’t be. He said, If you are worried, you should come with us. I knew he didn’t mean it that way, but it still bothered me.
“You know I can’t afford it. Besides, I don’t want to go to Cabo with you and your ‘bros.’ I’m not going to go and be the only girlfriend and drag down your party.”
“You wouldn’t be. Josh’s girlfriend, Alison, is going to be there,” Jeremiah said.
So Alison had been invited and not me? I sat up straight. “Alison’s going with you guys?”
“It’s not like that. Alison’s going with her sorority. They’re getting a bunch of rooms at the same resort as us. That’s how we found out about the deal. But it’s not like we’ll be hanging out with them all the time. We’re gonna do guy stuff, like off-road racing in the desert. Rent some ATVs, go rappelling, stuff like that.”
I stared at him. “So while you race around with your buddies in the desert, you want me to hang out with a bunch of girls I don’t know?”
He rolled his eyes. “You know Alison. You guys were beer-pong partners in our house tournament.”
“Whatever. I’m not going to Cabo. I’m going home. My mom misses me.” What I didn’t say was, your dad misses you too.
When Jeremiah just shrugged, like, Have it your way, I thought, oh, what the hell, I’ll say it. “Your dad misses you too.”
“Oh my God. Belly, just admit that this isn’t about my dad. You’re paranoid about me going on spring break without you.”
“Why don’t you admit that you didn’t want me to go in the first place, then?”
He hesitated. I saw him hesitate. “Fine. Yeah, I wouldn’t mind if this was just a guys’ trip.”
Standing up, I said, “Well, it sounds like there will be plenty of girls there. Have fun with the Zetas.”
Now his neck started to turn a dull red. “If you don’t trust me by now, I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve never done anything to make you question me. And Belly, I really don’t need you guilt tripping me about my dad.”
I started putting my shoes on, and I was so mad, my hands shook as I tried to lace up my sneakers. “I can’t even believe how selfish you are.”
“Me? I’m the selfish one now?” He shook his head, his lips tight. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but then he closed it.
“Yes, you are definitely the selfish one in this relationship. It’s always about you, your friends, your stupid fraternity. Have I told you I think your fraternity is stupid? Because I do.”
In a low voice, he said, “What’s so stupid about it?”
“It’s just a bunch of entitled rich guys spending their parents’ money, cheating on tests with your test bank, going to class wasted.”
Looking hurt, he said, “We’re not all like that.”
“I didn’t mean you.”
“Yeah, you did. What, just because I’m not pre-med, that makes me this lazy frat guy?”
“Don’t put your inferiority complex on me,” I said. I said it without thinking. It was something I had thought before but never voiced. Conrad was the one who was pre-med. Conrad was the one at Stanford, working a part-time job at a lab. Jeremiah was the one who told people he majored in beerology.
He stared. “What the hell does that mean, ‘inferiority complex’?”
“Forget it,” I said. Too late, I could see things had gone farther than I had intended. I wanted to take it all back.
“If you think I’m so stupid and selfish and wasteful, why are you even with me?”
Before I could answer, before I could say, You’re not stupid or selfish or wasteful, before I could end the fight, Jeremiah said, “Fuck it. I won’t waste your time anymore. Let’s end it now.”
And I said, “Fine.”
I grabbed my book bag, but I didn’t leave right away. I was waiting for him to stop me. But he didn’t.
I cried the whole way home. I couldn’t believe that we had broken up. It didn’t feel real. I expected Jeremiah to call me that night. It was a Friday. He left for Cabo on Sunday morning, and he didn’t call then, either.
My spring break consisted of me moping around the house, eating chips, and crying. Steven said, “Chill out. The only reason he hasn’t called you is that it’s too expensive to make a call from Mexico. You guys will be back together by next week, guaranteed.”
I was pretty sure he was right. Jeremiah just needed some space. Okay, that was fine. When he got back, I would go to him and tell him how sorry I was, and I would fix things, and it would be like it never happened.
Steven was right. We did get back together a week later. I did go to him and apologize, and he apologized too. I never asked him if anything happened in Cabo. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me to wonder. This was a boy who had loved me my whole life, and I was a girl who believed in that love. In that boy.
Jere brought me back a shell bracelet. Little white puka shells. It had made me so happy. Because I knew that he had been thinking of me, that he had missed me as much as I had missed him. He knew like I knew that it wasn’t over between us, that it would never be over. He spent that whole week after spring break in my room, hanging out with me and not his fraternity brothers. It drove my roommate Jillian crazy, but I didn’t care. I felt closer to him than ever. I missed him even when he was in class.
But now I knew the truth. He bought me that stupid cheap bracelet because he felt guilty. And I was so desperate to make up, I hadn’t seen it.
