My best friend laughs. “Hardly. I’ve just been chained in the middle of The Fish Shack’s dining room.”
“Yikes. Do they at least feed you?”
“They did, but fried flounder gets old after a while, you know? The worst part is the shame. Everyone can come there and see me. They keep the chain tied to a collar around my neck, and on game nights, they let the rival team throw rotting vegetables at me.”
I laugh again. Eight years as friends and Lee still manages to lift me up each time she opens her mouth.
“God, Lee, what the hell?” I ask between spurts of giggles. “That is messed up.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry.” She’s not, though. I can practically hear the grin on her face.
“So how are things in old Manteo?”
“What do you think? Basically the same. Everyone asks me about you, like, every single shift.”
I crinkle my nose and push my sunglasses tighter against my face. “Really?”
“Really. They think you’re already majorly successful. They want to know if your first film has a release date yet.”
“Why? Just because I haven’t come back?”
“Yep. Precisely.”
“Ha. Well, I only just got out of school, so there’s still plenty of time left to fail.”
“Hey, as long as you don’t come back here, everyone’s going to think you’re a big time director.”
I pull my legs up onto the wooden bench, crossing them. “If only it were so easy.”
“How’s your new job?”
I open my mouth to answer, about to tell her about Mr. Mulroney, then hesitate. Now that I’ve committed to the decision to basically ignore him, everything is so much less complicated. In fact, I don’t even need to talk about it anymore. It’s old news. It’s time to focus on the good and what’s to come.
“It’s nice,” I answer. “It’s just office work, but I’m on one of the biggest studio lots in the world, working for the head of the company.”
“Wow,” she breathes. “It sounds kind of intense.”
I give that some thought. “Not as intense as it should be. My boss is a no show half the time, so it’s not as stressful as I think it would be in another studio office.”
“Hey, that’s pretty sweet. Are you learning anything?”
“It’s a little soon to say. Does how to live without any view from the window count?”
“Definitely. And at least the job is something to put on your resume.”
“Right.” I nod, though she obviously can’t see me.
“Oh my gosh,” Lee gasps. “Guess who I saw yesterday?”
“Who?” I ask, glancing over at the young couple just arriving at the overlook. They clasp hands and stare out at the view, their backs turned to me. The scene is sweet and sickening at the same time.
“Brendan.”
I don’t say anything. The name comes with waves upon waves of connotations, and I’m a little too busy drowning underneath them all to respond.
“Sydney? Did you hear me? I saw Brendan.”
I clear my throat. “Cool,” I feebly respond.
Her voice grows lower, uncertain. “Should I not have told you?”
“No,” I quickly say. “It’s fine.”
“He asked about you.”
I play with the hem of my shorts while staring down at my lap. Lee’s announcement is unexpected, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. If you want to get cheesy about the whole thing, you could call Brendan my high school sweetheart. We dated for four years, including the first two I was away at school in California.
It’s been almost a year since I saw him, and it did not go well. Even though we’d been broken up for a while, I still left the house party in Manteo a complete wreck after seeing him there with another girl.
Details? Okay. I drunkenly cried in the back of Lee’s car while she drove me to her mom’s house where I then fell asleep on the living room floor — still crying over Brendan.
And we hadn’t even said much. It had just been a simple, “Hi, how are you?” and a “Good. How are you?”
But just like that, old wounds had been opened up.
Sometimes, when I allowed myself time to think about it, I wondered why Brendan and I broke up in the first place. Distance was an issue, of course. And sometimes it seemed we just didn’t have much in common anymore.
Sometimes I think that I was too pushy. I wanted him to move out to California, and it was clear he wasn’t feeling the idea. Perhaps if I had just given him his space, we would have eventually come to some kind of agreement. Instead, I brought it up all the time until the weight of the decision just hung over our heads like a heavy cloud, discoloring every conversation we had.