Getting Over Garrett Delaney (18 page)

Besides, if I don’t like this look, I can always try a new one.

“There he is, the nerd himself!” LuAnn calls ahead. Josh is just up the street, feeding quarters into the meter. “Sorry,” she adds cheerily, greeting him with a kiss on the cheek. “I meant geek.”

“How’d it go?” He takes a look at our armfuls of bags and then laughs. “Wait, don’t answer that.”

“This? Ha. It was a slow day.” LuAnn starts piling things onto the backseat.

“You kept up with them? I’m impressed,” Josh tells me as I pass over my own bags. I shrug, suddenly self-conscious.

“How was the harbor, or wherever you went?” I ask, too aware of his eyes flicking over me. But despite the fact that I started the day a gawky girl with overgrown bangs and came back looking completely different, he doesn’t seemed surprised, just … curious.

“Fun.” Josh breaks into a smile, waiting until all of our bags are unloaded before locking up again. “I walked the whole city.”

“Great.” We start to head up the street to the venue, where a line is already snaking back from the doors. “Well, great for you,” I correct myself. “I think I was better with the shopping.”

He laughs. “To each his own.”

“Josh!” Aiko suddenly elbows him. “You haven’t said anything about Sadie’s new look!”

“Ooh, yes. Tell us what you think,” LuAnn insists. “Gorgeous or what?”

“Guys!” I protest, flushing. “Stop it.” I turn to him quickly. “You really don’t have to answer that.”

“Yes, he does!” LuAnn nudges him from the other side, joining Aiko in an elbow onslaught until Josh is bent double, laughing.

“OK, OK.” He pulls away from them. “It’s, uh, nice.”

Nice? I blink. Is that a good thing?

“Nice?
Nice?
” LuAnn screeches. “Boy, you need help. Sadie is a work of art. A vision. A dream!”

“LuAnn.” I blush, pained. “Please … ?”

She must see the embarrassment on my face, because she stops her theatrics. “Oh, fine.” She sighs. “He’s a boy, ‘nice’ is like a soliloquy from them. We’re lucky he didn’t just grunt.”

The doors finally open, and the line begins to inch forward. “You ready?” Aiko asks me, rolling up her sleeve in preparation for the underage wristband. I pause. If I was with my dad, we would already be inside by now: me camped out on a prime stool at the bar with a lemonade while he trades touring war stories with roadies and bouncers he knows from way back when. But even though I’ll probably spend the gig crushed up with everyone else on the main floor, getting my toes trampled by some overenthusiastic frat boys from Vermont, I’m actually more excited than ever. I’m in the city for a show with my new friends, and if that sounds simple to you, then you clearly have a way more exciting high-school life than I do.

I grin, giving my head a tiny shake to feel the curls flutter against my face. Suddenly the dress doesn’t feel so foreign; the armful of cool carved bangles I picked out feels just perfect. It’s different, sure, but as I’m finally starting to see, different can be good.

“Ready!”

It’s time to get ruthless. Living in a shrine to your failed non-relationship isn’t helping with this whole moving on thing, so something’s got to give. And that something is every photo, every gift he gave you, and every crappy mix CD he made full of depressing British indie bands from the 1980s.

Get thee gone.

Keep a couple of mementos, sure, for when you’re way older and wiser — like, in college — and can laugh about the time you wasted on him. But for now, that crap needs to be stuffed in a shoe box on the very back shelf of your closet — out of sight and even further out of mind.

“One copy of The Smiths’
Meat Is Murder
?”

“Donate.”

“A program from the Sherman Amateur Dramatic Society production of
Brigadoon
?”

“Trash.”

“The collected poems of Rainer Maria Rilke?”

“Keep!”

Kayla pauses rifling through the great piles of my possessions littering my bedroom floor. Like me, her hair is tied back and she’s wearing her oldest jeans; unlike me, she’s armed with a garbage bag and a look of steely determination. “Sadie …” she warns, her tone exasperated.

“I like Rilke!” I protest. “‘Live the questions now,’ ” I quote. “See? It has nothing to do with Garrett.”

Kayla flips the book open and reads the inscription. “‘Sadie, Happy Hanukkah. Love, Garrett.’”

I snatch it away from her. “So he likes Rilke, too. I am allowed to keep
some
stuff!”

“You said you needed my help,” Kayla cries. “Total Garrett detoxification. But we’re not even halfway through your library, and you keep wanting to save things.”

“But look at everything I’m donating.” I point to the not-at-all-insubstantial stack of books, movies, and CDs that I’ve decided to purge from my life. Sure, my mom reorganized the place just six weeks ago, but that was merely a surface job. This? This is an archaeological excavation we’re on here; delving through the sands of time and/or my hoarding habit to find every Garrett-related artifact and purge it from my life. Everything I have only because of Garrett goes, that’s the rule. No exceptions, no excuses. It’s time I figure out what
I
like for myself.

At least, that’s the theory. But watching Kayla toss aside my precious memories with such casual disregard is too much for my sentimental heart to take. “Not that!” I yelp as she grabs a handful of faded old flyers from my dresser.

“This?” Kayla holds up a crumpled blue sheet of paper. “‘Library sale, Wednesday, 2 p.m.’ Wow.” She laughs, “I can see why you want the reminder … from two years ago.”

“It was the first time Garrett and I hung out.” I take it from her and smooth out the paper, remembering how nervous and excited I’d been. Meeting him by accident was one thing, but the first real, live plans we made? That was momentous. “It stays.”

Kayla sighs. “OK, let me see it.” I pass it back to her, but she doesn’t pause for a split second before announcing “Nope!” and ripping the flyer in two.

I let out another yelp. She rips the pieces again. I whimper.

“Sadie!” She laughs. “Get a grip. These are just things, remember?”

“They’re memories.” I look around, feeling a pang. “And once he’s gone, they’re all I’ll have left of him. Don’t you keep things from Blake, to remember all the time you’ve spent together?”

Kayla shakes her head. “Not like this. Photos are memories. Special gifts are memories. A room full of junk is just a creepy stalker shrine.”

“I’m not creepy!” I object. She doesn’t reply, just holds up an old shirt of Garrett’s I “borrowed” six months ago and conveniently forgot to return.

“When was the last time you washed this?”

“Um, never?” I reply in a small voice. “I didn’t want to lose the scent of him!”

“Just listen to yourself.” Kayla shakes her head in despair. “Personal hygiene isn’t negotiable!”

I blink.

“You’re right,” I say in shock. “What have I become?”

And just like that, I see the clutter for what it really is: sad, pathetic hoarding, a testament to my powers of denial and self-delusion. But no more.

“Trash it!” I say, a new surge of energy coursing through my veins. “Trash everything!”

“Yes, ma’am!” Kayla grins as I tear into the stack of stuff anew. All those dreary indie bands that Garrett loves so? Gone! The endless parade of books about twenty-something men having identity crises in Brooklyn? Out of here! My shelf of snooty foreign films about existentialism and the constant betrayal of death?
¡Adiós, amigos!

Soon, the garbage bags are filled to overflowing and everything useful is packed up and ready to take to Goodwill. “Somewhere, a pretentious teenage boy is about to get very lucky,” I joke, hauling the last box to the doorway.

“Wow.” Kayla exhales, sinking onto the bed. “It’s like a blank canvas. You can be whoever you want now.”

I sit next to her, taking in the spaces on my shelves and the white gaps on my walls where my set of Criterion Collection movie posters used to hang. She’s right — it is kind of … freeing, to be rid of it all. I’m liberated from reminders of that pining, angst-ridden past: no signs of Garrett hanging around, waiting to fill me with indecision and second thoughts. Now I just have a few boxes of photos and gifts stored away, safely out of sight in the top of my wardrobe.

But how empty the room looks is heartbreaking in a whole different way.

“Was I really this pathetic?” I ask quietly.

Kayla turns to me in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“Beth said once that it was obvious how much I loved him, that I trailed around like some kind of puppy.” I gulp, anxious. “Is that what everyone thought?”

“No!” Kayla gives me a hug. “I mean, we knew you were superclose. It just seemed like … you were in your own world together — that’s all.”

“Really? Because I want to know if it was a running joke or something.”

“I swear.” Kayla squeezes my shoulder. “To tell the truth, some girls were kind of jealous of you. Garrett’s up there on the school hot list.”

“He is?”

“No idea why.” She laughs.

“Yeah, yeah, pretentious jerk, I know.” I manage a smile. “But he wasn’t, not to me. He still isn’t,” I add. “But I just can’t believe I ended up like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like my entire world revolved around him. I didn’t even realize — that’s the crazy thing,” I tell her. “All this time, I’ve been walking around thinking I’m some strong, independent girl who would never lose her head over a boy. And it turns out, I’m nothing but a Garrett clone.”

“You’re not!” Kayla protests, grinning. “You have way better hair.”

I laugh, despite myself.

“It’s OK,” she tells me. “We all go crazy for a guy sometimes. And then we date him, figure out he’s not this perfect mythical god, and get over it. Maybe that was your thing,” she suggests. “You never got together with him, so he stayed up on the Perfect Boyfriend pedestal.”

“Maybe.” I look around. “Anyway, come on. Let’s get this stuff into the garage.”

Kayla pulls me to my feet. “You know what the best thing is about this clear-out?” she asks, hoisting two bags of trash down the hall.

I struggle under the weight of the boxes. “I don’t have to go to sleep with Vladimir Nabokov staring down at me?”

“Sure, that, but also you’ll be able to bring guys back here now.”

“Guys?” I laugh, following her downstairs. “What guys? Aside from Garrett, the only man ever to step foot in my room was there to fix the heat.”

Kayla grins. “Exactly! But that’s all going to change. And when you do bring a guy up to, ahem,
pretend
to watch a movie, he won’t take one look around and run.”

“OK, now you’re just exaggerating.”

“Trust me on this, Sadie. Obsession is not cute in a date, especially if they’re obsessed with someone else.” Kayla dumps her bags in the garage. “It’s like those girls who collect dolls or have a wall full of kitten posters.
You
might want to look up at adorable bundles of fluff every night, but just think how it looks to someone else. You know Lizzie Jordan, right?”

I shake my head.

“Junior, blondish, student council?’

I shake my head again.

“Sadie!” Kayla sighs as we head back into the kitchen. “You’re oblivious. Anyway, she was dating Chris Leeds last year. They’d hung out a little, nothing serious. He goes over there to “study,” walks into her room, and finds pictures of her ex everywhere. Like, everywhere! He dumped her like that.” She snaps her fingers. “Now everyone thinks she’s a psycho bunny boiler.” She goes to the fridge and pulls out a jug of lemonade.

“Charming.”

“But true.” Kayla shrugs. “Anyway, don’t worry, we’ve saved you from that fate.”

“For which I’ll always be grateful.” I laugh. “No, seriously, thanks for helping out with this. I know it’s not the ideal way to spend your Saturday.”

“No problem.” She shrugs again. “These days, if it doesn’t include an army of evil brats, I’m in.”

“Didn’t you have plans with Blake?”

She shakes her head, following me out into the backyard with the drinks. “He’s with his family on some trip to Philadelphia this weekend.”