Page 67 of We Are Okay

She takes her hand away but the imprint is still there, a spot of warmth on the glass.

“When I was waiting for my parents at the airport, I kept thinking of something I wanted to ask you.”

“Okay,” I say.

She’s quiet.

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve just been wondering if there’s anyone here you’re interested in.”

She’s flushed and nervous, but trying to hide it.

“Oh,” I say. “No. I haven’t been thinking about things like that.”

She looks disappointed, but slowly, her expression changes.

“Let’s think about it now,” she says. “There must besomeoneout there.”

“You’re doing it again,” I say. “This is like the Courtney and Eleanor thing.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not like that. I just—it would make me feel better. It would makeyoufeel better, too.”

“I don’t need to be with somebody in order for it to be okay that you have a boyfriend. It’s okay already.”

“Marin. I’m just asking you to think about it. I’m not saying you have to make some huge decision or fall in love or do anything that complicates your life.”

“I’m fine as I am.”

But she isn’t backing down.

“Come on,” she says. “Think.”

This is a New York college—it isn’t Catholic school—and so many of the girls here wear little rainbow bracelets or pink triangle pins, so many of them talk casually about their ex-girlfriends or call the chair of the women’s studies program hot. I’ve never joined in, but it’s only because I don’t talk about the things I left behind. But I’ve noticed, I guess, even though I’ve tried to close myself off. I’ve noticed a couple girls in spite of myself.

“You’re thinking about someone,” Mabel says.

“Not really.”

“Tell me,” she says.

I can see how much she wants this, but I don’t want to do it. Even if therewassomeone, how could I keep telling myself that I’m fine with so little, that all I need is Hannah’s friendship and the pool and scientific facts and my yellow bowls and a borrowed pair of winter boots, if I spoke a girl’s name aloud? She’d become something I wished for.

“Is she pretty?”

It’s too much coming from her mouth and the look in her eyes is too earnest and I’m too overwhelmed to answer.I guess she needs this—for us to move on—but it feels like another loss. To think a new girl is pretty, and not in a way that lots of people in the world are pretty, but pretty in a way that might mean something to me. To look into Mabel’s dark eyes, try not to stare at her pink mouth or her long hair, and say that. To think that a girl who is practically a stranger could be the next person I love. To think she might take Mabel’s place.

But I think about Mabel’s warmth on the pullout sofa. I think about her body against mine and I know that a lot of what I felt that night was about her, but that some of it wasn’t. Maybe I am already hoping for that feeling again, with someone new. Maybe I just didn’t know it.

Something in me is cracking open, the light coming through is so bright it hurts, and the rest of me is still here, wounded, even though I know it’s all for the best.

“That night at the beach,” Mabel says. “And the days after, until school ended and all through the summer...”

“Yeah?”

“I thought I’d never love another person.”

“I thought that, too.”