Page 10 of Forget Me Not

“His name is Reed,” I gush. I don’t gush. Well, I never used to. Now I gush. “He’s the most amazing human being on the face of the earth. He’s funny and charming and smart.”

“Hold up. You met him, what? Seven, eight hours ago? How do you know he’s smart? He have his IQ score on hand or something?” She picks up another green bean, clearly confident she can multi-task her way through this conversation.

“It’s been four. And he’s on the honor roll. Plus, he wants to be a lawyer.”

She twirls a gangly bean around in the air. “Whoopee.”

I scrunch up my face, rethinking this attempt at girl talk. I’ve never had girlfriends. Not real ones. And while I’ve talked about everything and anything with Gun my entire life, somehow, when it came down to it, I couldn’t talk to him about this.

“You’re being a sucky girl, Mags.”

She snorts. “I’m notbeinganything. Iama sucky girl, Coop.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a handful of M&Ms, which she plops down onto the counter in front of me. “You spent over an hour hanging over at B’s after school. Why didn’t you unload all this on your BFF while you were there?”

I scoop five into my mouth at once and grumble, “I tried. It was weird, so I stopped.” This blows. No one wants to be stupid and giddy with me. First amazing crush of my life and no one freaking cares.

“Was it weird because you remembered you already have a boyfriend?” She lifts her lids sporadically to check for my reaction while she snaps away at her green beans.

I sigh. Extra, extra loud. “Gunnar is not my boyfriend.”

“Okay, fine. He’s not your boyfriend. Whatever you say.” She reaches for the nearly empty bag of beans and brings it closer to her. “You were saying things got weird.” She motions her hand for me to continue.

“Yeah.” Finished with my chocolate, I could really go for something fresher. I start peering into all the bowls sitting out on this counter until I find one filled with sliced cucumbers. “I don’t know. Everything was great this morning. Then, you got all in my head!” I accuse her. Been waiting all day to do that. Ever since I had a mini-meltdown watching those girls hover around Gun. I’m over it now.

She nods. “Yeah, I do that. Like to get in there and really rearrange shit if I can.” She’s so not taking me seriously. Or maybe she is, in which case this conversation has taken a scary turn. Freaking mind bender.

“This is so not going the way I thought it would,” I mutter, stacking three slices of cucumber together and taking a bite.

“No? Seems about right to me.” She smirks. She’s done with her green beans so I have her undivided attention for the moment, which is sort of frightening. “So far, we’ve established you have a crush, you’re conflicted about your feelings for your best friend, concerned this new boy might interfere negatively with your friendshipandyou are surprisingly trusting of my judgement.”

“I’m not conflicted.” Wait. “Okay, I’m a little conflicted.” I place all three half-eaten cucumber slices onto the counter. They’re making me sad now. Maybe because I know Gun likes to eat them with celery salt and I’m eating them plain. Maybe because cucumbers make me think of Gun at all and that’s lamer than lame. “There was a moment, this morning in first period, where I realized, for the first time, how other people see him. How othergirlssee him.” I pause to see if Mags would like to add anything here, but she stays quiet, so I carry on, “It’s like this whole time, Gun and I have been existing in some sort of glass bubble where we can see the whole world around us, we’re part of the world, but nothing ever gets in. Inside, it’s just us. Against everyone else. The times we weren’t together, I just went through the motions, on autopilot. I didn’t get close to other people. There was never time. Never any reason to trust. And, I guess I just assumed it was the same for him. But really, our lives never ceased to exist outside of the bubble, he wasn’t caught in a vacuum alone when we were apart, he had his own, separate life and so did I, they simply never overlapped. Until today. And, that’s a weird thing to realize after so long.”

Mags is still watching me in silence. I wonder if I need to tell her I’m done, my wandering thoughts have arrived at their final destination.

“Mags?”

“I’m thinking.” Then, thinking turns to filling a pot with water and setting her green beans on the stove. Thinking continues as she proceeds to make herself a cup of coffee. And even one for me. She still says nothing while she leads the way in silence to the living room where we both sit on her worn but comfy and oversized couch.

“I met B when I was Twelve,” she begins, a rather random starting point but I’ve been waiting so long, I’m not going to be picky. “He was fourteen and had just been adopted by our parents. I had no idea they’d wind up being my parents too at that point. Had no reason to believe I was staying at that house any longer than I’d ever stayed anywhere else.” She takes a sip. “If you think I’m a bit prickly now, it’s only because you didn’t know me then. I’m an all-out softy in comparison to my snotty past self. But, for the first time in my life, no one cared. No one held it against me.” She grins. “Well, you’ve met my mother. You know how she is. Not scared to hug anyone.”

“Kind of thought you broke her into that,” I joke, setting my cup on the coffee table.

“Nah, she was already a pro by the time I came along. B was no walk in the park.”

“What? Mr. B is like, the nicest person on the face of the earth.”

She laughs heartily, it’s quite possibly the most genuine laugh I’ve heard from her. “B was a friggin’ nightmare when he was a kid. Complete ass. Put both our parents through hell, the little shit. But nothing ever swayed them. If anything, I think the harder a kid rebelled against them, the more determined they became to adopt and make it permanent. Like, that was their way of winning and sticking it to the kids most determined to prove no one would ever love them enough to commit to them. Well, they hadn’t met my parents.Ihadn’t met my parents.”

There aren’t enough people like that out there.

“But, back to B, who was still transitioning from hellion to ‘the nicest person on the face of the earth’. Out of all my brothers and sisters, he was the one I connected with from the start. Something about him, just drew me right in. We just,goteach other. So, from that moment forward, whatever I was up against, B was in my corner. He had my back. I’d never had that before. Ever.”

I nod. I get it. “That’s how it was with Gun and me. For as long as I can remember we’ve had this unspoken agreement that we never leave the other behind. No matter what is going on, or how far apart it seems we are, we’re in it together.”

“Exactly.”

Something unexpected dawns on me. “Is that why I’m here? Why you agreed to foster me?”

“B’s literally the only person on earth who could have convinced me to take in a teenage foster kid. Not because I’m that big of a bitch, but because I would be terrified of screwing you up more than you already are.” She shrugs. “B said that wasn’t possible so I wasn’t allowed to use that as an excuse.”

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