Page 22 of What You Wish For

“I think he’s going to be really nice,” I explained. “Too nice. Totally irresistibly nice.”

She lifted her head, likeGot it.“You think the crush is going to wash back over you.”

“Like a tsunami.”

“So you think it’s going to be the same situation as before.”

“But worse. Because now they’ll be married and have like forty kidsand the life I wanted so badly but was too chicken to try for will parade itself around endlessly until it breaks me.”

Very gently, Alice said, “Maybe it’ll shake down some other way.”

But I’d accepted my despair. “No. That’s it. That’s what’ll happen.”

But Alice wasn’t giving up. “So what if he’s married now? So what if he’s got a whole litter of kids? That could work in your favor! You’ll hardly see him. He’ll be exhausted. He won’t be drinking beers out in Babette’s backyard, that’s for sure.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, shrugging. “I’ll see him enough. A little goes a long way.”

An image appeared in my head of Duncan in the courtyard of our school, wearing a pair of his crazy pants—maybe the red ones with lobsters—surrounded by a crowd of cheering kids while he juggled beach balls.

“You look sick,” Alice said, watching me.

“I feel sick,” I said. And that’s when I noticed it was true. Of all the equilibrium-shaking things that had happened lately, this one was throwing me off the most.

“Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think,” she said. “Maybe he’ll show up here and you won’t feel anything. Crushes fade all the time. It’s been years. Maybe he’ll seem middle-aged and unappealing. Maybe he’ll have sprouted a bunch of hair on his ears. Or maybe, like, one of his teeth turned weirdly brown. Or”—she brightened, like this was her best idea yet—“maybe he has really bad breath now!”

“Maybe,” I said, but really just to be polite.

“I’m just saying,” Alice said, “that photo in the meeting was not exactly irresistible.”

I couldn’t explain the photo. “Yeah,” I said. “But it didn’t capture him.”

“Let’s hope not,” Alice said.

“You’re going to love him,” I promised, “despite yourself. We all are. You can’t not love him. On hot days, he used to bring squirt guns to car pool. He invented Hat Day. He started a pancake-eating contest. He talked the kids into doing a terrible flash mob on the playground. One time, he rented a cotton-candy machine without telling anyone and putit in the cafeteria. On the last day of the school year every year, he’d wear a purple velvet tuxedo to class, and then he’d take off for the summer in a limousine.”

“Okay,” Alice conceded. “Fine. He’s gotjoie de vivre.”

“He’s got it,” I said, “and he shares it. You can’t be around him without catching some.”

“So that’ll be… good for the school.”

“Not just good—great,” I said. “It’ll begreat. For the school.”

Alice nodded and finished my thought. “And it’ll be kind of awful for you.”

“The irony is,” I said, “after I moved away, I regretted it. I missed him so much after I was gone. I used to fantasize all kinds of reasons to see him again. I used to long for a reason to be around him.”

“Exactly,” Alice said, like she really got it. “Be careful what you wish for.”

I nodded. Then the kitchen fell quiet, and we stared at our half-drunk tea mugs.

And in that little pause, I realized some other worst-possible-bad news for me. I did feel sick. Physically sick. Sitting in Babette’s kitchen talking about Duncan Carpenter was making me nauseated.

But not just any kind of nauseated. A very particular kind. The kind of nauseated that can mean something’s going on neurologically. The kind of nauseated that I sometimes got… when I was on the verge of having a seizure.

Which happened from time to time.

Occasionally. Once or twice a year.

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