Page 82 of Guy's Girl
A few minutes after Ginny finishes writing in her journal, she hears a soft knock on the door. She knows who it is without even asking. She doesn’t want him to see her like this, with tearstained cheeks and puffy eyelids, but she says, “Come in,” anyway. Her back is to the door.
Adrian turns the knob gently, the same way he does everything. “Are you okay?”
She pauses, then says, “No.”
Footsteps on the wooden floor. “Can I...”
“Yes,” she says. “Lie with me. Please.”
Adrian hesitates. Then the mattress dips as he kneels onto it. She feels his body stretch out behind her. His head settles on her pillow, arms wrapping around her chest. She scoots her pelvis back until it lays flat against his.
“Is this okay?” she asks.
“Yes,” he whispers. “I can’t stay all night, though.”
“I understand.” She reaches up and squeezes one of his hands. “Thank you, Adrian.”
And they lie like that, body to body, until at last they drift off to sleep.
***
On Ginny’s last day in Hungary, she turns her phone on for the first time in almost a week. She let it run out of battery the night of the ruin pub crawl and hasn’t plugged it in since.
But she has to now. And she’s terrified.
The minute it turns on, texts start to roll in. She shoves the phone under her pillow, but it barely muffles the chorus of buzzes and pings. Each one makes her pulse tick faster. What are the boys going to say? How is she supposed to explain herself to them? She’s hidden from reality for five days now—but reality is always there, waiting.
When the phone finally stops making noises, she creeps over to the pillow and pulls the phone out from underneath:
137 text messages.
16 missed calls.
3 voice mails.
“Jesus Christ,” she says aloud.
Fifty messages from Finch alone. She ignores those, clicking first on the conversation with Clay.
CLAY:Gin, are you ok?? What happened?
CLAY:The message didn’t go through. I think your phone is off.
CLAY:I’ll try you again tomorrow
CLAY:Helllooooo
CLAY:Still not going through. Ok. I’m calling Adrian.
CLAY:Ok. Just talked to Adrian. He filled me in on the situation. Please don’t be mad at him for telling me, Gin. He just wants you to get healthy.
CLAY:I haven’t told the others yet. I just said that you were having a health issue and were recovering at Adrian’s. I won’t say anything else until you tell me otherwise.
She rereads the messages several times. To be honest, it hadn’teven occurred to her to be angry with Adrian for telling Clay. She feels grateful, actually. A big part of the reason she dreaded turning on her phone is that, once she reconnected to the outside world, she would have to start telling people what was happening. And the idea of doing that, of sitting down with her parents or brothers or sister or best friends and telling them that she’s bulimic—it makes her want to fucking throw up. Both literally and metaphorically.
She sets down her phone without reading any of the other messages.
***
