Page 85 of Olivia's Only Pretending
“It is girls’ night, and girls’ night needs gossip.” I lifted my palms up.
Katie and Emma exchanged a glance as if asking each other,who would start the story?
“Well …” Katie leaned in conspiratorially. “Did you guys know Violet and Tristan back in school?”
“Oh, definitely,” I said. “Those two were inseparable.” Violet and Tristan were best friends all through high school. If you saw one, the other wasn’t far behind.
“I always thought they would get married.” Lucy sighed dreamily.
“We all did,” Katie said emphatically, patting the table.
“See, Gabriel and I went to this writer’s conference in Seattle for journalists—and you know, they’re both writers. The main difference is that Tristan stayed in Sweet River while Violet travels all over the world. Somehow, they both wound up at the conference,” Emma said. “And the two were avoiding each other the entire weekend. And I brought Tristan up to Violet, and she said the two haven’t spoken since their senior year of high school.”
“There had to be some massive falling out for a friendship like that to end like that,” Katie tried to whisper, but failed, making me giggle.
“I’m in shock,” Lucy said. “I thought those two were bound to end up together. I mean, they were ‘best friends.’” She made air quotes with her fingers. “But I thought they were one of those couples who aren’t together yet, but there’s that big impliedyetat the end.”
“I know.” Emma leaned back against the booth. “Tristan and Violet were inevitable.”
I wondered if this was how these same people talked about Victor and me. If they made air quotes when they said we were best friends. If they saidVictor and Olivia are inevitable.
My stomach dipped low, my cheeks going pink at the thought. I hated how I made another thing about Victor. And even worse, how badly I hoped they said that about us.
Twenty-Five
Sunday night was Halloween. Jack-o’-lanterns lined my neighbors’ front porches, and large fuzzy fake spiders clung to their bushes. Kids were racing down the street in princess dresses and superhero capes long before the sun went down. The sound of children giggling carried in through my open windows.
All week long, I’d tried to push the looming holiday to the very back of my mind.
Over the past several weeks, Victor and I had text messaged costume ideas back and forth: Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable, Ross and Rachel when they were in Vegas, Ferris and Sloane. Or Victor’s favorites, which were a cheeseburger and fries or tequila and lime, since he’d been rooting for some kind of food-based costume.
What started as a joke about our “pretend couple costume,” much like everything we pretended was a joke, easily slipped into something more real. Now I had our salt and pepper costumes hanging in my closet. These silly costumes would go sadly unused.
I stood in my closet, rubbing the soft fabric of the salt costume between my fingers, wondering how I could believe I had a chance of keeping Victor neatly compartmentalized in thefriend zone?How did I believe he was in the friend zone at all anymore when I ordered us these matching costumes?
I’d envisioned the two of us passing out candy to trick or treaters together, sitting on my front porch side by side.I’ve been fooling myself.
You can’t force something to be safe just by taping a less intimidating label on it. Calling dynamite a birthday candle might make it sound innocent, but in the end, it only makes it even more dangerous. It makes it something mislabeled, misused, a disaster waiting to happen.
Denying the chemistry—the dynamite—between Victor and me was always a disaster in the making.
Lucy, Adam, and my mom showed up on my doorstep dressed up in costumes and their arms loaded with pizza boxes.
“I need a slice of pepperoni pizza, stat,” I nearly whimpered as they walked through the doorway. The spicy aroma of pepperoni wafted by me.
“Where’s your costume?” Lucy asked, in a tone of surprise. She and Adam were dressed as Lucy and Ricky fromI Love Lucy. My mom had thrown on a pair of felt orange cat ears. “You’re Olivia. You always win the costume competition.”
Iwasknown for how seriously I always took my Halloween costume. I deliberated for weeks, months sometimes, and narrowed down the options until I finally landed on the costume. And I always made sure to have my costume secured on time. I didn’t want to risk being costume-less on the 31st.
Last year, I dressed in a historically accurate medieval bliaut and headdress, which was the talk of the history department the entire week after. The year before that, I wore the lime green Isabella Parigi costume from theLizzie McGuiremovie that I’dwon in a charity auction. I’d worn it to a costume party, and every millennial woman present recognized it on sight.
Yet, here I was, in a pair of baggy gray sweats and a white T-shirt, on the 31st.
“Weren’t you supposed to be, like, paprika or something?” Adam asked, setting the pizza boxes down on my kitchen counter.
I reached into the cabinet for paper plates. “Salt. I was going to be salt,” I said, leaving out the pepper counterpart.
“Salt?” Lucy raised a brow. Then, keeping her judgments on my costume to herself, she asked, “Did it not come in on time?”
