Page 33 of I'm Not Done with You Yet

“Sorry,” I mumble. “Sorry, sorry.” I’m already walking away, ducking into the crowd, ignoring the noise behind me. I can hear snatches of Ani’s voice—“What the hell is her problem?”

My problem, Ani, is that Thalia was mine. All mine, before you and your brother came along and ripped her away from me. And why did she cut herself off from me but not from them? Did she only cut herself off from me? Does she still keep in touch with everybody from Oxford? I can barely remember the names of anyone else at Pemberton. Pam, or Pat, or whatever the fuck. Does Thalia keep in touch with her too? Was I the only one who was excommunicated?

The thought is too painful to bear. Already tears are burning in my eyes and I have to blink them away rapidly to stop them from falling. All this time I thought...

Never mind what I thought, because I’ve clearly been wrong about everything.

I’m stumbling blindly through the crowd, barely seeing or hearing anything. There’s a cry or two as I shove people away, but I don’t stop. I don’t care, I can’t be here, and where’s the freaking exit anyway?

Then I hear it. The voice that’s been haunting me all these years. It skips my ears and goes straight into the center of my nervous system, lighting up all of my synapses. My entire bodyreacts to it. I stop mid-stride, everything inside me pricked to attention.

Thalia.

I turn slowly, and there she is, sitting behind a desk, speaking into a microphone. A large crowd is gathered around her, a sea of humans standing between the two of us. She’s so far away from me, achingly far. So many bodies in between ours. And as I stare, she continues talking: “—my first ever panel, oh my gosh. It’s so wonderful to be here.”

Back in Oxford, Thalia had this quality that made her, even when addressing a crowd of people, seem like she was speaking directly to you. It’s still present now, everyone in the crowd staring at her with rapt attention. And how can they not? She is incandescent. Over the past nine years, her beauty has sharpened into something breathtaking, the kind that makes people do a double take to make sure she’s real. It’s the kind of beauty that actresses pay good money for, the kind of beauty that requires a busy mind, a mind that holds a myriad of secrets.

“Tell us aboutA Most Pleasant Death,” says another woman who is sitting next to her, probably the moderator. “What’s the story behind the story?”

Thalia smiles. “Well,A Most Pleasant Deathis about an all-consuming, sort of toxic friendship between two women, and what inspired me was my own experience with various female friends. I have always found female friendship fascinating, the way that from a very young age, girls are encouraged to see one another as competition just because of how sexist many societies are, and therefore there’s only ever room for one girl at the top. In school, I have always kind of felt like the other girls can’t help but compete with one another: even though they may be best friends, they’re also rivals. And so it becomes this extremely complicatedrelationship that’s nurturing and yet also harmful. I wanted to show how this kind of friendship can spiral into a darker state, until it spins out of control and hurts those around it.”

The moderator nods like she understands what Thalia was just talking about, but she doesn’t understand. No one else understands, because what Thalia just said? That was all meant for me. Heat rises from the base of my chest. She wrote a whole book about our friendship. And that’s what tips me over the edge. Because I don’t understand how she could have written this, a whole book that was obviously meant for me, and yet she never once reached out to me over the years.

Before I know it, I’m wading through the crowd of listeners and calling out, “I have a question!”

Heads are turning in my direction. The moderator frowns, pausing mid-sentence, and looks at the crowd. “Wow, we have some enthusiastic listeners here,” she says with a forced laugh. “We’ll have a Q andA session in about half an hour, so—”

I shout the words out; I can’t bear it any longer. “Why did you never come back to Oxford after your first term there?”

Silence falls, suffocating and thick. I know it’s impossible, but it feels as though the entire convention center is suddenly quiet, every ear inside the building listening.

And finally, Thalia sees me. Her eyes widen, her mouth—those rose-pink lips—parts slightly. For a second, something passes across her face—fear? Horror? It can’t be. She’s just surprised, that’s all.

“Jane!” she says, and my name, amplified by her microphone, reverberates through flesh and bone and breathes life back into my whole body. Her expression is pure shock, and she turns to the moderator and mutters something.

The moderator nods and looks at me sternly. “We’ll have aQ and A session after this talk. Let’s get back to the program for now.”

I lower my head and move to the edge of the crowd, my face in flames. Shit, what the hell is wrong with me? Why did I just blurt that out? Fortunately, the moderator moves the talk along and soon I am forgotten once more, blending into the crowd as we all fall under Thalia’s spell. She got lucky withA Most Pleasant Death, she says, because so much in publishing depends on timing and luck. So humble, as always. Minimizing her own talent. I wish I could tell her to stop, to own that she deserves this meteoric success. It’s a different form of torture to be stuck here among the audience, as though I’m like any of these people, a stranger to Thalia.

Nothing she says is particularly enlightening; they’re all responses I’ve heard from other authors before, but somehow when Thalia says them, they become different, exotic, exciting. The Thalia effect.

Movement from the edge of the stage catches my eye, and I turn to see Ani aiming a serious-looking camera at Thalia. My gut sours. Shit, she’s going to tell Thalia about how I went completely berserk before running away. Ani seems completely absorbed in taking photos. When she’s done with the big camera, she pulls out her iPhone and takes more photos using that, before turning the phone around and posing for a few selfies with Thalia in the background. She then aims the phone at the crowd. I duck my head, but I’m not fast enough. She frowns when she sees me and rolls her eyes.

My heart rate slows to a manageable pace. She just thinks what she’s always thought of me: a weirdo, just some loser that Thalia took pity on. Nothing worth remembering. I can deal with that. I’m not here to impress Ani.

An eternity passes before the panel is finally done. With superhuman effort, I manage to stop myself from blurting out more awkward questions during the Q and A, gritting my teeth instead while listening to mundane questions like: “How long did it take you to write this book?”

“Come on,” I whisper under my breath, willing the whole thing to end already. Then we’re asked to stand in a single file to get an autograph. An autograph from my estranged best friend. The line that forms is impossibly long. Of course everyone wants to have a piece of her. I want to scream at them to get away, to let me have this time with her. But I am patient. I have been waiting years for this moment. I can afford to wait a few more minutes.

As it turns out, I end up waiting a whole hour. An hour spent on the sidelines, shifting from one foot to the other, biting my nails until they are ragged and bleeding. I squeeze my thumb and watch the blood well up into a fat droplet before I put it to my mouth and lick it off. The pain keeps me present, reminds me I’m not dreaming, that Thalia really is just a few feet away; after all these years, here she is in the flesh.

Then the signing is done and Thalia is waving to people and waving away her agent/editor/publicist and heading toward me. I turn into a statue. I can’t move as she closes the distance between us, the expression on her face unreadable—is that a smile or a frown or something between the two? And now she’s in front of me and I must be dreaming because she is here and she’s so perfect I could cry. The scent of her, that familiar smell, takes me right back to Oxford. The nose is the only part of our body that can time travel, and I’m whisked back nine years to when I first landed in England, among the damp and the bus exhaust, finding Thalia for the first time. Her nearness pulling me to thesurface just as it’s doing now, yanking me up and up until I break through, as though the past few years I’ve been floating underwater, everything around me muted. Now, suddenly, everything is loud and clear, and all the colors are bursting with vibrancy.

“Jane,” she murmurs, and I’m not sure who made the first move, but we’re hugging now, and she feels amazing in my arms, so warm and real and—oh god—I can feel those delicate bird bones of hers and my throat thickens with my need for her. Thank god my weird outburst earlier hasn’t scared her off. “Let’s talk over coffee,” she says, pulling back and smiling at me.

Someone clears her throat. Ani. I have to resist from lunging at her. She stands next to us with an are-you-kidding expression. “Um, not to interrupt the moment—”

She very definitely meant to interrupt the moment.

---