Confessions of an Almost-Girlfriend. Louise Rozett

      “Then what?” This roller coaster is making me insane.

      “I wasn’t gonna do that—”

      “Don’t bother, Jamie. You don’t have to explain—”

      “I do. There’s a lot of stuff I gotta explain,” he says, his eyes locked onto mine.

      The fact that he knows he owes you some explanations means something. My anger starts to deflate. But where the hell was he all summer? Did it take him months to come up with these explanations he claims he now has? My anger balloons up again. Well, so what if it did? Not everybody knows how to explain how they feel. You have to cut people slack sometimes. Now my anger just sits still, not knowing what to do. Suddenly I find the entire situation…funny.

      “Did you just say you’re going to explain something to me? Seriously?” I tease. “You mean, I’m finally going to get some actual explanations out of Jamie Forta?”

      After a moment of what looks like confusion, a little smile crosses his face, and I feel a shift. I don’t know how to explain it in a normal way. It’s like we’ve always been standing on two different levels, with him above me. But just now, the levels moved closer to each other and we’re not so far apart anymore. We’re almost—but not quite—on equal ground.

      I guess another way to say it is that Jamie doesn’t hold all the cards. I actually have a few of my own, and I like it.

      “Next Saturday,” he says.

      Next Saturday. Next Saturday? As in, Saturday night?

      “Dinner,” he adds.

      Last year, Jamie and I had covert conversations in his car in various locations, hidden away. But we never spent any time together around other people.

      “Are you finally going to be seen with me in public?” I say, pretending to be astonished. “We better not tell anyone or we’ll both end up in jail this time.”

      His smile gets a little wider and he actually laughs—that beautiful, delicious laugh that feels like a reward whenever it’s let out. It practically makes me giddy. And it dawns on me that Jamie likes it when I make fun of him. That’s why the playing field is leveling out. Because I’m teasing him.

      “I can’t believe it,” I say. “Jamie Forta and me, on an actual date.”

      “You don’t have to keep saying Jamie Forta, Rose.”

      “Oh, sure I do. In these big moments, when explanations are being promised and public outings are announced, it’s important to address you by your full name. The occasion calls for it.”

      His smile makes me want to get into his car and go anywhere with him. It’s a little intimidating to feel that for someone. It makes you wonder if you’re going to do something you don’t really want to do, or shouldn’t do. I mean, I haven’t seen or talked to Jamie in months, and after one kiss and a couple of moments of me being really mad, I’m ready to have his hands on my bare skin again. Because that was amazing. That felt like…everything.

      But I guess the point is, even though I’m feeling what I’m feeling, I’m not getting in the car with him. Although, why is that? Is that just because it’s late at night and I’m staying at my friend’s house and I don’t want to get in trouble with her parents, or get her in trouble? Or is it actually because I have enough respect for myself not to drive off in the middle of the night with the guy who didn’t bother to call me all summer?

      I push off the car to show him—and myself—that I’m going back inside now.

      “I’ll call you,” he says.

      “I’ll believe it when I see it,” 2.0 answers. I feel all sassy as I walk past him, even though what I said doesn’t exactly make sense—you don’t really see someone call you. But I don’t care. I look over my shoulder and Jamie’s still smiling, looking at me like he’s seeing me in a different way. A new way. A way he likes.

      It was worth torturing myself all summer long just for that one look.

      disinter (verb): to uncover or reveal (see also: getting grilled in therapy)

      4

      “DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE ISSUE HERE, ROSE?”

      What I want to say is, the issue is that I should be eating Saturday-morning pancakes with my best friend and telling her about what happened with Jamie last night, not sitting on a therapist’s couch with my mother for Saturday-morning therapy. But I’ve already been told that sarcasm has no place here.

      Caron’s office is nicer than my mother’s. The couch is squishier, the tissues are softer and the view of the backyard is more interesting. The room smells a little bit like wet dog, but I like dogs, so I don’t care that much. Not that I’ve ever seen Caron’s dog. I hear it snuffling around on the other side of the door every once in a while, but that’s it. For all I know, it’s just a tape of a dog, and the smell is some kind of weird incense—my mom says therapists do all sorts of things to their offices to make their clients feel comfortable. Even all the neutral colors serve a purpose—they’re supposed to keep patients focused.

      From my point of view, the only thing wrong with Caron’s black-and-brown-and-cream office is what goes on inside it. What has been going on inside it every other Saturday—or sometimes more often, depending on the level of drama in the house—since June.

      “The issue?” I repeat, trying to prove to them that I’ve barely been listening.

      “The problem,” Caron says, stressing the word problem as if I need a synonym for issue. If she thinks I’m confused about the meaning of the word issue rather than just plain old baffled that we have to hash this topic out yet again, she’s clearly forgotten my father, who she knew well. Dad started using vocabulary flashcards with Peter and me before we could talk.

      Caron and my mother actually look like they could be sisters. They are both tall with dark brown hair and light blue eyes, and they’re skinny and wear what I think of now as shrink clothes—earth tones that blend into the office furniture, with a colorful necklace or scarf. Maybe it’s a kind of uniform. They both wear tortoise-shell glasses—my mom’s spend a lot of time on her head functioning as a headband, but Caron’s are always on her face. The difference between them these days is their energy, I guess you would say. Caron is calm; my mother seems totally wired, like she’s fighting really hard to stay in control of things. Things like me.

      “Do you understand why your mother has a problem with the memorial website?” Caron asks. “Why she wants you to take it down?”

      I know that I’m supposed to say yes—after all, we’ve been going around and around on this topic all summer long. And I could just do that, because technically, I do understand the problem. I did something very public, and I did it without Mom’s permission, using private family photos of Dad. But I don’t understand why having a website in Dad’s honor makes her so crazy. I thought she’d be happy when she saw all the photos I scanned and uploaded, and all the quotes I posted, and the Word of the Day section featuring his favorite words of all time.

      But she wasn’t happy. She was pissed. And when she realized that I didn’t really care that she was pissed, and that if she wanted the website taken down she was going to have to figure out how to do it herself—all hell broke loose.

      I think what freaks my mom out the most about the site is that it’s an open invitation for people to express their opinions. I run the site, and I can make changes to it, but I have no say in how people respond. And it turns out that there are all sorts of people who knew Dad well, and they have things to say about him. Mom doesn’t like that, because she can’t control what they write.

      Which, of course, is exactly