Confessions of an Almost-Girlfriend. Louise Rozett

in the other. I sit down next to her and get to work on a back issue of Elle, carefully tearing pages out that Tracy has marked by folding the corner down.

      I have no idea why she wants some pages and not others, because all the models and outfits look pretty much the same to me. But as Tracy carefully explained when I first started helping with her magazines, each outfit is an individual work of art that needs to be studied. When I looked skeptical, she reminded me of the monologue Meryl Streep has in The Devil Wears Prada, where she smacks down Anne Hathaway for laughing at a bunch of magazine editors who are trying to describe the specific shade of blue on a belt. I knew the speech she was talking about—when I first heard it, it made me see fashion as a kind of art, and I’d never thought of fashion that way before.

      As I play the role of Tracy’s assistant, I take a look around the room. A year ago, I would have been on her orange shag rug and she would have been in the beanbag chair, asking me whether or not she should sleep with Matt. Now, the shag has been replaced by a flat black rug with gray lines that I think are supposed to be flowers, and two clear plastic armchairs sit where the beanbag used to be. And we’re doing something meaningful—or at least, meaningful to her.

      To be truthful, I don’t actually know what we’re doing.

      Tracy’s walls are covered with magazine pages and blog photos, but they’re not just taped up as part of a collage, like they would be in most girls’ rooms. She has painted one entire wall with special magnetic paint so she can use these tiny magnets to hang up the images, which she moves around daily and covers in different colored Post-its. Sometimes she’s written a word or a phrase on the Post-it like “Bubble!” or “Blue sky”; other times, just letters.

      If I ask her what she’s doing, all she says is I’ll find out soon enough.

      We’re not supposed to be keeping secrets from each other this year, but she looks so happy when I ask about her project that I decide not to remind her about that.

      “So, Peter went back to school?” Tracy gets up, disappears into the bathroom, and comes back with the leave-in conditioner I forgot to put in my hair.

      I nod.

      “Back to what’s-her-name? That rich pot freak?”

      Tracy—who has had a crush on my brother for most of her life—knows what Peter’s girlfriend’s name is. She just can’t bring herself to say it. I get it. Sometimes I can’t bear to say that girl’s name, either.

      “Yup, back to Amanda.” I take the bottle from Tracy and squeeze some of the conditioner into my hands. It smells like tomatoes fresh off the vine. “And I’m sure she just couldn’t wait to get him high,” I add, the words sounding funny—for a whole bunch of reasons—as they come out of my mouth.

      It’s hard for me to think about Peter getting high. I never thought that my brother would be one of those guys who would get into drugs just because his girlfriend liked them.

      Caron says that people’s reasons for using drugs are “often very complex.” It’s the one thing she says that doesn’t get an instant nod of agreement from my mother. Mom and Caron know each other really well—they used to be in the same practice together—so I usually feel ganged up on when Caron is talking and Mom is just nodding at everything like a bobblehead. But when Caron talks about Peter’s “complexity of motivation for using,” Mom gets very quiet and looks at the floor.

      I don’t think there’s anything complex about it. I think he’s doing it because Amanda wants him to, and he’s desperate to impress her because he’s never had such a beautiful girlfriend in his life. He’s never really had a girlfriend at all, now that I think about it.

      “So how is Peter doing?” Tracy asks after a pause that is meant to make the question seem way more casual than it really is. “Have you talked to him?”

      I shake my head.

      “Well, you’re going to call him, aren’t you? To check on him?”

      “At some point.”

      “You’re still mad.”

      I nod.

      “Maybe you should be worried, not mad.”

      “And maybe you should just call him yourself if you want to talk to him so badly,” I tease.

      “It’s not that I want to talk to him,” she says too quickly, though we both know she does. “It’s just that I’m worried.” She fixes me with her most serious stare. “And you should be, too.”

      About a week before they had to go back to school, Peter and Amanda came to visit. They’d been working in a hotel on Martha’s Vineyard for the summer, and the first thing I noticed was that they looked like they hadn’t been in the sun the entire time. What’s the point of dealing with snotty, demanding hotel guests on Martha’s Vineyard if you’re not going to go to the beach?

      Then I thought maybe they were just being really conscientious about sunscreen. Amanda definitely seemed like the type to want her pale skin to stay as pale as possible.

      But that didn’t explain the bags under their eyes.

      It was the first time my mom and I met Amanda, and I hadn’t been looking forward to it. I was still pissed that she’d invited Peter to go to her house last Thanksgiving, even though she knew it was our first Thanksgiving without Dad. When Peter had called to tell me he wasn’t coming home, I’d actually hung up on him.

      So Amanda and Peter drove up in her hand-me-down silver Mercedes convertible that her father—who is also a shrink, by the way—gave her when he upgraded, and they looked like they hadn’t showered in weeks. When I said something about it to my mom, she said that that’s what college students do. Something about rebelling against their parents’ enforced hygiene rules once they finally get out of the house.

      Amanda is definitely pretty—there’s no getting around that, no matter what Tracy says about how she’s so super skinny that her head looks too big for her body. She wears baggy clothes that are supposed to make her look like she doesn’t have any money, but they’re so nice that you know she totally does. She has super-long blond hair and green eyes, and when she smiles she looks like a sleepy cat.

      Or a high cat.

      For a few days after they got home, I actually believed that they had just been working really, really hard, and Peter was too exhausted to speak. He barely deigned to acknowledge my existence until he said that he was giving me his old iPhone because Amanda had gotten him a new one. That was on the third day of their visit.

      Not talking may be normal for some brothers and sisters, but it’s not for us. Peter and I were really close. He used to look out for me, and he was even nice to me in public. Maybe that’s because we’re four years apart—we were never really interested in each other’s toys when we were little, or each other’s friends when we got older.

      I could go to him if I needed advice for practically any situation. And when he came home with Amanda, I was planning to tell him how nervous I was to go back to Union after ruining Regina’s life, and that I needed some real “coping strategies,” as opposed to the ones that Caron and Mom were coming up with in therapy that involved telling Regina how her actions hurt me, by filling in the blanks of this sentence: “Regina, when you blank, it makes me feel blank.”

      The first—and only—time I’ve ever laughed in therapy was when I tried to imagine saying that sentence to Regina.

      Anyway, there was no way I was going to ask Peter for advice on anything while he was walking around with such a huge superiority complex. When he gave me his stupid iPhone, he actually patted me on the head and called me “kiddo.” And Amanda gave me a weird little sad-face smile and told me I was just unbearably cute. “Pete, what’s it like to have a little sister?” she said in front of me, using a voice that most people reserve for talking about puppies, kittens, or babies. “Oh, look at her—how sweet.