The Trouble Is

Chapter 25: Coffee Break

Katie and I have received official signoff on our food pantry volunteer hours. Aunt Linda made a big to-do about signing the forms in purple Sharpie. She also presented us both with Starbucks gift cards. That woman knows how to pick a gift. So naturally, Katie and I are at Starbucks this morning living it up.

"So how are you and Eastern doing these days, Anne?" Katie asks in full imitation of a game show host. She's already laughing a little before I even respond. I ignore her new little game of changing his name around like she does mine all the time.

"You've got muffin crumbs in your lip gloss," I say.

"Yeah, so? East, Annie. Focus. How's East?" she asks, wiping her lips carefully with a napkin.

"He's great," I tell her. "And how's Joe or James or John or whomever you are messing around with today?"

"They're sufficient," she says with a grin. "I'm not looking for a steady thing. So they'll do for now."

"So are you putting the whole 'lose your virginity' idea in abeyance?" I ask, complete with air quotes around the virginity part.

Katie laughs out loud at this. "Have you been secretly reviewing SAT words?" she asks. "And what does that word even mean: 'abeyance'? Is it like pending?"

I suck the last of my iced latte through the straw as I nod.

"Exactly that," I say. "Is it on hold? Do you still have the list of contenders?"

"Yeah, narrowing it down now," she says. "I'm running local auditions. Don't roll your eyes at me, Annabelle. There's no rule about dating just one guy at a time. I'll narrow it down. We still have half the summer to go. When it comes to the whole virginity thing, there can be only one. I must choose wisely."

I used to try to figure out this aspect of Katie. She seems to have an all-or-nothing approach to boyfriends. Even when we were little, she wanted to be with the boys on the playground. You would think this was because she loved boy sports, but that wasn't it. She just loved the attention. She was actually terrible at sports, but that didn't seem to bother her as long as she was surrounded by the boys.

So, in my amateur psychologist mode I have considered whether she was ignored by her parents at a critical developmental point, but I can't find any evidence of this. I know her entire family, even her grandparents and aunts and uncles. I've known them all my whole life. There's no touchy uncle, no hard-lined psycho aunt, no phases where she was totally left alone with a creeper cousin. There are no creeper cousins. She has an older sister who is a teacher in Lubbock and is happily married to some guy who works at a bank. Her older brother goes to the University of Texas and never seems to come home. Her mom has been bringing food to our house every Sunday for months now. They are as "normal" a family as I can imagine, if there is such a thing.

If Katie has some deep-seated psychological need to be loved by a different person all the time or by a large group at one time, I have no clue where that comes from. I'm pretty sure she didn't get it from her mother or the Baptist church the family practically built. I guess that sometimes the person we are can't be traced back with a clean line. Maybe cause and effect isn't always a "thing" when it comes to the things that make up the heart of a person. Maybe the fact that I'm a mini-me of my mom is just chance or something.

I'm thinking about this while she pokes her straw around in the cup, as if to make sure it is truly empty. She knows it's empty, so I can tell that she's working her way through some thought, some unspoken idea.

"Do you think that I'm a bad person?" she asks.

"No. Absolutely not."

"Do you think I'm a bit, well, a bit weird because of my inability to choose just one? My mom always says I'm flighty, whatever that means. I know that I'm nothing like my sister at all. She's just so perfectly boring. I can't live like that. Dad says I'm a creative spirit, which is a good thing. But sometimes I worry that I might just be broken in some fundamental way."

I give this the thought that it deserves before I answer. She's not messing around. This is a real and serious question. I know it when I hear it from K. We are always honest with each other, even if we are not so honest with everyone else.

"No . . . ," I reply slowly. This is real-time computation here. I want to answer her truthfully and without judgment. This is one of those pivotal best-friend moments. I see it in front of me like a movie or hologram or something. I think the word for this is premonition. Years from now, I picture us watching our kids play, talking about our husbands, or sex, or whatever it is moms talk about at the park. And when we are old and gray, pushing our walkers through the park, we will gripe about why the kids don't come see us and compare our sagging boobs.

"Maybe you are not really ready for that," I say.

"What's there to be ready for?" she says. "It's just sex, not a relationship or anything. The problem is that they are all bits and pieces. There's just not one of them who has it all. Actually, none of them even hit the halfway mark. But if I put them all together into one guy, it works."

"I think you are like that Pink song," I add. "You are not broken, just bent. And I don't really know why or if that even matters."

"My mom says I'm inconsistent," Katie says. "And she doesn't even know about my book of boys. She says that right now I'm so busy figuring things out that I'm like some kind of software application where no one can ever hit the Save Changes button. It's like Microsoft Word or something. I think I'm just moving from one thing to another to figure out what fits."

Katie doesn't really have a book of boys. That's just what she calls all of the boys she's gone out with or has a secret fantasy about. It's more like an undocumented list.

"I think you are consistent in your inconsistency with boys," I say. "And beyond that, you are my friend and that's all that matters to me. So what if you aren't hitting Save. You will when it's right. And if you are a little broken, if that's what your indecisiveness means, then we're all broken. Life is messy. People bend and break and get fixed up again, or they don't. I don't really think there's a good label for that. It's not broken, really. You are where you are right now. It's just life."

She carefully wipes off the table with her napkin, catching the crumbs in her hand and then transferring them onto the napkin.

"So what is it about East, A?" she asks. "What's the one thing that makes him the one boy? Not the list of five or ten ranked below him that I know you probably have in your notebook. The one thing."

I answer without thought and am surprised that it's not something on the other list that she knows I have: .

"He kisses me like he means it," I say. "It knocks the wind right out of me every time. Oh, and he has never stopped chasing me, even after he caught me," I say. I feel my shoulders shrugging a little as I say it, as if it's just too hard to believe. "It feels so great to be wanted in that way."

"That's two, baby," Katie says. "You are a rebel."