AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I can’t get the vision of her puffy eyes yesterday today out of my head. Crying in a stairwell doesn’t match up with the image of Lucie Lamont that’s lived in my mind and haunted my life for the past few years. The Lucie who watched Veronica Mars with my mom and me. The Lucie who called the printer herself when our November issue was delayed, sweet-talking them into giving the school a discount for the next six months. The Lucie Lamont I admired, even after she cut me out of her life.
“I used to,” I say quietly. “But I’m not sure I really know her anymore.”
When the bus arrives, we take it through campus and down Forty-Fifth Street to University Village, an outdoor shopping center just north of the school. We wander through the maze of upscale chains and local eateries before finding the bagel shop on one edge of the mall.
“You’re going to win her back with bagels,” Miles says, a hint of amusement in his tone.
“You clearly haven’t had Mabel’s Bagels.”
Operation Make Lucie Love Me—the name is a work in progress—hinges on making Lucie happy. And few things can spark that kind of immediate happiness like a dose of carbs.
Bagels are a delicate matter among Jews. Everyone has a favorite bagel place in Seattle, though none of them agree on which place that is. Some shops are acceptable and some are downright offensive, but the one thing they can agree on is that whatever it is that makes New York bagels so perfect—we don’t have it here.
This kosher shop is my mom’s favorite, and the SHALOM welcome sign written in both English and Hebrew instantly makes me feel at home. Which, with a painful twinge, instantly reminds me of Jocelyn’s proposal.
Something else hits me: if we don’t get out of here, it’s not just the proposal I’ll miss. I won’t be able to see them get married, either.
This has to work.
Miles watches while I fill a bag with a baker’s dozen, jaw twitching, an unreadable expression on his face.
“You’re demonstrating remarkable restraint, not tearing apart this idea,” I tell him.
“I just don’t see how—” The words seem to rush out before he has a chance to rein them back in. He holds up a hand, gives me an apologetic look. “Sorry. Sorry. We’re doing it your way.”
But just as we’re about to leave, my stomach lets out an embarrassing growl. “Oh—I, uh, didn’t eat breakfast.”
“Well. We happen to be in Seattle’s finest bagel shop.”
So I order my usual: an everything bagel with honey-almond schmear. As for Miles—
“Thirty options. Thirty options, Miles, and you picked plain and plain?” I ask once we’re seated with our bagels in a corner of the shop.
“I like what I like,” he says with a defiant jut of his chin. “Yours looks like someone may have already eaten it. For dinner last night. Don’t tell me that is the epitome of flavor.”
“Mmm. It is.” I take a big, fluffy, cream-cheesy bite. “You and Ankit seemed close, by the way. Or at the very least, not at each other’s throats.” I wanted to mention it when we were on the bus, but then I worried I might need to address the weirdness of That Look his roommate gave him, and I didn’t want to go within fifty feet of that topic. Now that we’ve had some distance from it, it feels like a safer conversation.
He shrugs. “He’s easygoing. Extroverted, but not aggressively so. We both moved in early, on the same day, and we just clicked.”
“What about your high school friends?”
“We kind of… scattered.” He takes another bite of bagel, though I know deflection when I see it. Evidently, the guy doesn’t love talking about himself. “So I’m helping you with your roommate and you’re really not going to tell me why you don’t get along?”
I consider this. It doesn’t hurt to give him a sliver of information, especially if he might be able to help with the plan. It doesn’t mean I have to tell him the whole truth. Especially not the section of it that’s locked in a vault at the back of my mind.
“We were friends for a couple years,” I start. “Not close—mostly school friends. We worked on our middle school newspaper together, and then our high school paper.” I pluck sesame seeds from my bagel, needing something to distract from the way Miles is so intently focused on me. God forbid he be anything less than an active listener. “I, um, unearthed this cheating scandal. With the tennis team. That her boyfriend was on. They were disqualified from the championships, which led to him losing a scholarship and the two of them breaking up. So. She didn’t have a lot of love for me after that.”
Miles blinks a few times. Frowns. “You realize that’s not your fault, right? That someone’s scholarship was taken away?”
“I know.” But it doesn’t matter. It certainly didn’t matter to Cole. “I’m sure I’ll deal with much worse when I’m writing for the New Yorker or Entertainment Weekly. And,” I continue, wanting to linger on this as little as possible, “I wasn’t a gem to her afterward, either. We were always clashing in the newsroom.”
“Really? I can’t picture that.” He says it with such a straight face, daintily dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “If she’s the one who was such an asshole to you, then why should it be up to you to fix the relationship?”
“Because I need the universe to see that I’m the bigger person here.”
“Ah. The almighty universe, with its record keeping and scorecards.”
“Do you always need to be the smartest person in the room?” I ask.
