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Turns out, I managed to do that too well. Or not at all. I’m still not sure.
I haven’t spoken to Chase since the wedding. This has been a joint effort between Caroline and me. There are days I want nothing more than to talk to him and days when I wish he’d just disappear from the face of the earth so I never have to fear turning a corner and see him standing there, waiting to try and make his apologies.
Caroline’s chosen me. If there are sides to be chosen.
“Chase will always be my brother,” she said once she had joined me on the kitchen floor and proceeded to drink three hard ciders in the span of an hour and a half. “You’re my best friend, though. I need to protect you.”
By the end of the night, we were both laughing at how ridiculous the situation was. A fake relationship, a ruined wedding, and two women sitting on the kitchen floor in formal wear, dribbles of cider on their bodices. We laughed until we cried.
I seem to do that a lot lately.
“I’m picking up a prescription,” I say to the pharmacist. I know this pharmacist because I’ve been coming to this particular pharmacy for three years now. We don’t ever exchange pleasantries beyond the exchange of information and money. And yet he feels like a person I know.
“Name?”
I know they see hundreds of people every week but come on. Some names have to stick right? And I’m a pale-ass redhead in the heat of Savannah summer. “Judith Parry.”
“Just a minute.” The pharmacist steps away.
“I hate pharmacies. They always smell weird,” Caroline mutters beside me.
I laugh. “Be grateful you don’t have to come here more often then.”
Caroline flushes slightly and shakes her head. “I just don’t get what they’re doing back there. Like why does it take so long to fill a prescription? Toss the pills in the bottle and be done with it already.”
“You’re right, you should tell them that,” I say.
She shrugs her shoulder. “You know what, I think I will.”
We both laugh. “You really are a businesswoman,” I say, spying the pharmacist zigging and zagging through the aisles, baskets of bagged prescriptions on either side.
“What’s that mean?”
“You just think you know how things should be done, that’s all,” I grin.
“Ugh, you’re making me sound like Gram.”
“Hate to break it to you…”
Caroline thwaps me on the arm. “Don’t you dare.”
The man returns with my prescription. He scans it and his eyebrows jump. “Um, did we scan your insurance c –”
Caroline cuts him off, whipping her black Amex out of her purse and smiling. “Just charge it, thanks.”
I glance at the line behind us. I feel like I’m buying new school clothes with my mom. I distractedly play with my car keys while I’m waiting for the pharmacist to complete the transaction.
The pharmacist hands me the bag, the edges of the insulin box creating ridges in the thin paper. “Thank you,” I say.
As Caroline and I walk away, I repeat these two words, except with much more emphasis. “Thank you, Caroline. Seriously.”
“You don’t need to make it sound so serious every time you thank me, Jude.”
“Well, it is that serious.” Since the wedding, my PCOS has been at an all-time high, complicated by my cortisol levels. I’m constantly broken out, my skin all oily and pimply. I’ve gained at least five pounds and that’s being generous, despite not having much of an appetite at all. And I’ve lost a few clumps of hair in the shower. I’ve been here before. I know it comes and goes.
But it fucking sucks on top of everything I’m dealing with emotionally, I have to fucking deal with my chronic illness too.
They’re right when they say life isn’t fair. The lottery is fucked.
