We don’t dig into the meal—we dig it out. The bun, almost as puffy as cotton candy, seems to have enveloped that crazy-thick burger in doughy stickiness. Meanwhile, the laptop-sized carton seems to have closed its cardboard flaps nearly impenetrably on the fries.
With groans of exasperation, we finally rip everything out and stuff our faces.
A few minutes of good face-stuffing later, Wynona leans further back onto the rock with a blissful look on her face. “This really is good.”
I lean back too. “Just good?”
Her face is so pressed-up against my cheek that when she smiles, I can feel her cheek move when her lips pull up.
“Great, maybe,” she says.
“Great,” I say.
“Great,” she says.
“Great,” I say, but not to mess with her.
There’s something about the word that just occurred to me.
Something familiar, and yet...
Ah.
Yes.
I remember now. “Weird.”
“What?” she says.
“What?” I say.
She laughs. “I don’t know. You just—you said the word weird.”
I turn to shoot her an ironic look. “Now you’re going to get on my case for saying the word weird?”
I can see the debate in the flickering of her pupils whether to glare or grin.
She grins. “Yeah.”
“Got me,” I say. “It just reminded me of something.”
“Something,” she says, forehead creased. “Oh, my God, something! Of course.”
I bop her with the side of my body. “Okay, okay. Just not a happy memory.”
“The best ones are.”
“What a Wynona thing to say,” I quip back.
“Careful.” She quirks a black-penciled eyebrow. “We haven’t fought today.”
“It’s just that band—you remember LCD Soundsystem?”
“God, I had a whole summer where I wouldn’t turn off ‘All My Friends’. Of course I remember! What about them?”
“They had this song, ‘Something Great’—”
“Oh, yeah, I remember.” She’s got on a lazy smile I like. Part of me just wants to kiss her, change the subject entirely. “Another good one.”
The silence sits like a hat that’s way too big.
She doesn’t look at me expectantly, at least.
Shit.
“For months after I ended things with you, I couldn’t stop listening to it. Guess you could say it was our breakup song. I even figured out a way to play it on the piano.”
Wynona’s gaze on me is guarded, thoughtful.
I take her hand. “It’s not important. I finally deleted the song off my laptop because I was so sick of it.”
Her voice is quiet and not humorous. “Sick of missing me?”
My hand finds hers, and her fingers have formed into a clenched half-fist. I untwine the fingers like a knot. “I guess you could say that.”
But they keep tensing up again. “I wish it had been as easy as deleting a song for me.”
A glance at her finds her eyes staring off, narrowed at a far-off buoy that can’t be the real source of whatever she’s feeling.
I close my fingers on hers, tensed and all.
“I drew,” she says. “How it felt. Like I had to bury myself and resurrect myself at the same time. Like when most of your personality is shaped by a person, you have to shed it.” With her eyes closed, she exhales. “If not, every day is hell. Every day is unbearable. You can’t be reminded of them every second of every day. You can’t stand it then.”
I wrap my arms around her. “I’m sorry you went through that. But you should know it was hard for me too.”
“Yes,” she says, letting me hold her, her smile sad. “You’re sorry I went through that—but not that it happened.”
If this is a test, I’ll surely fail it.
But I owe Wynona the truth. Nothing less.
“Yes,” I say.
“Me too,” she says.
Another one of those sad smiles. “At first, I wasn’t, of course. I hated it, hated you. Unblocking your Facebook late at night and checking it was like a self-flagellating daily exercise. I wrote so many texts to you that I never sent. But then, somewhere along the way, I realized my life was better for it. In a way, my life was forced onto the right track by it.” Sad becomes rueful. “Whether I liked it or not.”
“Thank God,” I say.
She smiles. “Yeah. I guess so. That’s the thing about pain like that—it almost forces you into doing things you normally wouldn’t just to get away from it. Remember how long I’d been talking about opening my business, talk, talk, talk, all talk? After, I just did it. Because the fear and the potential pain of what I’d lose if it didn’t work out were nothing compared to what I was feeling already. It was like a spur driving me.”
“Sounds like you got off easily,” I say with almost a chuckle.
She does chuckle. “In some ways.”
She exhales, pulling away. Her back is rigid. I can see the delicate pale curves of her spine. Her gaze, when she turns it to me, is resigned.
She smells like the kind of flower I want to devour. Which doesn’t make any sense.