…or, I’m Sorry, You Feel That Way
I stared at Marlot.
Not in shock.
Marlot had just said something shocking, yeah. Something completely out of character. That was all totally in character for her, though. Everything was a big, fat joke to her. Surely this was too.
I stared at her, waiting for her to show it.
She could keep a straight face forever to keep a joke going, but when the impetus drained from it she had to bust up laughing or at least crack a smile. It was in her nature. She enjoyed her little jokes too much not to appreciate them herself.
She wasn’t laughing.
She wasn’t smiling.
She was serious.
“Marlot, are you actually apologizing?” I asked her.
“For not giving you enough credit, yeah,” she said. “For thinking too little of you. For the other stuff, too, but the crux of it is that I underestimated you. What I did was stupid and shortsighted, but it all came from that first mistake. I guess I’ve just always thought of you as a younger brother,” she said.
“We’re the same age, Mar,” I said. “No, actually, I take that back. You’re seventeen days younger than I am. ”
“Yes, but girls mature faster than boys,” she said. “And it always seemed to me like I was maturing faster than you. I mean, I was always the one who taught you about ‘grown-up’ stuff when we were little.”
“Yeah, because you grew up in a bar,” I said. “Then I started hanging out there, too.”
“Yeah, but then we got to high school,” Marlot said. “I was planning for college, you weren’t. I was dating, you weren’t.”
“Hey, just because I wasn’t taking advanced classes doesn’t mean I didn’t have a plan for college,” I said. “And it’s not like you were out every Friday night while I was home alone. You dated one guy. If you can call it dating. If you can call him a guy.”
“Your plan was ‘go to college’,” Marlot said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Not having a solid vocation or knowing what I want to do with my life doesn’t mean I’m immature. It means I’m young, Mar. That’s all.”
“Well, yeah,” Marlot said. “Young. Like a younger sibling would be, in relation to oneself.” She threw up a hand like she was warding off the look I gave her. “Look, Jamie, I’m not defending my actions and I’m not defending the viewpoint that led to them as being right.”
“You are defending your viewpoint, though,” I said.
“As being understandable from my point of view,” she said.
“That’s almost tautological,” I said. “Also, irrelevant.”
“It’s relevant to me,” she said.
This wasn’t the Marlot that I knew. Usually if she talked around in circles like this, she was being a smartass, trying to get someone else worked up. This time she was getting worked up. It was kind of disconcerting. I wanted to comfort her, but I wasn’t sure how. Or why.
“What exactly are you driving at, Marlot?” I asked her.
“It’s important to me,” she said. “I acted stupidly. I treated you poorly. I really want you to understand why I did it, why I felt the way I did. Do.”
“This is unexpected,” I said. “Usually when your feelings come up, it’s because I’ve hurt them. That seems like a funny way to handle an apology.”
“If you’re not interested in hearing what I’ve got to say, Jamie, just say so.”
“I’m not uninterested so much as I’m confused,” I said. “I don’t understand why you want to talk to me about your feelings all of a sudden.”
“Well, I guess that makes two of us,” she said.
“And now I’m the bad guy again,” I said.
“I’m trying to make a sincere apology,” Marlot said. “Not just one where I say I’m sorry and you forgive me.”
“Yeah, you’re doing really great at managing the risk of that,” I said. “Especially the second part.”
“Jamie, do you want to know why I did what I did, or do you just want to be mad at me?”
“Marlot, I am mad at you,” I said. “Want isn’t going to do anything about that.”
“So you’re not even going to listen to me.”
“I don’t think this is the best time,” I said.
“So, are you now saying there’s going to be another time later?”
“Probably,” I said. “Marlot, I’m pissed. I can forgive you, but being pissed at someone is a bad place to try to be sympathetic from.”
“I’m not looking for your sympathy, Jamie,” she said.
“You want me to understand your viewpoint,” I said. “That doesn’t happen when someone’s angry. You think I need to in order to really forgive you. Marlot, if I’ve ever understood your viewpoint before, it’s only because it overlaps mine in spots. Why do you suddenly need to be understood?”
“Maybe I’m tired of being a mystery to you,” she said.
“Really? It’s always seemed like it amused you to be a little inscrutable.” I actually smiled a little. Marlot had always been smug, self-assured. Maybe a bit too pleased with herself.
“Oh, it’s terribly entertaining,” she said. “But it’s also tiring. It’s an effort, Jamie. The facade gets heavy. Sometimes you want to drop it.”
“And yet you still found the strength to start a whole new charade today with the party that you supposedly didn’t know if you were going to or not,” I said.
“Jamie, I told you, I wanted you to make up your own mind,” she said. “If you came here, I wanted it to be your decision, because you wanted to go out and have fun, not because it would let you stick close to me.”
“Well, mission accomplished,” I said. “I think it’ll be a long time before I put being close to you over going out and having fun. Marlot, it almost sounds like you’re trying to drive me away.”
“I’m not trying,” she said. “Just acknowledging what’s happening, what’s likely to happen. Do you really think we would still be hanging out a year from now?”
“Why wouldn’t we?” I asked. “Without something like this, I mean.”
“Okay, let me rephrase that: that’d you still be hanging out with me?” Marlot asked.
“Marlot, we’ve been friends a long time,” I said. “If I wasn’t already pissed off, I’d almost be insulted.”
“We were friends in high school,” Marlot said. “Where neither of us was exactly popular, and every summer you disappeared with your mom and came back acting like you’d had the time of your life with your cousins. I was your best friend in Agora, but in the world outside it you didn’t need me.”
“Marlot, I followed you here,” I said. “You chose to go to school halfway across a continent from Agora and I came with you. What does that tell you?”
“That you’re slow on the uptake,” she said.
“When I said I was almost insulted, that wasn’t a challenge.”
“You were still thinking like a high schooler,” Marlot said. “Thinking you had to stay close by me. But there are more people our age going to MU than there are people living in Agora. On just our floor there’s more people than there were in our graduating class. At Agora Civic High, you were Jamie Bowman, known dorkwad and suspected gaywad.”
“I think you’re exaggerating my wadiness just a little,” I said, wincing.
“Here no one knows you, and there are people who think being dorky or queer are kind of cool. Here you could reinvent yourself. Here, you don’t need me.”
I remembered the first day at MU. One of the first things Marlot had done after we got settled into our rooms was to alter the tag on my door from “James” to “Jamie”. She’d also sabotaged my effort to keep my elven blood from defining me the way it had back home.
“You’ve seriously been afraid that I’m just going to leave you?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“Marlot, do the words ’self-fulfilling prophecy’ mean anything to you?”
“Yeah, I didn’t pick the best way to handle it,” she said. “I swear, rationality was my backup plan, just in case being really passive-aggressive somehow failed.” She sighed. “Jamie, I wasn’t trying to make you stay. Once we got here and you started hooking up with the elves and I saw how all the girls were throwing themselves at you, I was resigned to the idea that you probably wouldn’t.”
“Girls don’t throw themselves at me, Marlot,” I said.
“Sure they do,” she said. “Do you want me to start naming names? You’ve got Missy, you’ve got Barley, you’ve got whats’s her name, the girl who doesn’t believe in boundaries or deodorant, you’ve got Lonnie. In fairness, you’re not the only person she’s thrown herself at.”
“‘Lonnie’ hasn’t exactly thrown herself at me,” I said. “Except to tell me how nifty she thinks it is being a virgin.”
“She didn’t come here with you tonight?”
“Yes, she did,” I said. “And then she got into the hot tub with me, naked as an asexual jaybird.”
“She’s a virgin, not a nun,” Marlot said. “Just because she isn’t going to get into bed with you doesn’t mean she can’t be interested in you.”
“Yeah, but what’s the point?”
“The point is that she’s among the girls who have thrown themselves at you,” Marlot said. “And those are just the ones I can think of. Them, and all the girls whose eyes were glued to you tonight.”
“So, this is a jealousy thing?”
“Yes, Jamie, I’m jealous of how oblivious you are,” she said. “No, Jamie. Look, by now I’d resigned myself to this. I wasn’t going to beg. I wasn’t going to guilt you into keeping me around. I’d miss you like crazy, Jamie, but I’m not completely pathetic. I’ve made other friends here, too.”
“Marlot,” I said. “You aren’t at all pathetic. You’re my best friend.
“But you contradict yourself,” she said, and I snorted. And smiled. That was the Marlot I knew. Suddenly I felt a little less angry.
Or just as angry, but it mattered less.
“So, if I’m following the logic—to abuse the term—then you didn’t tell me that you were going to be here because you thought it would be clingy or desperate or something on your part if I ended up coming here only because of you,” I said.
“Well, when you put it that way, it makes it sound like it was a really bad idea that I didn’t think through at all,” she said. “Seriously, Jamie, I thought the day would come when you’d pick parties over me, anyway, and I didn’t want to stand in the way of that.”
There was a knock on the door. It opened inward a bit and Bobby stuck his head in.
“Hey, uh, that Lonnie girl’s okay, by the way,” he said. “In case either of you were, you know, concerned or anything.”
“Oh, yeah, your spirit thing healed her,” I said.
“I just thought you’d want to know that she’s alright,” Bobby said.
“Okay, yeah, great,” Marlot said. “Bobby, we’re kind of in the middle of something here.”
“Well, I thought you’d be interested,” Bobby said. He stood there, a puzzled and slightly annoyed look on his face. “Since you did kind of knock her out and leave her there on the ground.”
“I’m not going to apologize for defending myself,” Marlot said. “No matter what I said, you don’t react to words with violence.”
“Wait, what did you say?” Bobby asked. “She’s still pretty ticked off.”
“Does it matter?” Marlot asked. “She attacked me. I don’t believe any words excuse violence.”
“But still, it seems like it must have been pretty bad—”
“Sticks and stones, Bobby,” Marlot said. “Now, will you please excuse us?”
“Yeah, okay, sorry,” he said, and he ducked back out.
Marlot rolled her eyes as the door closed.
“Khersis, can you believe that guy?” I said to her.
“Oh, don’t you start on him,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re not dating him,” she said. “You don’t get to talk about him if you’re not dating him. That’s just the way the world works. Anyway, there’s something else, more important I’d like to talk about.”
“What’s that?”
“Iason,” she said.
Next time: Talking about Iason. Hey, they can’t all be suspenseful.
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