People We Meet on Vacation

ALEX AND I were both pretty strapped for cash when the resort in Vail, Colorado, reached out to offer me a free stay.

At that point, whether the trip would happen was up in the air.

For one thing, when Guillermo broke up with me for a new hostess in his restaurant (a waifish blue-eyed girl almost fresh off the plane from Nebraska)—six weeks after I took the plunge and moved into his apartment—I had to scramble to find a new place to live.

Had to take an apartment on the high end of my price range.

Had to pay for a U-Haul for the second time in two months.

Had to buy new furniture to replace the stuff that had become redundant and thus been discarded—Gui already had nicer versions of my things: sofa, mattress, Danish-look kitchen table. We’d kept my dresser, because the leg on his was broken, and my bedside table, because he only had the one, but other than that, pretty much everything we’d kept was his.

The breakup came just after we’d gone to Linfield for Mom’s birthday.

For weeks beforehand, I’d debated whether to warn Gui what to expect.

For example, the Beverly Hillbillies–style junkyard that was our front lawn. Or Mom’s Museum to Our Childhood, as me and my brothers called the house itself. The baked goods my mother would pile up around the kitchen the whole time we were there, often with a frosting so thick and sweet it made non-Wrights cough as they ate, or the fact that our garage was riddled with things like once-used duct tape Dad was sure he could repurpose. Or that we’d be expected to play a days-spanning board game we’d invented as kids based on Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

That my parents had recently adopted three senior cats, one of whom was incontinent to the point of having to wear a diaper.

Or that there was a decent chance he’d hear my parents having sex, because our house had thin walls, and as previously stated, the Wrights are a loud clan.

Or that there’d be a New Talent Show at the end of the weekend, where everyone was expected to perform some new feat they’d only started learning at the start of the visit.

(Last time I’d been home, Prince’s talent had been having us call out the name of any movie and trying to connect it back to Keanu Reeves within six degrees.)

So I should’ve warned Guillermo what he was walking into, definitely, but doing so would’ve felt like treason. Like I was saying there was something wrong with them. And sure, they were loud and messy, but they were also amazing and kind and funny, and I hated myself for even considering being embarrassed by them.

Gui would love them, I told myself. Gui loved me, and these were the people who’d made me.

At the end of our first night there, we shut ourselves into my childhood bedroom and he said, “I think I understand you better now than ever before.”

His voice was as tender and warm as ever, but instead of love, it sounded like sympathy.

“I get why you had to flee to New York,” he said. “It must’ve been so hard for you here.”

My stomach sunk and my heart squeezed painfully, but I didn’t correct him. Again, I just hated myself for being embarrassed.

Because I had fled to New York, but I hadn’t fled my family, and if I’d kept them separate from the rest of my life, it was only to protect them from judgment, and myself from this familiar feeling of rejection.

The rest of the trip was uncomfortable. Gui was kind to my family—he was always kind—but I saw every interaction they had through a lens of condescension and pity after that.

I tried to forget the trip had happened. We were happy together, in our real life, in New York. So what if he didn’t understand my family? He loved me.

A few weeks later, we went to a dinner party at his friend’s brownstone, someone he’d known from boarding school, a guy with a trust fund and a Damien Hirst painting hanging over the dining room table. I knew this—would never forget it—because when someone said the name, unrelated to the painting, I said, “Who?” and laughter followed.

They weren’t laughing at me; they genuinely thought I was making a joke.

Four days after that, Guillermo ended our relationship. “We’re just too different,” he said. “We got swept up in our chemistry, but long term, we want different things.”

I’m not saying he dumped me for not knowing who Damien Hirst was. But I’m not not saying that either.

When I moved out of the apartment, I stole one of his fancy cooking knives.

I could’ve taken them all, but my mild form of revenge was imagining him looking everywhere for it, trying to figure out if he took it with him to a dinner party or it fell into the gap between his enormous refrigerator and the kitchen island.

Frankly, I wanted the knife to haunt him.

Not in a My-Ex-Is-Going-to-Go-All-Glenn-Close-in-Fatal-Attraction way, but in a Something-About-This-Missing-Knife-Seems-to-Be-Conjuring-a-Strong-Metaphor-and-I-Can’t-Figure-Out-What-It’s-Saying way.

I started feeling guilty after a week in my new apartment—once the sobbing wore off—and considered mailing the knife back but thought that might send the wrong message. I imagined Gui showing up to the police department with the package, and decided I’d just let him buy a new knife.

I thought about selling the stolen one online, and worried the anonymous buyer would turn out to be him, so I just kept it and resumed my sobbing until I was done threeish weeks later.

The point is, breakups suck. Breakups between cohabitating partners in overpriced cities suck a little extra, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to afford a summer trip this year.

And then there was the matter of Sarah Torval.

Adorable, willowy yet athletic, clean-faced, brown-eyeliner-wearing Sarah Torval.

Who Alex has been seriously dating for nine months. After their first chance encounter when Alex was visiting friends in Chicago, their texting had quickly evolved into phone calls, and then another visit. After that they’d gotten serious fast, and after six months long distance, she’d taken a teaching job and moved to Indiana to be with him while he finished his MFA. She’s happy to stay there while he works toward his doctorate, and will probably follow him wherever he lands afterward.

Which would make me happy if not for my increasing suspicion that she hates me.

Whenever she posts pictures of herself holding Alex’s brand-new baby niece with captions like family time, or this little love bug, I like the post and comment, but she refuses to follow me back. I even unfollowed and refollowed her once, in case she hadn’t noticed me the first time.

“I think she feels kind of weird about the trip,” Alex admits on one of our (now fewer and farther between) calls. I’m pretty sure he only calls me from the car, when he’s on his way to or from the gym. I want to tell him that calling me only when she’s not around probably isn’t helping.

But the truth is, I don’t want to talk to him while anyone else is around, so instead this is what has become of our friendship. Fifteen-minute calls every couple weeks, no texting, no messaging, hardly any emailing except the occasional one-liner with a picture of the tiny black cat he found in the dumpster behind his apartment complex.

She looks like a kitten, but according to the vet she’s fully grown, just small. He sends me pictures of her sitting in shoes and hats and bowls, always writing for scale, but really I know he just thinks everything she does is adorable. And sure, it’s cute that cats like to sit in things . . . but it’s quite possibly cuter that Alex can’t stop himself from taking pictures of it.

He hasn’t named her yet; he’s taking his time. He says it wouldn’t feel right to name a grown thing without knowing it, so for now he calls her cat or tiny sweetie or little friend.

Sarah wants to call her Sadie, but Alex doesn’t think that fits so he’s biding his time. The cat is the only thing we ever talk about these days. I’m surprised Alex would be so forthright as to tell me that Sarah feels weird about the Summer Trip.

“Of course she does,” I tell him, “I would too.” I don’t blame her at all. If my boyfriend had a friendship with a girl like Alex’s and mine, I would wind up in The Yellow Wallpaper.

There’s no way in hell I could believe it was wholly platonic. Especially having been in this friendship long enough to accept that five (to fifteenish) percent of what-if as part of the deal.

“So what do we do?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say, trying not to sound miserable. “Do you want to invite her?”

He’s quiet for a minute. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Okay . . .” And then, after the longest pause ever, I say, “Should we just . . . cancel?”

Alex sighs. He must have me on speakerphone because I can hear his turn signal clicking. “I don’t know, Poppy. I’m not sure.”

“Yeah. Me neither.”

We stay on the phone, but neither of us says anything else for the rest of his drive. “I just got home,” he says eventually. “Let’s talk about this again in a few weeks. Things could change by then.”Belonging © NôvelDram/a.Org.

What things? I want to ask, but don’t, because once your best friend is someone else’s boyfriend, the boundaries between what you can and can’t say get a whole lot firmer.

I spend the whole night after our phone call thinking, Is he going to break up with her? Is she going to break up with him?

Is he going to try to reason with her?

Is he going to break up with me?

When I get the offer of a free stay from the resort in Vail, I send him the first text I’ve sent in months: Hey! Give me a call when you’ve got a sec!

At five thirty the next morning, my phone rings me awake. I peer through the dark at his name on the screen and fumble the call on to hear his turn signal tapping out a rhythm. He’s on his way to the gym. “What’s up?” he asks.

“I’m dead,” I groan.

“What else?”

“Colorado,” I say. “Vail.”