“Feels kind of like a first date or something. An awkward one.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said then, hoping to shut the conversation down. “I don’t go on dates.”
She peered at me. “What does that mean?”
Oh God. Now I’d started a conversation. “My generation doesn’t really date,” I said.
“Why not?”
I shrugged. “I guess it just seems kind of artificial.”
“What do you do instead?”
I kept thinking each answer I gave would be the last one, and thenI’d be released to go on up. But she kept stopping me—snagging me there on the staircase. “We hang out. Usually in groups.”
“But then how do you ever get close to anybody?”
“I guess it depends on how you define close.”
“How do you have conversations? Get to know each other? Fall in love?”
“I told you,” I said. “I don’t fall in love.”
“Surely you do, a little bit.”
“Nope,” I said. “Love is for girls.”
“You are a girl,” Diana pointed out.
I didn’t even try to hide the scorn in my voice. “That doesn’t mean I have to be girly.”
Did we really have to have this conversation? I lifted my foot to the next step. I just wanted to go memorize fire hydrants. I sure as hell didn’t know how to explain it to her if she didn’t get it already. “Love makes people stupid,” I said at last, hoping to cut to the chase, “and I’m not interested in being stupid.”
“Not always,” she said.
“Women especially,” I added, not bothering to hide my impatience. “It makes them needy and sad and pathetic. And robs them of their independence.”
“Independence is overrated,” my mom said.
“Love is overrated,” I countered. Then my notes from Captain Harris popped into my head, and I added, slapping the banister for emphasis, “Love is for the weak.”
I needed that on a bumper sticker.
She wasn’t letting that stand. “Love is notweak,” she said, like I couldn’t have shocked her more. “It’s the opposite.”
I took another step up. “We’re just going to have to agree to disagree.”
But she wasn’t releasing me. The wind creaked the house. “Choosing to love—despite all the ways that people let you down, and disappear, and break your heart. Knowing everything we know about how hard life is and choosing to love anyway… That’s not weakness. That’s courage.”
I have to give myself credit here for not snorting and saying,We cantalk about courage after you’ve walked through actual fire.She wanted to talk about courage? I could talk about courage all day. And you weren’t going to find it in a rom-com.
But I really just wanted to go to my room. “Okay,” I said in a pleasant voice. “Whatever you say.”
Now she pinned me with her stare. “It’s my fault,” she said, after a second. “For leaving.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said, but there was that anger again, swirling itself into the mix. It kind of was her fault. She had been the first person to show me how terrible love could be.
The first, but certainly not the last.
