Beautiful Disaster

Realized that bulimia wasn’t something I needed to drag myself into again, so I forced myself not to puke after the next bar. It tasted really good, even if I cried through most of it."

"Again?" I have to interrupt her, suddenly weary.

Alice offers me a small smile. "There are things you don’t know about me, either, not just the other way around."

Exhaling loudly, she resumes, her tone once more clinical and flat as she continues with her recount.

"Then Christmas, I went to see my family, big mistake. My mother was horrified at the cat hair and the one scratch on the back of my hand, then was scandalized that I was drinking coffee with real cream, and told me I looked unhealthy because I had started to gain weight. I just turned around and called a cab, and spent the night in a hotel at the airport before I caught the next flight home. Then I threw out the remaining clutter, and brought half of my wardrobe to the nearest homeless shelter. Just couldn’t look at it anymore, it had her written all over it, not me.

"Because I couldn’t work, either, I went to see some college friends of mine who had moved to London, where I met Cecile, and realized just how much more I loved working with her. Sold my label, as I said, got a new ‘healthy living’ cook book, then bought a bunch of ten dollar a pair jeans and they were the best ones I had ever had. And ever since then I have pretty much have been working on building the new me."

I take that all in in silence, and I don’t know what to say even when she’s done. While I hung out a lot at her family’s home before they moved to Florida a few years ago, I never realized the amount of tension that must have existed between Alice and her mother that would cause things to blow up like that, but in hindsight it all makes sense. I guess I always thought they were just close, but not in a way that made Alice feel like she had to eventually break away from her.

"What about Nate?" I finally ask when the only other thing I can think to bring up is more likely to cause some nasty bickering.

"We broke up. Kind of," she sighs, then shrugs. "I told him I really needed to be alone, he tried to offer me a shoulder to cry on, and I kicked him out, telling him I didn’t need anyone’s sympathy. He still wouldn’t go and I told him that I’m not the woman he thinks I am. He told me that I don’t know that, and that I’m not really like I acted at the dinner. We kept fighting, and he finally left me alone when I promised I would call him once I felt better.

We’ve been on a few dates since then, but I’m keeping my distance. He still insists that he sees the real me and has fallen in love with her, but how can he see that when I can’t? Guess I’m too weak to cut him free, but he’s old enough to know if he wants to waste his time with a crazy bitch or not. We’ll see, maybe eventually I’ll trust him and believe him, seeing as I can’t see anything clearly anymore."

It’s strange that she sounds more like she’s musing over the topic, detached and trying out possibilities in her head, than talking about her love life. She’s weirding me out, but at the same time I feel like this is the first real conversation we’ve had since

ever.

Before I can think of a reply, her gaze turns a little jaded, and she herself pokes the big elephant crammed into the room with us.

"So how are things with Bella and Jazz?"

No way to avoid that topic now.

"Difficult but good."

My answer doesn’t sit well with her, but not for the reasons I expected. She mostly seems as if she’s hurt but not surprised that I don’t go on explaining.

"Guess it must be difficult with three people in the mix, when two are sometimes already impossible enough."

I grin in spite of myself, considering how often Bella alone calls me

‘impossible’. Alice keeps looking at me expectantly, so I finally try to add a few more sentences.

"True, but the problems we keep bumping into aren’t the ones I’ve been waiting for. It sometimes seems as if we’re deliberately trying to drive each other crazy. And many things explode way more quickly than they used to, and everything escalates, but also diffuses faster. Or maybe that’s just us –

mope, shout, then make up. You just end up saying things differently to a friend than to someone you love, and the weird mixture we’re cultivating is forming its own dynamic in that spectrum."

She nods as if my words make sense to her, then munches another cookie.

"Just how mad are they at me?"

I consider what to tell her for a long time, but don’t know what to say in the end.

"Why did you say what you said at Thanksgiving?" I ask her instead, feeling that if I understand her, maybe I can give her a better explanation about how things are between us and her.

Alice falters for a moment, and for a while I think she is just going to shut me out again and not tell me anything at all, but then she continues anyway.

"I really don’t know. I wasn’t really myself, I was in a bad place, everything kept getting worse and worse – and I’m not saying this as an excuse, but as an explanation."

She turns away from me then and looks out the window, her voice again hollow when she resumes.

"Things were going bad a long time before that. Even before summer.

Sometimes I don’t even remember when they were any different. I mean, I didn’t feel like everything was all that bad, I did my thing, tried to be who I thought everyone expected me to be: happy, superficial, exuberant Alice with a killer fashion sense and sage advice for everyone. Pretty stupid, huh?"

I don’t reply, but I don’t think she’s really waiting for an answer.

"I guess when Jazz told me what you three had been up to, that should have been a wake-up call for me. Not because my three best friends were f**king each other behind my back, I mean, duh, just the spacial arrangements considered that probably shouldn’t have been such a surprise. But it was, because I simply couldn’t wrap my head around it, and my only reaction was to lash out, then try to ignore it. I guess on some level I realized that I had lost any connection I had to you and Jazz because I completely withdrew from you, then tried to fit what I had to into my perfect little world."

The fact that she doesn’t mention Bella isn’t lost on me.

"Anyway, I decided to make the best of it, grow up, turn my life around.

Only that didn’t really turn out so well. Nothing fit, and if I hadn’t been so afraid of being all alone, I would have told Jazz after a month that it wasn’t working. But I couldn’t. I tried to change him, and when that didn’t work I gave up. Guess I was just waiting for everything to blow up in my face again. That’s why I brought Nate to the Thanksgiving dinner, I knew that there wasn’t a chance in hell that could work out. Only then it looked like it really would, so I had to make sure myself that it didn’t."

She falls silent, looking everywhere but at me, before finally she catches my gaze. The pain in her eyes is so palpable that I can’t even feel angry at what she did anymore.

"But why? We’re your friends, you could have told us. And if not me or Jazz, maybe Rose? You know that she would have listened, and maybe made you see reason?"

"There was nothing she could have said that would have changed things for me. I didn’t see it all as I see it now, I was so in over my head and so desperate and lost and… see, I can’t even explain it now! But one day I woke up and no one in the whole world understood me anymore, didn’t know who I was, and at the same time all of you were strangers to me! I didn’t know how to deal with that, and things only got worse, so I did the only thing I still could, I tried to hang on to the delusions. But then I met Nate, and with him I was suddenly someone else. It wasn’t even sexual attraction at first between us, that came much later. And I hated myself for sleeping with him because I knew I was cheating on Jazz and that he’d never forgive me when he found out, but locked inside my head, it seemed like him shoving me away was exactly what I deserved. I waited and waited for him to catch on, but he just didn’t, we went through the motions like before, pretended to be happy, and that drove me insane! He forced me to end things, and I did, about the only mature thing I’ve done in years."