Cartwheel by Jennifer duBois

Author:Jennifer duBois [duBois, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780812995879
Google: Sb9ocQaYAqAC
Amazon: B00CK8CLJI
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-09-24T07:00:00+00:00

That night, Sebastien sent a text at four a.m. and Lily woke up to read it but forgot to answer. She forgot the next day, too, and the next day, and by the third day responding seemed fake and forced, but she made herself do it, and she tried to sound as unself-conscious and breezy as possible—“Hey SLC, sorry I’ve been MIA, wanna hang out tonight?”—as though she was a very popular girl and he was one of her many, many, many friends, no less precious to her because he was one of so many. His response came a day later, flinty and stiff—“I’d hardly noticed. You know where to find me”—and Lily knew that she’d done the wrong thing again, that she always did the wrong thing. Sometimes Lily wished she could float along in the kind of lighthearted solipsism that prevented grudges and bad feelings and lingering entanglements, that made it impossible to take anything too hard. But things in Lily’s life never worked out this way. Sebastien’s attempted gift of the bracelet weighed on her heavily, as did the sex, though she hated to admit it. She felt somehow obligated to him now; she felt that she’d treated him carelessly, and though she knew she’d treated him no differently from the way that many boys had treated her—no differently from the way that Sebastien himself would likely have treated her, if she’d let him—she still couldn’t shake the acrid feeling behind her heart, the queasy sense of revolving guilt.

She called Sebastien the next morning and proposed dinner. She would bring it, she said. Her treat. He assented.

At least, Lily told herself, Sebastien was unlikely to bring up her recent absence. That was something she liked about him. Stoicism was not valued at Middlebury, where everyone wanted to endlessly talk and process and expurgate every little thing. If you hooked up with a boy he seemed to feel he owed you a real-time narration of his entire life, a live-blogging of his every emotional memory. If Sebastien LeCompte had been a Middlebury boy, he and Lily would already have agonized ceaselessly over the nature of their relationship, the question of monogamy, the issue of forward momentum, the prospect of looming distance and separation, the meaning of things, the meaningless of things. What a relief it was to be excused from all of that, anyway.

“I think old Sebastien’s mad at me,” Lily said to Katy that afternoon. She and Katy talked about Sebastien a lot, partly because they couldn’t find much else to talk about. Katy’s family, apparently, was too loving and functional to merit discussion. On the question of politics, Lily sensed a level of conflict aversion in Katy that suggested that there might be conflict to be had if Lily pushed it, which, of course, she tried very hard to do—making flamboyant assertions, quoting outrageous statistics. But Katy proved impossible to rouse; she never agreed nor disagreed, only asked questions aimed at making Lily clarify whatever she’d just said.

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