Gansey Week #3
Gansey is good at dealing with the people in the hospital. She recognizes most of the administrative people she speaks to in the process of getting Eve released because she’d seen them just the day before when she’d broken her thumb, so she can smile pleasantly and call them by name without checking their nametags. It’s nice, right now, to have something she’s good at. Remembering names, filling out paperwork, explaining away why she’s paying the bills. As much as she’s looking forward to seeing Eve safe and whole (don’t think about her ear, Gansey tells herself, don’t think about the concussion she miraculously didn’t have), the conversation they’re going to have will be anything but simple. All Gansey wants is for something to be simple for one whole day.
When she finishes inside the hospital, she decides to wait in the Camaro so that they’ll have a little privacy when Eve comes out. The keyring she keeps turning over in her hand does little to still the racing of her heart. Breathing exercises are useless. This fear is just going to keep making its nest in her ribcage until the day is over. When Eve finally pulls open the passenger seat door and gets in, Gansey is relieved that at least the wait is over.
“Hey Parrish.” The words immediately feel wrong in her mouth. Ronan calls Eve by her last name often enough, but Gansey doesn’t often do it. Now, it feels full of false girl’s school camaraderie. “They told me you didn’t have insurance. I took care of it.” Now she wishes she hadn’t said that either. She could have left it implied, but instead she’d touched the wound with her clumsy hands and she can be certain that Eve will feel the sting.
“You win,” Eve says softly. “Take me to get my stuff.”
“I didn’t win anything. Do you think this is how I wanted it?” She tries to make it sound like a rhetorical question, but some masochistic part of her wants to know what Eve really sees when she looks at Gansey.
“Yes, yes I do.”
Gansey wants to cry, so she gets pissed instead. She feels like Ronan. “Don’t be shitty.”
“I’m telling you that you can say ‘I told you so.’ Say ‘if you left earlier, this wouldn’t have happen.’” The dead tone of her voice frightens Gansey, so she stays indignant, though she keeps her own voice even.
“Did I say that before? You don’t have to act like it’s the end of the world?”
“It is the end of the world.”
When Gansey looks at her, it’s like Eve isn’t even there. Her voice, her eyes, her hands, are all empty and she is gone, gone, gone. Gansey swallows back her terror and says, “Moving out of your dad’s place is the end of the world?”
“You know what I wanted. You know this wasn’t it.”
“You act like it’s my fault.” It’s petty and whiny and she knows it, but she can’t help herself.
“Tell me you’re unhappy about how this is going down.”
It takes Gansey a moment to respond. If there’s anything that could override her concern for Eve’s well being, it’s this. From where she’s sitting, it sounds an awful lot like confirmation that Eve really does hate her. Still, she manages to say, “I’m unhappy about how this is going down.”
“Whatever. You’ve wanted me to move out forever.”
“Not like this,” Gansey says, and she looks at Eve, trying to communicate by expression if not by words how fucking sorry she is that this has happened. How sorry she is that anything bad has ever happened to Eve. But Eve won’t look up, so Gansey turns back to look over the dashboard. “At least you have a place to go. ‘End of the world’...What is your problem, Eve? I mean, is there something about my place that’s too repugnant for you to imagine living there? Why is it that everything kind I do is pity to you? Everything is charity.” She can’t bring herself to say, it’s not charity, Eve. It’s love. It’s always been love. It’s too much, too big and clumsy a thing to say. So she says, “Well, here it is: I’m sick of tiptoeing around your principles.”
“God, I’m sick of your condescension, Gansey. Don’t try to make me feel stupid. Who whips out repugnant? Don’t pretend you’re not trying to make me feel stupid.”
“This is the way I talk,” Gansey says, on the verge of tears. She’s never going to be someone that Eve can like, at least not in a simple way, not in a way that doesn’t involve fighting and shitty communication and words not even meant to wound landing like bullets. She wants to scream and writhe and beat her fists against the steering wheel. Not like Ronan, not real violence, not a focused beam of wrath that will destroy anything its path, but a useless and messy energy that curdles in her chest and takes away all her control. When her voice returns to her, it’s thin and shaking and too high. “I’m sorry your father never taught you the meaning of repugnant. He was too busy smashing your head against the wall of your trailer while you apologized for being alive.”
The words are out, and she can’t take them back. Gansey feels hollowed out. She can’t bring herself to look at Eve.
“Fuck you, Gansey. Fuck you.”
She doesn’t even turn to look when Eve gets out and slams the door behind her. For a moment she closes her eyes and tells herself, you cannot go away right now. When she opens her eyes again, Eve is walking across the parking lot. Turning the key in the ignition, she hurries to pull out of her parking spot and pull up alongside her friend, slowing to a crawl and rolling her window down to speak to her.
“Where are you going?” She asks, and when no reply comes, “Where do you have to go?” Eve doesn’t look at her, just keeps walking with her eyes ahead, dead on her feet. “Eve, just tell me not back there.” She hates it when her voice cracks, but she lets it happen, just this once. “It doesn’t have to be Monmouth, but let me take you wherever you’re going.”
When she stops walking, Gansey hits the brakes and waits the several seconds it takes before Eve begins moving again, this time around the hood of the car to get back into the passenger seat. She looks more defeated than ever when she says, “It doesn’t matter how you say it. It’s what you wanted, in the end. All your things in one place, all under your roof. Everything you own right where you can see…”
Gansey doesn’t reply because she doesn’t have any words and even if she did, they’d be the wrong ones, she’d regret them the instant she heard them, they’d make Eve hate her even more. Just get to the end of the day, she tells herself. Eve won’t look at you like that in the morning. It will be better. Still, it takes her the entire trip to the trailer park and then to Aglionby, where they’re picking up Ronan, to put away the hurt of those sentences. She can’t understand what it is that she did or said to make Eve imagine that she could ever think of Eve and and Ronan and Leah as her things. Maybe she’s forgetting something. Maybe she’s forgotten a dozen things. She hates how often in her fights with Eve she feels like she’s missed something, like she’s remembering an entirely different version of the past. But she’s gotten good at finding ways to tuck the pain of it into the back of her mind to be retrieved and agonized over on some insomniac night. But she doesn’t have the luxury of thinking about it right now. There are too many motions to go through before she can finally put her head down on her pillow and fail to sleep.