Free Why Can't I Be You by Allie Larkin

worse?”
    “What’s your sore spot?” I asked, eager to steer the conversation away from me. The less I talked about myself, the less likely I was to screw up and say something that would give me away.
    “That I didn’t go to FIT. That I stayed behind for John.” She sighed and grabbed her mug. “I think I overcompensate for it now. I live like a monk. All I do is work. Like I need to prove to the world that I’m not the kind of girl who gives up everything for a boy. Now I’m, like, romantically impaired. I don’t know if I know how to be in a relationship. I don’t know if I’ve left room for one.”
    “Sometimes,” I said, “maybe we do things for the wrong reason, but we end up with the right result. At least I hope it works that way.”
    Myra shook her head like she didn’t want to think about herself anymore. “What’s your sore spot?”
    “I think maybe I try so hard to be who everyone wants me to be, I don’t know who I want to be.”
    “But you’re Jessie
Fucking
Morgan.”
    I reached for my coffee mug and clinked it against Myra’s instead of answering. “To falling down the rabbit hole,” I said.
    “Drink me,” Myra said, wiggling her mug back and forth like it was talking to her.

    If I could make up a dream friend to have gone through high school with, she would end up being exactly like Myra. Actually, if I could make up a dream friend to go through adulthood with, it would be Myra too.
    We stayed up talking until three a.m., fell asleep on the big king-sized bed, and had room service breakfast on the balcony. We spent every waking moment talking about life and jobs, who we are now, how we were both still waiting to feel like grown-ups, and this hot guy who owns the coffee shop next to Myra’s store. And I didn’t feel self-conscious. I didn’t feel like I had to pretend I never get morning breath or sleep in my eyes. I didn’t feel like everything that came out of my mouth had to be funny or clever. Even though I knew it was completely bizarre, I felt like it was okay to just be me when I hung out with Myra.

M y life didn’t really start until college.
    I got to go away to school. My mom was going to make me live at home and go someplace local, but my dad said that Ithaca wasn’t far and it would be good for me to have a little bit of distance. His proclamation was, of course, followed by my mother shouting, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” and then yelling and screaming until my dad finally said, “Thank God I don’t have to listen to this shit anymore,” and slammed the door behind him hard enough to make the windows rattle.
    For weeks after that, I was the enemy and I had to tread lightly. I’d learned to read every single smidge of a warning sign. There were clues in her tone, in the subtle movements at the corners of her lips when she talked. She had a twitch that sprung from her left eyebrow when the tide was about to turn. A simple conversation would devolve into a lecture about how selfish I was, what a hardship sending me away to school was going to be, how no one ever thought about her needs. I was ungrateful. I didn’t know how much she’d given up for me. I made things hard for her with my father. She wondered sometimes if her life would have been better if she hadn’t had a child. Her words smelled like bourbon.
    But in the end I got to go away to school. If my mother hadn’t let me, she’d be proving my father right on some level, and she couldn’t let that happen.
    My roommate, Yarah, was from Brazil and used to tell me that she felt like an eight-legged sea creature around American college kids. I never told her that I felt that way too.
    The first time it snowed, Yarah and two girls from California who lived on the third floor ran outside in their pajamas and stared in amazement. I did too, even though Rochester is one of the snowiest cities in the country. The snow in Ithaca felt different, exciting. We twirled around on the quad and