Free Why Can't I Be You by Allie Larkin Page B

and I spent Sundays on the sidelines at the indoor beach volleyball courts, breathing in the smell of too many bare feet, playing the good girlfriend to the best of my abilities. I didn’t even complain when he tracked sand through my apartment after the game.
    So many years later, I still wished I’d told Yarah that I felt like an eight-legged sea creature around all the other college kids too. I wished I could have let myself be better friends with her, instead of carefully keeping a little bit of distance between us. I told myself it was the language barrier, but it was my barrier. Yarah’s English was perfect.

M yra left to go to work, and I had about twenty minutes before I had to be at the conference. I used the shower cap from the toiletry kit to keep my hair dry, since it was still looking direct-from-the-hairdresser fabulous. It gave me time to call Luanne while I did my makeup.
    “Great timing,” Luanne said, when she picked up the phone. “I’m about to pull the trigger on these plane tickets. I’ll meet you at the hotel on Sunday, and we can rent a car and drive out to the spa on Monday. I can crash in your room, right? I found a place that rents classics, because what, we want to get stuck in an economy car? No. I’m thinking something with fins. Is a Bel Air too obvious? Maybe an MG?”
    “Hi, Lu. How are you this morning?” I dipped the flat-tipped brush into a tiny smudge pot of charcoal eyeliner and drew a thin line along my top lashes, flaring it up just the slightest bit at the very end. I was better at it than I thought I’d be. It was just like painting, but on my face instead of canvas.
    “Whatever, pleasantries, blah, blah, blah, et cetera,” Luanne said. “So is Sunday good? Because I have to order these tickets and get back to work. You guys are three hours lazy over there. I have a lunch in a few, and my client has been on my ass all morning about the Context account.”
    It’s not like Luanne was a bad person, but after staying up all night pouring my heart out to Myra, Luanne kind of seemed like a caricature of a friend. The loud sidekick in a romantic comedy. And when I thought of her that way, all of a sudden, I kind of wanted to high-five myself. I usually felt like the sidekick in my friendship with Luanne. When it comes down to it, you probably aren’t supposed to feel like the sidekick in your own life.
    I had to make a choice. Luanne was a big old monkey wrench in the plan. I couldn’t tell her the truth. There was no way she’d ever understand. How would I even start that conversation? And I couldn’t have her showing up at the hotel and risk her running into Myra. These kinds of things always end badly in movies. If Myra did find out I wasn’t Jessie, and Luanne wasn’t there to bear witness, at least when I went home I could pretend none of it had ever happened. And if Luanne didn’t show up, the chances of Myra finding out dropped dramatically.
    So instead of saying, “No, Lu, I’m pretending to be this other girl, and if you show up here, you’ll out me,” I said, “You know, I think this is something I need to do by myself, Lu. I mean, no offense or anything. I think I really need to
process
, you know? To sit with myself or something.” And it wasn’t even a lie.
    “Sit with yourself?” Luanne said, with a snotty little cough. “Do you have a split personality all of a sudden?”
    “You know what I mean. If you come, I’ll have a fantastic time.”
    “And that’s a bad thing?”
    “That’s a wonderful thing, but then I won’t be processing. I won’t be getting over Deagan. I’ll just be putting everything off until later. And I’ll get home and it’ll all hit me, and I’ll be stuck running into him and Faye at Wegmans and hiding in the cereal aisle.”
    “So you need alone time now.”
    “Cap’n Crunch can’t save me if I don’t man up and save myself.”
    “Woman up,” Luanne said.
    “Exactly.”
    “I get it,” she said softly,