Free All of Us and Everything by Bridget Asher Page B

matters who loves who last, but that also would have been me.”
    He rubbed the cuffs of his shirt and without looking at Ru, he asked, “How is she?”
    Ru was pretty sure that her sister’s life was a disastrous mess and that she was miserable. “Good, I think. You know, we all have our things.”
    “I see,” Teddy said. “She was kind of my Daisy. I guess I’m just lucky I’m not floating facedown in a pool at the end of your story of my life, right?”
    “That’s a little overblown, don’t you think?”
    “Can I tell you that I didn’t really see my life as a chick flick that made hipsters cry into their monogrammed hankies?”
    “
Chick flick
is kind of a pejorative term.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes, really.” Was he doubting her?
    “I think if you’ve profited from a genre, you can’t really bad-mouth it much.”
    Ru said to herself, “I was just getting on a plane and minding my own business.”
    “Funny. I always imagined I’d one day run into you and how it might go.”
    “Is this how it goes?”
    “Not really. You’re usually more contrite. But maybe that’s not really who you are. You know, I remember this time when I met you. You were twelve or so and you were wearing pajamas, leaning out one of the bedroom windows. Your mom and Liv were having a screaming match about me, to be honest. I was out of sorts. I could see them through the windows. And I asked you what your name was. You said Ru Rockwell and you added that you weren’t related to the painter.”
    “We’re not.”
    “I knew that already. I was dating Liv, but then you asked me my name and I told you my full name, Teddy Whistler, and you asked me if I was related to the painter who painted his mother. You were just a kid. How did you know that?”
    “I have an excellent memory. In fact, I remember what you said back to me.”
    “What was that?”
    “You said,
Whistler painted a lot of things.
”
    “Well, that’s true. He did.”
    “And then my mother called the cops, if I’ve got that right.”
    “And they were prompt and hauled me off in cuffs.”
    They sat there for a while. Ru wasn’t sure what to say. Teddy Whistler was such a huge part of her childhood. He was a myth, a legend, a hero and a villain, a saint and a lover—the undoing of her sister. Ru had exploited all of that. She didn’t want to apologize again but she clearly owed him.
    “What did you mean by what you said when you first woke up?” Teddy asked.
    And for the first time in her life, Ru didn’t remember. She stared at Teddy. His hair was groomed like he was going somewhere that entailed grooming. “What did I say?”
    “We believe what we’re told.”
    “Oh,” Ru said. “Right. I know what I meant by that.” She smoothed her bangs, aware now—suddenly—that she had a weird lopsided haircut—the child who’d taken up the habit of petting her had cut Ru’s hair one morning while she slept. She hadn’t worn makeup or shaved her legs or worn perfume or deodorant since she landed in Vietnam. She thought of her eyebrows. They had no arches. She looked past the sleeping old lady out through the small window. Ru was still wearing the engagement ring, but only so she wouldn’t lose it.
    “And what did you mean by it?”
    “I meant that if someone tells us that something like quitting or, say, running away is bad, we buy into it—personally and collectively as a culture. But that’s not true.”
    “So, what are you quitting or running away from?” he asked.
    “I’m just heading home.” She glanced at him. “Catching up with family.”
    “I’m running toward,” he said.
    “Toward what?”
    And without any sarcasm or hint of insincerity, he said, “I’m going to see Amanda.”
    The name charged a distant memory. Amanda. “The girlfriend you broke up with before Liv?”
    He nodded. “You cut her from the movie.”
    “I thought it was simpler with just one girl.”
    “The one who turned me in.”
    “Really, I made it about