Free Getting Over Jack Wagner by Elise Juska Page A

There is only one topic that could present itself next.
    â€œWell, Alan and I are planning a trip to the Amish country.”
    Bingo.
    According to the textbooks, Hannah’s relationship with Alan Pinkerton is the picture of mental health. Unlike the rock star wannabes I date, Alan Pinkerton is a grown-up. He has a full beard. He wears bedroom slippers. He is a psychology student, like Hannah, though he’s been at Penn a year longer than she has. They met when Hannah entered the program two falls ago, after she got back from London. For Alan, either the proximity of academia or the proximity of Hannah’s year in London seems to have entitled him to be part British. He says “post” instead of mail, “cheers” instead of see ya. He calls me “e-LI-za,” with a mournful note on the second syllable, like some trying-to-be brogue.
    On the outside, I smile at Alan politely. On the inside, I am screaming: You’re from Newark, for fuck’s sake!
    The funny thing is, I think Alan recalls Hannah’s London experience more fondly than she does. For her, it was the “transitional year,” the “growing year,” the year when all the inclinations she’d been born with—an obsession with animals, a talent for listening—hardened into diets and stances and careers. She worked at a food co-op, where she fell in love with a lad named Reuben and, soon after, moved into his flat, which had a great view and a sturdy teakettle and a window ledge where pigeons came for muesli in the mornings.
    I learned all about Hannah’s life via postcards—“On my way to Spain!” or “Recipe for Pudding (easy)” or “Think I’m falling in love!”—while I moped around post-college Philly, dating the bassist from Roller Toaster and plastering my freezer door with stoic Royal Guards and Big Bens. I resented Hannah, though I didn’t like to admit it. I resented her willingness to take risks. To travel abroad, to give up chicken, even to fall in love. To do all the things I didn’t dare. Although I told myself frequenting The Blue Room was living on the edge, all the risk in my life truly began and ended with the nipple ring on my Roller Toaster.
    But in December, the Big Bens stopped coming. Reuben had left Hannah. Reuben had left London. And for three weeks, Hannah didn’t get out of bed. In March, Mrs. Devine flew to London and came back with Hannah, who started applying to med school for psychiatry.
    â€œI want to go horseback riding,” Hannah is saying now. “And Alan will insist on trying all the native Amish foods.”
    â€œWhat are native Amish foods?”
    â€œOh, you know. Apple dumplings. Shoo fly pie.”
    â€œShoo fly pie?” I say, feigning shock. The Inner You woman lifts her head and sighs. “That sounds violent. Isn’t killing flies required?”
    Hannah flashes me a sly smile. “I guess you’ll never be stopping by the Amish country, Eliza. No rock stars allowed.”
    I grin. She grins back. Any dry wit Hannah has acquired over the years I take partial credit for. Likewise, any emotional maturity I’ve achieved I owe in part to her. We are more different now than we were as kids, but that’s the way old friends work, I think. With new friends, what you have in common is more circumstantial: colleges, jobs, hobbies, acquaintances-of-the-hour. What old friends share goes deeper than that. Your lives can branch off in completely different directions, but always, you share that knot of a past—heartbreaks and sleep-overs and screened-in porches—and the raw, peculiar memory of yourself which, in part, belongs to them.
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    Phone message from Andrew: “What up, G? What going down?”
    This is unfortunate. Andrew’s attempts at hip lingo fall into the same embarrassing category as his attempts at air guitaring. I’ve noticed that he seems to be practicing