Read Guyaholic for Free Online Page B

the guy you just cheated on.
    I finally discover my phone wedged between the sheet and the side of my mattress. Just as I’m opening it, the ringing stops. I glance at the last call. aimee. I quickly dial her back.
    “Hey!” my mom says. “I just tried you.”
    “I know. I was sleeping.”
    “Want to call me when you’re awake?”
    “No . . . that’s okay.” I fold an extra pillow under my head. “What’s up?”
    “I just wanted to say I’m
so
sorry about missing your graduation. We went back to the emergency room in the middle of the night for more testing, but they sent us home again and . . . Oh, hon, I really am sorry. You know how much I wanted to see you walk across that stage.”
    I’m getting the hugest lump in my throat.
    “Did my package arrive?” Aimee asks.
    I remember brightness, a searing headache, my grandma shouting from the bottom of the stairs.
    “It should have come this morning,” Aimee says. “It’s lots of stuff for college. I was going to bring it with me to Brockport.”
    My eyes are filling with tears.
    “Speaking of college,” Aimee says, “I was thinking I could use my ticket to fly back east in August. We could rent a car and I’ll drive you to Boston, get you settled in. What do you think?”
    “That sounds nice.”
    We’re both quiet for a moment. Then I wipe my eyes and say, “What’s his name, by the way?”
    “The Cowboy?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Steve,” Aimee says. “And do you want to know something? We’re talking about buying a house together, maybe even a ranch.”
    “In San Antonio?”
    “Yeah . . . you should come visit.”
    “Really?”
    “You’d like it here. Steve has three horses that he boards in a nearby stable.”
    “Horses?”
    “We could take them out whenever you want.”
    I say that sounds nice, even though riding a horse around Texas was not exactly what I had in mind for myself this summer.
    Twenty minutes later I’m down in the kitchen sucking a saltine and wondering whether Rachel told Sam that she saw me with Amos. I’m sure she did because Sam hasn’t called or texted yet, and we’ve never gone this long after an argument. Then again, I’ve never cheated on him before. But I can’t
really
call it cheating because we never made any monogamy pledges.
    The home phone rings.
    “Hello?” I ask.
    “Hey,” Mara says. “I heard.”
    “Heard what?”
    “About graduation . . . Mom and Dad told me about Aimee not showing up.”
    “That was fast.”
    “You know them,” she says. “They’re talking about sending you to therapy this summer.”
    “At least it’s not rehab this time.”
    “Seriously,” Mara says, laughing.
    Mara is my grandparents’ other daughter. Officially, that makes her my aunt, except they had Mara when Aimee was eighteen, so she’s only a year older than me. When I moved here last year, Mara was a senior. She was this super-uptight, perfectionist overachiever, and I was, well, the opposite. At first we wanted to murder each other, but things got better throughout that spring. By the time Mara left for Yale in August, I’d even say we liked each other.
    “Are you okay?” Mara asks.
    I snort. “Hardly.”
    “How so?”
    “I fucked things up with Sam.”
    “Oh no,” Mara says, and I can hear genuine regret in her voice. She’s spending the summer in Chicago, but she was home for five days after Yale let out. While she was here, she hung around with Sam and me a few times and kept saying how she’d never seen me that happy.
    “What happened?” Mara asks.
    I tell her about the fight, the party, Amos.
    “That sounds awful,” Mara says.
    “I know.”
    “Do you think you guys are over?”
    “It can’t be over because it never was anything to begin with.”
    “You really believe that?”
    “Hmmm,” I say. “I guess I’ll have to discuss it with my therapist.”
    “Stop joking. I know you’re upset.”
    I pour myself some Dr Pepper, but my stomach is still too queasy, so I dump it into the