Ask for Pain

(Julia Fullerton-Batten -- Getty - )

"Yeah. Everyone thinks I'm a rich kid from Marin."

"Aren't you, mahal?" he said. Mahal: It was Tagalog for expensive, or dear, like cher in French.

"No," I said. "I'm a baker's daughter. A writer's daughter." But I'd told him about Solomon and his law practice, his house in San Anselmo; as far as Javi was concerned, I was a rich kid from Marin. Della had done this to me, too.

"I wish my mom would marry someone with money," he said. "She could quit her job, kick back a little."

"You don't really wish that," I said. "Trust me."

"What do you know about it?" he said, and for a moment his eyes went hard on mine. But then he was laughing and shaking his head. "We'll both go to Berkeley," he said. "We'll raise hell, okay?"

DELLA PINED LIKE A CHARACTER IN A VICTORIAN NOVEL. She lost weight, wandered in the morning fog like a ghost, carried on whispered conversations with her friends from the Orb, spent hours sitting under a tree and writing in a red leather notebook. Whenever she and Javi came within 50 yards of each other, she went white and looked like she was going to faint. She never mentioned him to me, though, and of course I never told her that he and I had been meeting; I never told her anything that was important to me.

Then one day, when she and I had to drive down to Palo Alto for a bridesmaid-gown fitting, she gave a sigh and confessed it all -- that she was in love with Javi, and had been since that day in her room with the screens.

"I'm going to tell him," she said, gripping the steering wheel, her eyes fixed on the curving plane of Highway 280. "What do I have to lose? At worst he'll think I'm an idiot. And if he does, so what?"

I imagined what he'd say to her when she told him; I saw her turning away, her ears burning with shame. I wanted to see the aftermath of it, see her crying on her friends' shoulders. "You should tell him," I said, and then, in a half-whisper, "I've seen him looking at you."

"You have?"

"Yeah," I said. "More than once."