Page 28 of Good at Being Alive
“Bro, all of the UK plus Ireland is still smaller than Texas. That’s not ‘rather large.’ So do you know her?”
He sighs. “Well yes, actually, we’vemetbefore, but saying we’re not large just because our combined area is smaller than your third-biggest state is still unfair.”
I picture her sauntering in, just the way Theo’scomplicationmight. An English rose wearing a big hat and a dress with buttons down the front, her every glance at me screaming,Oh goodness, what drunken bad decision-making led to this?
“It’s an American show,” I grumble. “Why are there so many Brits involved? I feel ganged up on.”
He straightens his tie. “Samia is originally from India. Lars is from Sweden. Katrina’s French. So we’re basically from four separate countries. How is that being ganged up on?”
“You know you’re all united in your hatred of Americans.Oh, you’re too loud. You’re too friendly. You dress badly. You’re always shooting people.Why are your teeth so straight?”
“We don’t talk about your teeth. And you do have a lot of shootings.”
I spin his direction and make finger guns. “You’ll be glad I know how to fire a gun the next time we have to bail your asses out of a world war.”
“Rebecca,” he says, opening his phone again, “there’s no enemy in the world I find quite as terrifying as the thought of you waving a gun around in self-defense.”
I laugh to myself. That’s entirely fair. He’d definitely be at risk if anyone gavemea gun.
A few minutes later, Samia arrives. She is not wearing a big hat or a dress with buttons down the front, and she appears to dislike us equally. She introduces herself to me with a pained smile…and it’s barely even a smile when she turns to Theo.
“I’m not sure if you remember me,” Theo says, extending his hand, “but—”
“No one’s going to forgetyou,Theo,” she replies coolly. Iglance between them.What did you do, Theo Porter? Because you definitely fucked up somewhere along the way.
“Shall we begin?” Samia asks, sliding into the seat across from us. “Bex, tell me how you met.”
“I came on to him at the funeral because I was upset my family was dead,” I chirp. Samia might as well know what she’s dealing with up front.
Theo groans and Samia shoots him a look. I can’t tell if she’s agreeing with his chagrin or asking him to silence it. “Bex,” she says with a strained smile. “Please.”
I shrug. “Fine.” I reach out to take his hand—large, warm, surprisingly calloused—and give him my most genuine smile, as if I adore him…I have to remember him bringing me the donut holes in order to make it possible. “I went through a lot after the train crash. It felt as if my friends all just wanted me to, you know, get over it, and my family was entirely gone. But Theo just cared. He tried to protect me as much as he could. And that meant something.”
This is bullshit. It’s what I wish someone had done, though the odds are I wouldn’t have allowed them to do it. Theo frowns, though I can’t imagine why. It was a decent answer.
“And you, Theo?” Samia prompts.
He hesitates before he finally looks up. “When I saw how gracefully Rebecca handled what was one of the worst things anyone can endure and how resilient she was, I just knew. She is able to find a silver lining in anything, and that’s the person you want with you for the long haul.”
There’s a strange thud in my stomach. Because it sort of sounded like he meant it. I’m sure he didn’t, but apparently Theo is a better actor than I’d have guessed. And if I was capable of falling in love with anyone, it would be with a man who answered that question exactly the way he just did.Someone capable of loving me just as I am, rather than what I pretend tobe.
When our training concludes, we walk into the studio, where Lars waits with Carolyn Clark, the reporter. We’re led to a couch onstage and sit side by side, with Carolyn in a chair diagonal to us. My thighs begin to sweat, my pulse humming in my throat. I scoot infinitesimally closer to Theo—he might be my enemy still, but he’s the closest thing I’ve got to a friend here.
“This isn’t live, so there’s nothing to stress about,” Carolyn assures us. “We can edit errors out later.”
“Cameras in three…two…one,” says a voice overhead. Our hands link because they’re supposed to and for no other reason.
“Last December,” a suddenly somber-faced Carolyn says to the camera, “the world watched in horror as it learned about the crash of a New Jersey Transit commuter train heading from Newark to New York City.” She continues offering details about the crash I choose to tune out, focusing instead on the screen to the right, which shows a photo of us from much younger days: Jessie and Bronwyn, pink-cheeked blondes, posing beside my dad in the sand. I’m there too, but slightly off-center, smaller and darker than the rest, hugging my knobby knees to my chest.
I look exactly like what I was: the child who didn’t belong. The child they’d have preferred wasn’t there. I remember that year—fourth grade. It’s when Jessie persuaded my dad to call me Rebecca instead of Bex because she thought my mother’s nickname for me wastacky.Insisting on that nickname at school was the only rebellion I could mount back then, and now she’s gone, and it’s too late to mount any rebellion at all.
It shifts to a video of Jessie speaking, my dad behind her. “When we founded the company,” Jessie says into themicrophone, “we were simply a young family who loved to travel and wanted to do so safely.”
Acid burns my throat.
Jessie got away with everything, and the fact that she felt comfortable stepping onto a stage and saying, “When we founded the company”—about a company she had nothing to do with—is a testament to this fact.
She hated the real reason Families Travel began: that my dad was so destroyed when my mother died that he quit a lucrative job and took his four-year-old daughter on a disastrous RV trip through North and Central America—so disastrous that he decided to come home and create a travel company just for families.
