“I’m hungry,” Tris states, and I have to agree, “Me too.” She stands up, and I take the hand she offers to help lift me up and I don’t think this is about a prisoner exchange anymore.
We walk to the 24-hour Korean grocery across the street, and it’s like some primal instinct because we both go right to the cookie section and she opens up a bag of Chips Ahoy and I open a bag of Oreos and we are chomping in the aisle, and the owner at the counter is like, “You have to pay for that!” and Tris and I are both like, “WE KNOW!”
She leans her head against a display of Fig Newtons and says, “It’s like this. I met Nick. And I wanted him and I had him but he didn’t want to let go, and he was such a f**king great guy, I couldn’t let him go, even if there were other guys in the picture.” She places her thumb inside her mouth, removing a piece of chocolate chip stuck between her teeth. “But then it got to this point where he’s making college choices based on me, thinking we have a future, I mean he’s ready to turn down all these great f**king schools to go to Rutgers so he can be near me, and I am thinking, this cannot be happening, he cannot do this. Because he said ‘I love you’ and, you know, I was just not feeling that back. And I know it must suck to say that and not have the other person say it back, but I felt like now was the time to set him free, so he could find someone else, someone who could say that back to him, because someone should say that back to him. I figured it would hurt him much worse later if I had let him believe he had something he didn’t, so I took the brutal route. I didn’t say ‘I love you’ back. I said, ‘It’s over.’ I’m eighteen, about to move to the city for school, start my life. I want to have fun. I don’t want commitment and ‘I love you.’”
She pauses to wolf down another Chips Ahoy. Once she’s swallowed it, she says, “Was I like just profound or what?”
Nietzsche f**king Tris may be on to something. Tal told me he loved me, and told me and told me, but you don’t tell someone that and then tell them they’re not experienced enough in bed and should read a book or something to learn, or they should try wearing deep-red lipstick and tight skirts to look hot like their best friend once in a while. If Tal hadn’t lied to me when he said he loved me, I might not be without a future right now, a sucker who was so chickenshit she allowed herself to believe a false dream from a false god. I’m not sure I ever even liked Tal, much less loved him, and by the way, Tal, I believe the Palestinians should have their own state.
For once in my life, I am speechless. I have just eaten my thirteenth consecutive Oreo in under five minutes. When I do speak, I know from the security mirror hanging behind Tris and in front of me that I am speaking from a mouth blackened by Oreo bits. “You have to tell him why, Tris. He deserves to know. And he’s gonna be damaged goods until he does know.”
So Nick won’t be going through my rehabilitation program. That’s okay. He’ll make some girl, the right girl, a great boyfriend one day. He’ll be the love of some lucky girl’s life, and maybe after I’ve had some sleep after this epic night, I’ll be glad for him and the future he’s waiting to grab, once Tris truly sets him free. So I won’t be part of his life other than as this footnote “date.” So I have a lifetime of loneliness ahead of me. That’s okay, too. There are lots of careers for frigid girls. I can dedicate myself to good deeds. I’ll become some U.N. humanitarian (hey, Tal, I f**king believe in the United Nations, too, ass**le). I do have two years of Catholic school behind me. I could become a nun even if I am a non-believer. I’ll learn to fake it like Nick just did with me. I will minister the gospel of compassion and kindness and please, always use a condom, from famine-stricken nations to war-torn dead zones. It’s possible I might become a nun who kisses other nuns—hell, I can look up Becca Weiner from summer camp and see if she wants in on the action—but I know that a few hundred years from now when the post-apocalyptic pope is deciding whether to canonize me, s/he will look the other way on those indiscretions and figure, Hey, Saint Norah was hard up—it happens to all of us. And I will be floating over my heaven-hell dimension, probably in close proximity to my home base Arctic Circle, knowing that the saintly person I became was all because of this night. So I should be thanking Nick, not hating him.
“You’re wearing his jacket,” Tris says. “He never lets me wear his jacket.”
It’s Tris whose actions have caused me the night from heaven-hell, so I have no problem letting her pay for my Oreos. I leave her at the counter, fumbling for her wallet. I am ready for home. I am ready to sleep in my own bed, to wake up tomorrow morning and figure out a life plan, and maybe talk to my parents about us all talking to Caroline about getting some f**king help because if we’ve gotten to the point where Tris is more cool and less scary to hang out with than Caroline, there’s obviously a big problem to work out here.
I head for the door, but not before imparting some last saintly wisdom upon Tris. “Be more careful next time, bitch,” I tell her.
She doesn’t look up from her fumbling wallet maneuver, she just lifts her middle finger with the Jersey-bitch rhinestone-studded black-and-yellow-painted nail tip at me. “Okay, bitch,” she calls back to me.
I have enough cash for a cab ride all the way back home and the driver can go f**k himself if he tries to give me grief about a fare to Jersey. I look out onto the street in search of a cab but see Nick instead, leaning against a telephone booth outside the grocery.