You're Not You by Michelle Wildgen

Coke. She shook her hair out of her face and nodded toward the book apparatus and said something.
    “Should I take it off?” I asked. I was stalling. I knew perfectly well she’d asked me to remove it. “Or maybe you’d like to read for a while and give me something to do in the meantime.” A nice easy day around the house would be a godsend.
    “For starters, I was planning on the farmers’ market,” she said apologetically. “We’re having people over tonight.”
    Before I could stifle it I looked at her in horror: It was unspeakably sunny and hot and the market would be crammed with people. Why the hell did she need me so early on weekends? Nothing truly needed to be done right then. And where was Evan, anyway? Wasn’t the farmers’ market a couples kind of thing?
    “Oh, the market,” I said. “Uh-huh. Hey, what about that filing and insurance stuff? I could do that first.”
    Kate gave me an appraising look before she spoke. “No,” she said. “We’ll do this, please.” She backed up the chair and rotated, turning it toward the bathroom. Just before she turned the chair away from me she said, “Late night, huh.”
    “Yeah,” I admitted.
    “Okay. Fine. But I’m not rearranging my day around your parties, Bec.”
    My first thought was pure, pissy defensiveness. I could have walked out right then and there. What business was it of hers what I did when I left? I wasn’t so bad off that I couldn’t slap some pointless blusher on and hand over money for a bunch of parsley at the market. I watched her roll down the hallway toward the bathroom and stayed where I was, thinking seriously about whether I wanted to deal with her anymore. I thought I liked her, maybe even quite a bit, but she seemed imperious right now. I wondered if she was like this a lot.
    I took another gulp of my Coke and glanced at my purse slung overthe back of the chair. She hadn’t made up her mind about me either, it suddenly dawned on me, and I could tell that if I was going to leave, today was probably the day to do it and get it over with. But I was too ashamed to act on it—her expression had had none of its usual humor when she told me to get it together. I pictured that shiny, unreadable fall of blond hair as she’d rolled out of the kitchen. She was waiting in the bathroom, calm and detached, idly wondering if she had to interview people all over again.
    She was probably debating whether to fire me. My awkwardness around her, my total lack of experience and confidence, seemed all the more vivid through my hangover: After several tries yesterday I still wasn’t very good at helping her in the bathroom—she had to tell me to wipe her harder, which seemed to cost her as much to say as it did me to hear. Twice I had lifted her so badly that she had had to tell me, her voice urgent and unintelligibly fast, to put her down before I dropped her. I splashed nutrition shake on her clothes because I looked the other way when I poured it. No doubt when she compared me to Hillary, who’d been with her over a year, I seemed even worse than I was.
    I went to the end of the hall. She was at the door to the bathroom, her chair pivoted so she could back in. When she saw me still standing several yards away she spoke, knowing, I was sure, that I would have to come to her to hear her. So I did. I started walking, interested to know what she was saying, before I even thought about it. As I came closer, fighting down another lurch of nausea, I saw her break into a grin.
    “It’s just a hangover,” she said. “I used to run races with hangovers.”
    “Races?” I clarified, repeating after her.
    She nodded, her face softening. “But you can take your time with the makeup until the meds kick in.”
    “Thank god,” I said, and she laughed for real this time, sending a rush of relief through me so fast it startled me.
    As I did her mascara I looked at her face, at the tiny lines that bracketed her wide mouth, and the freckles that