[...] Toby was the friend she wanted. Toby was the friend she had for life. Toby was who she could be alone with. When you are someone who is rejected her entire childhood for reasons that feel impossible to discern, there is little that could happen to you in your future that doesn’t feel like further rejection. Miriam likes you, but why weren’t you invited to massages on Great Jones Street with her? Roxanne wants to know if you want to come for dinner before the kids have their sleepover, but then she mentions that she and Cyndi had been shopping all day and it’s not that she wants to go shopping with those two, it’s just that she wants to be invited. She wants to think she is integral to their lives. She wants them to look at her and her children like they’re not optional. Toby didn’t understand why she cared or why it mattered. How could he? He had a sister that he totally took for granted. He had parents—a mother whom he blamed for his terrible self-image, never once taking into consideration that the person he was talking to about this would have killed to have a mother to blame for anything. He had all those friends who wanted to be in his life from his youth. He had Seth. He had me. He had all the people who had ever seen him needy and pathetic and never once did that make it so that they didn’t still love him.