by Kit Frick
“Hey, Abigail.” She stops in her tracks. One of the other girls grips her arm just above the elbow, but Abigail murmurs something under her breath, and her friends keep walking. The elbow-gripper turns around to gawk at us over her shoulder, then quickly whips back around when I catch her staring.
“Hey,” Abigail says when we’re alone. She smiles, because she’s Abigail, but keeps her distance. I can tell she’s not super happy to see me, and I don’t blame her after last time.
“I just wanted to say thank you, for what you said before break. It actually meant a lot.”
“Oh.” Her face lights up. “I’m really happy to hear that.”
“So anyway, thank you. You were right. And I’m sorry I was kind of a bitch.”
“It’s okay.” She tugs at the end of her short uniform skirt, and there’s not really anything left to say. I smile, one quick flash of gratitude. I have business to take care of, and I have to get to the green room before Bex does.
“See you around.” I give her a little wave, and Abigail turns to catch up with her friends.
When I duck through the door to the theater, the place is empty. No rehearsal on Fridays. I walk stage left, through the door that opens into the green room, and throw my bag on the couch. I sink into the worn cushions for a minute, but I can’t sit still, so I get back up and walk over to the costume closet and back. Finally I settle for perching on the counter in front of the makeup mirrors, my feet tapping the back of one of the chairs. I can do this. I have to do this.
Outside the theater, I can hear a group of voices singing “Luck Be a Lady” at the top of their lungs, and for a moment I think I’m wrong about rehearsal, and they’re about to come in here, but then the voices pass by the theater and fade down the hallway, out the back entrance, and into the parking lot. Then, there’s silence.
Maybe she won’t show up.
Maybe she’s ignoring my text, even though I know she got it.
Maybe she doesn’t want to do this any more than I do.
But then I hear the soft scuffle of feet walking across the stage, and Bex pushes through the door to the green room and stops in the middle of the floor. For a moment, we just stare at each other.
I push myself up from the makeup counter and walk over to the couch, gesturing weakly toward the cushions. “Want to sit?” This is so awkward.
I sit at one end of the couch and Bex sits at the other like we’re on some sort of formal first date, our bags a protective barrier between us. Now that we’re here, my mouth feels dry, and nothing I’ve rehearsed feels right anymore. How do I explain that walking away from Bex wasn’t personal, that cutting her out was so much bigger than either of us? That I have to be alone—really alone—to find my way forward. Somehow, I don’t think it’s not you, it’s me is going to cut it.
I let my eyes wander across her face, try to focus on the memory of Bex twirling and twirling in the mink, the fur like snow against her shoulders sophomore year. Ret’s legs kicked up on the back of the couch, the Rolling Stone slipping from her fingers as she passed judgment on the almost purloined coat. But after a minute, the room gets hot, time moving us forward, dragging us through junior year. The memory shifts. There are flames licking up my cheeks, smoke in my lungs, the squeal of tires in my ears. Time wants to drag me down, and I can’t go back there again. It’s not her fault; she was on the periphery of it all. But I can’t be with her without remembering. This is why I had to walk away.
I squeeze my hands into fists and press my fingernails into my palms until the pain snaps me back to the present. One conversation, then this will be over. I cut straight to the point, my second apology of the afternoon. “I’ve been really shitty to you,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
Bex’s mouth drops open. I don’t know what she was expecting me to say, but it definitely wasn’t this.
“I just wanted you to know that I noticed. Calling me before school started. Inviting me over at Thanksgiving. It meant something.”
Bex shifts uncomfortably on the couch. “Are you trying to make up or something?” she asks.
“I just wanted to explain. The reasons we can’t be friends, they don’t have anything to do with you, okay?”
“I get it,” Bex says sharply. “I always got it.”
“Oh.” This conversation was supposed to make us both feel better, like something was finally resolved between us. But maybe I’m the only one who needs the resolution.
“It’s okay.” Bex gives me a tiny smile. “It’s nice to hear anyway.”
A small knot releases in my chest. “We never had much without Ret,” I say. “You and Jenni and me.”
“I guess not.” Bex is silent for a moment, then she asks, “Do you ever talk to her?”
“Ret?” Not since December. Not since I left her down by the river.
Bex nods.
“Not anymore.” I thought I was the only one to fall back under Ret’s spell. “Do you?”
“All summer.” Bex’s words are full of breath, like it’s a relief to tell me, like this is something she needs to unburden. “Every single night.”
We’re both quiet for a minute, lost in our own web of memories.
“Anyway, it ended when school started back up,” Bex says. “I just needed to tell someone, I guess.”
She’s waiting for me to open up to her, to confess that she’s not the only one who’s been cheating. Who couldn’t leave the past in the past, who couldn’t so easily forget Ret the siren, the charmer, the bellwether, and replace her with Ret the betrayer. Who couldn’t so easily forgive her, either.
I can’t say it.
“Thanks for understanding,” I say instead. “How I’ve been this year, it was never about you. I guess you knew that already, but I just needed to say it.”
“Thank you.” She stands and picks up her bag from the couch. “Take care, Ellory.” Then she’s gone, her back disappearing through the green room door. There’s a huge swell of sadness rising in my chest, and I don’t know why. This is what I wanted. To say I’m sorry, then move on. But it still hurts.
27
JANUARY, JUNIOR YEAR
(THEN)
After Matthias took the future off the table, the days were filled with pleasantries and how was the French quiz? And did you see what’s on the menu in the sky dome today? For two weeks, I was the model girlfriend. The perfect girlfriend. I kept it light. I didn’t fuss and I didn’t push and a perma-smile lit up my tear-free face.
And we didn’t make plans.
At all. Not just future plans. We didn’t hang out after school, and we didn’t see each other on weekends. During the week, we held hands in the hallways and we stopped by each other’s tables in the sky dome at lunch. Just like normal. Just like always.
Between the hours of eight to three, we were Ellory & Matthias. Matthias & Ellory. All smiles, all small talk, all the time. But outside the Pine Brook walls, it was like we didn’t exist. I did my homework and I hung out with Ret and I piled the girls into the Subaru to go thrifting and no one asked if something was wrong, because what could possibly be wrong? Whatever was broken between us was on the inside. My entire body was a thousand tiny robin’s eggs, stitched together with invisible thread. One bump, one push, one too hard shake of my hand, and everything was going to shatter.
Inexplicably, Pine Brook went on around us. The classes, the winter break war stories, the relentless January gray that settled in my stomach like a stone. By the third week back, I couldn’t take the niceness anymore. The stubborn avoidance of anything real. On Tuesday at the end of lunch, as everyone was packing up bags and beginning to filter through the doors, I touched Matthias on the shoulder and motioned him aside.
“Meet me down in the shop after eighth?”
The hesitation before he spoke was palpable. For a moment, we were standing there in the sky dome, only the palest scraps of January light filtering through the dirty glass above our heads, and I thought he was going to say no. Maybe this p
eriod of self-enforced politeness within the bounds of eight to three would go on forever.
Maybe we would never break up and we would never get back to normal. How long could we go on like this, suspended, hovering?
But then he said yes, he’d meet me. It was the only thing I’d asked of him in over two weeks.
While I waited for him to show up, I went through my routine: sweep beneath the machines, wipe down the worktables and stools, check the supply shelves, update the inventory list. I grabbed Mr. Michaels’s list of materials for the next day and started to pull supplies for his classes:
• 1/4-inch-round bar stock
• stainless steel filler rod
• 1/8-inch-diameter rivets
• rivet washers
• bin of sheet metal scraps
15 students x 3 periods, 13 students x 2 periods
When I had finished and Matthias still hadn’t arrived, I walked over to the bin in the back that held my own stuff. Recently, I’d been bringing in scrap from around the city and working on large, abstract sculptures. I wasn’t sure where they were going yet, but I was interested in combining different types of metals, bending sharp objects into curved shapes that could look almost delicate, soft. I liked finding the unexpected in something hard and cold.
At a quarter to four, when I was starting to worry that he wasn’t going to show, the shop door opened, and Matthias stood in the doorway.
“Blast from the past.” He looked around. “I haven’t been down here since freshman year.”
“Welcome to my home away from home.” My heart was fluttering. He looked like my boyfriend one minute and a stranger the next.
“I’ve thought about coming by before,” he said. He was still standing in the doorway, looking in. “But I didn’t want to interrupt.” My thoughts skipped back to our first conversation at Dave Franklin’s party. How I’d told him what I was working on. How he’d said, You should show me sometime, but he’d never come. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe he’d been waiting for an invitation. The door swung shut as he stepped into the shop and dropped his bag. “Anyway, sorry I’m late. The Smurf caught me after eighth. He wants my help painting their basement this weekend.”
“Painting their basement?”
“They’re converting it into a man cave for Mr. Murphy’s birthday, installing a bar and everything. Could be fun when his parents are out of town.”
It’s not like he said it could be fun for us or we should throw a party there, but the mere hint that we might go there, together, in the future, was like a tiny, dangling scrap. Until this second, I hadn’t realized how hungry I’d been.
My heart was starving.
“Could be fun, for sure.” I kept my voice light. Perfect girlfriend voice.
I placed the rag and bottle of Fantastic back in the cleaning bin and walked over to him. Not some stranger. My boyfriend. In the past two and a half weeks, he’d touched me exactly nine times: four pecks on the cheek, three touches to the small of my back, one tuck of the hair behind my ear, and one brush of his hand against mine in the sky dome, which may have been accidental. I needed more than small talk.
Before I could overthink it, I reached up with both hands and pulled his face down to meet mine. I could hear his breath catch, surprised. His lips were still against mine for a moment, but then he leaned into the kiss, into me, and he brought his arms up around my back and pulled me close. It was everything I’d been missing, everything that had been hovering between us, untouched, both of us too afraid to reach out, to risk something.
In that moment, kissing Matthias felt like coming home to a warm house after being out all night in a storm. My whole body ached, but he was made of heat and light. We made our way to the shop floor, tangled up in each other, our breath coming in hot, fast waves. The floor was cold and hard, but I barely felt it. I felt his hands running along the length of my legs, my stomach, my neck. I felt my body collapse into him, come back alive.
When the January gray had become a deep, five o’clock dark, we shrugged on our coats and walked out to the student lot. I slipped my hand into his hand as we walked. Everything had changed and nothing had changed. Now that our bodies weren’t pressed together anymore, now that we were two people walking out in the cold, the air between us felt empty, waiting. Waiting for me to say something.
“So are you going to help out this weekend? With the basement?”
“Guess so. I don’t really have any other plans.”
“We could go to that new Marvel movie on Sunday. Or Saturday. Whatever day you’re not at the Smurf’s.”
“Maybe. Painting might take all weekend.”
“Oh.” Suddenly everything was crystal clear. The last hour was a deviation, a blip. Apparently, we still weren’t making plans outside school. Nothing had changed.
We were standing in front of my car. Where the hell were my keys? I was so sick of this—the forced politeness, the perfect girlfriend act. Screw it.
The words came out in a rush. “I don’t get it. A minute ago, you were probably going to help because you didn’t have plans. But then you can’t take two hours to go to a movie? Help me out here, Matthias. I don’t know what’s going on with us.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Me either.”
I could feel my keys, jammed underneath my wallet at the bottom of my bag. I gave them a yank.
“If making out in the metal shop for an hour fulfills some sort of quota for the week, I guess we cashed in.” I didn’t even try to keep the bitterness out of my voice. I threw my bag into the back and slid into the driver’s seat while he walked around the front of the car and opened the passenger’s side door.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry.” He slid in and reached for his seat belt. Inside the car, with both doors closed, I could feel the quiet press in around us. The lot was pretty much empty, and the houses across the street from Pine Brook were closed up tight. I turned the key in the ignition and let the heater kick on.
“Where do we go from here?” My words were half voice and half breath. I didn’t want to fight, not again. I just wanted my boyfriend back. I let the car sit there in park for a moment. I wasn’t ready to drive away just yet.
“I need to take things kind of slow right now. Maybe we should dial it back.”
“What does that even mean? Are you breaking up with me?”
“No!” He whipped around in his seat and grabbed my hands. “That’s not what I want. Is that what you want?”
When I turned toward him, this time I didn’t try to hide the tears spilling down my cheeks. “Of course not,” I choked out.
“I don’t want to lose you, okay? I just need some space to figure things out. Can you do that for me? Can we just go easy right now?”
I let my head fall back against the headrest and wiped at my face with my coat sleeve.
“I didn’t mean to make you cry. I’m really sorry, Ellory. Things are just really intense at home right now. I need things to be a little less intense with us.”
“I get it.” I didn’t. I wanted him to tell me how things were intense at home, wanted to scream, open up, tell me! Instead, I shifted the car into drive and pulled out of the lot. “Less intense, coming right up.”
I could do it. I could do anything. Easy, breezy, beautiful Ellory Holland. The light side of the moon.
Matthias turned on some music, and I drove us along the dark West Shore streets toward his house while he chattered on about some band he was going to see tomorrow night after his shift at the restaurant and how the new dishwasher wanted to come, but he wasn’t sure he wanted company. It wasn’t even remotely suggested that I might be invited, and I didn’t ask. I nodded and smiled in all the right places. When we pulled up in front of his house, I let him kiss me. I could do this because for some reason, this is what he needed right now. Fine. Easy.
28
FEBRUARY, SENIOR YEAR
(NOW)
This next one feels like a cop-out, but as I go th
rough my room and gather up what’s left of her things, I have Dr. Marsha’s voice in my ears, telling me they won’t all be deep, cleansing heart-to-hearts. The point is to keep going. Sometimes there’s only packing up what remains and moving on.
I fill up a tote bag with old issues of Food & Wine, three pairs of sunglasses I borrowed and never returned, a worn copy of Go Ask Alice, and a set of star-shaped cookie cutters. I picked tonight because it’s the Senior Showcase, and pretty much the entire school will be there. Jenni will definitely be there, supporting oldest Hanson look-alike Elliot and his Christian rock band. As I walk outside, a few fat, wet flakes are starting to fall, and I’m grateful to sink into the Subaru’s blasting heat while I wait for the windshield to defrost.
It’s been almost a year since the last time I made the drive over to Jenni’s, but I could still do it in my sleep. Maybe I’m a coward to make my last drive there this way, but Dr. Marsha’s right. Jenni’s not interested in forgiving or forgetting, and I have to accept that. I have to work with what I’ve got.
When I pull up to the house, the first thing I notice is how empty the front yard looks without us filling it up. I came here during the Showcase for a reason; still all I can see are our empty forms, transparent and hollow, bringing the lawn to life. Bex marking the steps to a new dance team combination. Jenni passing around curry cashews or a tray of lemon drop cookies. Ret and me hanging back, listless and lazy, taking it all in.
The way we used to be. The way we’ll never be again.
I shake my head, and our bodies disappear. The lawn is brown and just starting to collect a thin layer of snow. I’m surprised to see two cars in the driveway. I guess her dad and stepmom are actually home. I don’t really want to see them, but the storm is starting to kick up, and I’d rather not leave her things outside like a bad case of déjà vu.
I pop the trunk and grab the tote. It’s weird to think that three years of friendship can be so easily contained, packed up, zippered shut. Jenni and I were never precious with one another, never tricked ourselves into believing we’d be anything without Ret at the conductor’s stand, playing us off each other, note by note. But still. For three years, she was the Earth to my moon. For three years, we shared the sun’s light.
