25
Over the next twenty-four hours, I slowly pack up my apartment. I have a plant fostering arrangement with my neighbour, who was watering them while I was away: he is going to look after them until I’ve figured out what I’m doing, and if that doesn’t involve coming back to New York, we’ll move to an adoption process. James the ficus was initially unhappy about it, but when he realised he could stay in my neighbour’s south-facing window, he changed his mind.
As I’m doing a final once-over of the bedroom, rummaging through the back of my wardrobe to see if I’ve missed anything, my eye lands on a shoebox, shoved to the back of the top shelf. Despite myself, my chest tightens at the sight of it. Out of sight, out of mind. I placed it here years ago, when Sara and I first moved in. I almost threw it away at the time, but Sara convinced me not to: I’d want the memories some day, she said. When I was ready for them. Of course, as usual, she’s right.
I pull the box down from the shelf and sit cross-legged on the wood floor of my now-empty bedroom. It’s time, babe , I think, trying to imagine the words that Sara would use, to conjure up her strength and warmth in this room with me. I called her this morning and she didn’t answer. I plan to try again later today, and have been doing my best to keep the fear that we’re not OK at bay in the meantime, but for now the image of her will have to do. I lift the lid and take a breath to still the tide of emotion that surges through me. The first thing, right at the top, is a picture of me and Sara in our freshers T-shirts, in a hand-crafted frame with glitter and stickers. My first birthday present from Sara. I lift it out of the box. I’m almost unrecognisable in it, my posture is relaxed, my expression carefree: all I had to think about then was whether or not I’d be able to make my next essay deadline, or when my next night out was going to be. I’ve often wished I could go back to that time. But as I look at myself now, all I see is a child. She was so young, so unaware of what life might throw at her. My world then was small and safe, but it wasn’t real.
I take a deep breath and put the photo to one side, then reach into the box again. My hand folds around fabric: the freshers T-shirt I’m wearing in the photo, covered in some dubious stains. Then a few postcards here and there – art from various museums, which I had pinned up in my room because I thought it made me seem cool. Some photographs of me and my parents. A letter from the pen pal I kept throughout my first year, part of an exchange programme with the university. A tangled string of fairy lights.
My heart grows heavy as I realise I’m getting to the bottom of the box – I know what I’m about to find. But I’ve come this far: I can’t stop now. It’s crumpled, both from being shoved at the bottom of this box for so long and through me screwing it up it in a fit of rage after that night with Robbie. But I’ve still kept it, all this time. Like a part of me knew I’d want to read it again one day. I lift it gently out of the box, smoothing it out on the floor in front of me. A copy of the University of Edinburgh student newspaper, dated five years ago. The headline splashed across the front page is typically dramatic: EXPOSED: The dark side of university sports . I’d talked them out of putting photographs of the boys involved on the front of the newspaper, convinced it was a step too far, that it would make people too angry. If only I could have known . I take a breath and start reading.
Absorbing every word, every sharp-edged sentence, an overwhelming feeling stops me in my tracks: I am proud . It’s a well-written article. My words are righteous and true, the words of someone who is scared but knows she is doing the right thing. And then, almost immediately, the pride is overwhelmed by sadness. By avoiding my pain, my grief, I’ve also been avoiding this person: this wonderful, angry person who wanted nothing more than to protect her friend. I’ve tried to be anything but her, so scared of the hurt she carried. And I didn’t need to. She was great. But instead of celebrating her, I became ashamed of her. I tied her up in my grief just as much as Jack, holding her responsible for pain that wasn’t ever her fault.
I never truly admitted it to myself at the time, but this article felt like the start of something. Using words to create change, to report on things I cared about. A future began to stretch before me, wide open and exciting. Journalism, perhaps. Or books. But then it all fell apart, and I put that version of myself in a box, tightly shut and hidden away. My job in book publicity, which meant communicating with journalists on a daily basis, was as close as I could get to that buzz that felt safe.
The doorbell rings through the silence, interrupting the flow of my thoughts. I place the article gently on the floor, wander over to the door and press the buzzer. I am expecting to see a delivery driver with the packing tape I ordered from Amazon, but instead I see Sara waiting outside my apartment building.
I buzz her up. Emotions swirl inside me, a thousand possibilities of what she might be here to say. Before I can think about it for too long, I hear her coming up the stairs – her familiar rhythm of two steps at a time, always my favourite sound when we lived together, the sign she was almost home – and all of those feelings are immediately replaced by a vast, overwhelming rush of love.
She’s hardly arrived at my door before I fling it open and the full force of how much I’ve missed her propels me into her. She steadies herself and hugs me back with the same intensity. ‘I’ve missed you, A,’ she says into my hair.
‘I’ve missed you, too,’ I say, pulling away and gripping her arms. I can’t believe she’s actually here. ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ I say, tears falling.
‘I’m glad, too,’ she says, wiping her eyes. ‘Can I come in?’
I gesture into the apartment, which was once hers too, and is now full of boxes just like it was on the day she first moved in. She looks around, taking them in, then whips towards me. ‘You’re moving?’
‘It’s a long story,’ I say. ‘I’ll explain in a minute.’
We step over the boxes, tracing a careful path to the sofa where we ate takeout night after night for months. Where she told me about her first awful breakup, her first date with James.
‘James and I broke up,’ she starts, as soon as we sit down. Oh, shit . A part of me had suspected something like this, deep down, every time she pulled away, every time my best friend alarm went off, telling me something was wrong. But hearing it confirmed is still a huge shock: I’d desperately hoped that my suspicions were wrong. I shift in my seat, but just as I’m about to reach for her, she continues. ‘It’s OK. We’re back together now. He quit his job and we’re working things out,’ I sit back down, listening. ‘It got really bad after you left, A. His work just kept pushing him harder and harder, and we were fighting all the time. I didn’t know what to do.’ She looks exhausted, and sad, and I feel so awful that I haven’t been here, haven’t been there for her – I just want to reach out and hold her and never stop.
‘Oh, S. Why didn’t you tell me?’ I ask, though it hits me like a gigantic punch in the gut that I already know why. Because I was so caught up in my own stuff that I didn’t keep track of what was going on with my best friend. Because I wasn’t there for her, like she always has been for me.
‘I didn’t know how,’ she says. ‘You were in Dublin, it happened the day you sent that SOS text. You were so far away, and you had so much going on. And—’ She pauses, gathering herself. ‘That night, A. In the flat. You said—’ Tears start falling down her face again, and she reaches up to wipe them away. ‘You said you sometimes wished that we’d break up so I would stay with you. I’ve been so scared ever since that you meant it, that you secretly hate him and resent me for moving away.’
Oh God. At her words, flashes of it come back – the haze, the deep well of loneliness. The words that I convinced myself were a joke, but which came out sharp-edged and true, probably hurting her deeply. Looking at her now, sat across from me on my sofa, the person I love most in the world next to my mum, my stomach drops. How have I been so selfish? Sara has been here for every important moment of my adult life – through my dad’s death, through what happened in Edinburgh, through my career struggles, everything. She’s my best friend. And instead of being happy for her as she finally built a life for herself that didn’t totally revolve around me, I made her feel guilty about it, responsible for my loneliness, dragging my feet about finding a roommate because I was so busy grieving her absence and never thinking about how that might feel for her. Then I went on this trip, and I was so absorbed in my own problems that I didn’t question her enough about hers. I should have pushed through her avoidance, should have checked in more often, should have blasted through the walls I could feel her putting up rather than running, scared.
Should have been half the friend to her that she’s been to me.
‘Sara,’ I say, my voice thick, reaching for her hand and squeezing it hard. ‘I am so unbelievably sorry.’
She squeezes back. ‘So you don’t hate him?’ she says, sniffing.
‘I could never hate someone you love, S,’ I say, pulling her into a hug. Sadness settles deep in my chest – that I caused this distance between us, which I’ve been putting down to her moving on and leaving me behind. How stupid I’ve been, thinking I was blocked from the rest of the world by some unseen force, but it was a wall I built myself: the first bricks laid between Jack and I in that car park, and then layer after layer between myself and everyone else once my dad died. A protection from the rest of the world, which also kept me from the people I loved. Even Sara, who I’d thought was the only person it didn’t apply to. How dense not to see that I was at the heart of it, this whole time. ‘I just want you to be happy. Always. You’re my best friend.’
She holds me tighter. ‘Thanks, A.’
After a few moments I pull away, crying, and see she’s crying too. We laugh, brushing tears from our eyes. ‘I have something to show you,’ I say, and I get up and walk over to the spare room, where I’ve been going through the box of things from university. I retrieve the photograph of us and hand it to her. She looks up at me, momentarily shocked that I’ve finally opened the box, but then smiles, slowly tracing the ‘B E S T F R I E N D’ stickers she had stuck to the top of the frame.
She hands it back to me after a few moments, and it’s like no time has passed – we’re back in her room in Edinburgh, and I’m sitting next to her plushies, tearing the paper off this gift, feeling an overwhelming warmth for her as I read those words. No one had ever called me their best friend before.
‘I’m so proud of you, Andie. It must have been hard, going through all this stuff,’ she says. Her voice falters a bit as if she’s getting choked up again. ‘And – I’m really sorry for pushing you so hard about Jack. I—’ She pauses, collecting herself. I lean in, sensing that whatever she says next will be important. ‘I’ve never told you, but I’ve always felt responsible for what happened in Edinburgh. You were so wonderful to me, and you ended up getting hurt so badly. I just – I wanted you to give yourself a chance to heal, but maybe that was selfish, more about my own guilt than what was best for you.’
Another punch to the gut. I had no idea she felt this way, that she’d been holding on to this for so long. ‘Oh, S, I would burn everything down for you, every single time, no matter the hurt,’ I say, letting out a sigh – of sadness that we’ve never spoken about this properly until now; of relief that it’s finally out in the open, finally released. ‘And you have no reason to apologise about Jack – you were right. About all of it. Like always. I’m only sorry I didn’t listen to you earlier,’ I continue, my throat constricting at the thought of Jack, in that car park. His face as I walked away. ‘It would have avoided a lot of pain.’
She smiles, her eyes welling up, too, and squeezes my hand, but then her forehead creases as she processes the full extent of my words. ‘What have I missed?’