24
Lillian
Sasha’s gone in the morning.
I wake up to daylight clobbering my eyelids through the basement windows. I remember that I’m not wearing pajama pants when I realize that I’m only half under the covers and only half on the air mattress.
I blink my eyes open to see my undignified self and an empty couch. Hopefully Sasha didn’t witness me in this state. They left their blanket folded and the pillows laid out nicely in a way that no pillows are ever organized on a basement couch.
Once I’m up, Quinn says he talked to Sasha briefly. Sasha said being home in the morning would help keep their parents happy. As long as I’m only out with Cyprus and Quinn, my mom doesn’t care much. I think I’m pretty mellow compared to the absolute metalhead hell-raiser she was when she lived in the UK.
Quinn says Sasha looked a bit wrecked, which goes for me too, and not in a grungy, alluring, TV-show way. The whole crying and not sleeping enough combination has Cyprus giving me quizzical looks while we eat breakfast.
She picks up that I don’t want to talk about it, just like she doesn’t want to talk about why she can’t hang out this afternoon.
My silence is about Sasha, or Emelia. That’s all woven together. It turns out Cyprus’s is about Emelia too.
Jasper comes by a few minutes later to pick up me and my gear. I’m putting my amp in the trunk when I see a familiar bike round the corner at the far end of the street. I recognize Emelia’s white bike helmet and her white shoes that never seem to be dirty.
She quickly changes course to coast down an alley. I can see the corner of her helmet as she’s waiting, watching, thinking she’s out of sight. Before she hid, I saw her shape too, her way of moving. In twenty or forty years, I could still pick out Emelia walking across the floor of a crowded room. There’d be the same tug in my stomach as when she first sat two seats in front of me in class. When I paid Logan twenty dollars to switch seats with me. He didn’t realize how desperate I was to be beside the new girl. He could have wrung me for all I was worth.
Jasper glances in Emelia’s direction as he puts my amp in the trunk of our parents’ car.
“Girl problems?”
He gives me a knowing nod.
“Same, same.”
Which usually means altogether too many girls are interested in him for his own good.
I get in the car so my heart’s not out in the open for the world to see it straining at its leash, wanting to run for Emelia. To punch her or hold her.
She’d be more likely to let me do the first one.
She’d say it hurts less.
As we back out of the driveway, Jasper says.
“Past Emelia so you can flip her off, or around the long way?”
“The long way.”
“Coward,”
he mocks, but lets me choose the music as we back out of the driveway. The drive home takes one song, which turns into a few while we sit in the car behind our house. I’m sure Jasper can feel me ricocheting around.
Jasper drums on the steering wheel along to the song.
“Do you want to talk? Sit in silence? I’ll leave you alone if that’s the mood.”
Cyprus and Quinn will be with Emelia this afternoon. It’s painful for the obvious reasons, then painful a second time because how I feel right now must be how Emelia feels all the time. Not in the band, not at the Mercury, not at Falafel ’Til Dawn, not sleeping over, not even meeting Sasha.
It’s absolute rubbish that you can be angry at someone and devastated by them and they can be angry at you and devastated by you and you can both be devastated that the other person is devastated. I have words and blows for whoever invented love.
“Why am I like this?”
I ask, which would throw most people off.
Jasper responds immediately.
“A total dick? I’d say poor genetics, but look at me.”
Unhelpfully, but immediately.
“I’m either feeling too much and running from it or feeling nothing and doing anything to get feeling back.”
“I diagnose you with being in a band,”
says Jasper, which almost gets a smile out of me.
“Who’s this noise that’s playing now?”
“Etherealish.”
“I hate it. It’s the worst. What’s the album?”
“Underloved II.”
He saves it in his phone.
“Do you want a smoothie? I was going to make myself one. Mom’s home, but she’s buried in deadlines. You’ll be able to brood in peace.”
A smoothie sounds cold, like it could slow my body down or reinvigorate it.
“I want a milkshake. No sneaking in protein powder or spinach.”
Jasper shrugs.
“I can’t guarantee that.”
“Or I’ll remind Mom you’re not allowed to drive unsupervised yet.”
“You supervised me.”
“On the way there?”
“You asked me to pick you up! You peer-pressured me.”
“You wish you were my peer.”
We stop arguing once we’re inside our house. There are some things I don’t want even a laid-back mom to weigh in on.
I’m late for school the next day, but I don’t notice Sasha’s bike in the rack. Quinn says they’re not in class, and I don’t see them around school. The next day and the next, Sasha’s not there. They’re not responding to Quinn’s texts either.
I don’t send any of my own, because I know it’s my fault.
I leaned in too hard. With sending such a vulnerable song. With the encounter on the back steps and then fleeing. With grabbing their hand after the concert and touching their hair and trying to kiss them.
They knew I was about to. It must have been obvious. They could be seeing someone already. Maybe those texts were from them. Or maybe there’s someone back where Sasha’s from who knows all their secrets. Hometown, grew up together, talk every night.
I want to talk with Cyprus or Quinn about it, but every way my heart is pulled and torn pushes on some other way. I’m trying to remember what Cyprus said and not pit my friends against Emelia. I’ll lose Cyprus if I do that, at least for a bit. For all the people she knows, she lets very few know her closely, and she holds them dear. I wonder if Sasha could be a person like that for Cyprus and Quinn. A potential close friend I just drove off.
On Wednesday, a frustrating band rehearsal leaves us all in bad moods. Sasha was right. We’re three-wheeled without Emelia singing. Cyprus and Quinn are uncomfortable with the new song. I’m calling i.
“Elevator,”
and we all know it’s a good one, but I think they’re imagining Emelia at one of the shows. They’re unsure about being part of her hearing that song.
I imagine it too, with alternating vengeance and hope.
In either case, it makes Emelia cry.
By the time I get back from practice, I’m agitated. I’ve got a lyric stuck in my head about how death is just a blink where your eyes never open. Usually I can do a breathing exercise and expel that sort of thought. Not tonight. Now it’s in my body. Like when you consciously focus on your breathing and suddenly the rhythm won’t settle, but with my eyes. I’m fixated on the little dark spaces whenever I blink.
Comfort food, cheese toast in the oven, trying to calm my nervous system, pacing around the kitchen. I check it, look in the fridge for no reason, check it again and the edges are getting too brown.
Then I just grab the glass dish with my bare hands.
I don’t mean to. I’m not present, and I grab it and the pain hits me and I pull away fast. The dish hits the open oven door and then smashes on the floor.
I’ve got my burnt fingertips clenched into my fist. I’m just standing there, glass all around me, the oven door still pouring heat out. Not even a swear available.
My mom looks into the kitchen and says.
“Don’t move,”
as if I was going somewhere. She comes back with a broom and sweeps a path to my bare feet amidst the glass.
She’s got hints of a British accent. We moved back here to her hometown when Jasper and I were little, so I never picked it up. Her edges have worn down, but she still raised me on maxed-out speakers and atheism and a distrust born out of working as an investigative journalist. She gave me the tools and space to know I was bi when I was eleven and tried to take care of her kids by saving her darkest music for when she took the bus alone.
Sometimes Jasper just hits the dial and lets the radio hand him whatever’s playing. Like he doesn’t care. That’s what really scares me.
My mom insists on taking a close look at my hand when she reaches me. The left took the worst of it.
“Dear, how’d you manage to do that?”
I don’t think I’m anyone’s dear right now. That’s sort of the problem.
“I was making cheese toast,” I say.
“Well, that is a difficult food. Go run this under cold water. It’ll be alright.”
“Can I take the toast with me?”
“Lillian, it’s got glass in it.”
“It’s all big chunks. I’ll pick them out.”
She doesn’t sound condescending. I don’t know how.
“Go run it under cold water. I’ll make you more.”
“We’re out of the good bread.”
I was looking forward to that bread.
“There’s more in the freezer.”
“I just wasn’t thinking. We had a bad rehearsal.”
“I could have guessed.”
“It was a new dish.”
“I know.”
She sweeps more glass aside so I can leave.
“It’s alright.”
I want to believe her.
Cyprus says my mom makes her feel safe because of her voice. She can have a softness in moments of care that always makes you feel listened to.
There’s never softness in my voice, and I don’t think it would help me. I don’t make anyone feel safe, it turns out, not even myself.