32
Lillian
I love having Sasha back at school this week.
Each time I see them, I feel a spark that makes me want to rush across the room to talk to them, to chase them down a hallway.
I don’t, of course.
Quinn’s better at friendship than I am, and he gets Sasha to start sitting with us.
They disrupt some of the sad patterns we were falling into, infuse some brightness into our worn-out group.
Today, the four of us are laughing and carving a cityscape into one of the picnic tables.
“This is you,”
says Sasha, carving a tiny stick figure in a window and giving them a straight line for the mouth.
“What are all those lines through my head?” I ask.
“Piercings,”
says Sasha.
“More importantly,”
says Quinn, taking a break from his argument with Cyprus abou.
“visually balancing”
the skyline.
“how did you so accurately capture the hate that burns within her, consuming her, driving her to ever angstier depths?”
“Minimalism?”
suggests Cyprus.
“Make it a little more obvious and I’ll post it.”
Sasha adds what I think is supposed to be a tiny skull to my T-shirt.
That’s when I see Emelia watching us. Just half an entirely disruptive second where our eyes meet before she’s out of sight.
The shortness of the glance lurches inside me.
When Emelia and I first started dating, we’d lie around and look at each other’s faces, smiling.
For minutes and minutes, not saying anything, just soaking it in, memorizing.
I’d like her at the table with us.
She could fit in.
It’s strange, but I have a moment where I want her to meet Sasha.
She said she couldn’t see me in person, wants her things back, isn’t ready to talk about it yet.
I don’t have a clue where to rest my belief.
Knowing Emelia, if she were here, it would only hurt anyway.
Awkward sad pleasantries and the devastation of her being close but feeling distant.
My favorite people belong together, and lately that’s been a whole mess.
A compounding, snowballing, god-awful mess.
The original band hasn’t all been in the same place at the same time since the middle of August.
It was the day before Emelia and I broke up.
Me and Quinn were having our annual-and-often-more-than-annual day of taking scissors to old clothes and seeing if we could make something cool.
We met Emelia and Cyprus at a movie theater to go see some big-budget affair about a famous band.
We sat in the back row and ate popcorn and critiqued the musical inaccuracies and bad lip-syncing.
Why is everyone disregarding the rhythm of the song? This is supposed to represent the first time he played guitar? He just got really motivated and wrote the whole album in one night, did he? And where are all the cables? It was the seventies in the film, yet not a cable in sight.
Or worse, cables clearly plugged into nothing at all.
I could rage on, but what matters is that I rested my head on Emelia’s shoulder.
Did she already know we were done? Did she just let me go along loving her anyway? Sometimes people who are only able to be kind wind up being cruel by accident.
Cyprus claims she has to get to class early, which is something I’ve never seen her do.
I’m proven right when I find her sitting on the hood of her station wagon fifteen minutes later.
She seems too tired for the blue thigh-high boots she’s wearing.
I think it’s about Emelia, though I’m not sure she’ll want to talk about it.
I sit next to her, both of us stalling on going inside.
She puts her arm around my waist and pulls me close.
She seems to need this, and so do I.
I’m used to having lots of warm physical contact, and lately there’s been a deficit.
And while Jasper’s surprisingly decent for advice-giving, our relationship isn’t what you’d call touchy-feely.
Sasha or I keep passing up on all the opportunities and Quinn’s never been inclined to sit still for long enough to settle into comforting contact.
Though as his body becomes more his own, he keeps getting happier to exist physically in the world.
When I first told people I was bi, I had some friends who immediately thought I liked them that way.
They stopped being comfortable around me and started constantly thinking I was flirting with them.
They read everything I did toward everyone like that, just applying their ludicrous systems around boys to my interactions with every person on earth.
I mean for fuck’s sake.
We were all eleven years old.
Also, they seriously overestimated their own allure.
Cyprus was never like that, even though people lumped her into the non-desirable social pool of Lillian Finley.
She told me that if I liked her, she’d be able to tell long before I did.
She told me I wasn’t subtle with my heart, and as soon as Emelia came along, all of that proved incredibly true.
Cyprus let me keep saying.
“I love you”
to her and knew it was friendship. All along.
I know that standing by your queer friends isn’t something that should be heroic so much as a base expectation, but when we were in grade six, it felt pretty damn heroic.
Cyprus is one of mine, and I’d take a bullet for mine.
“You just had to invite Sasha to the showcase,”
I say eventually.
“Any other show, it’d be fun to have them there again, but the showcase?”
“We’ll sound better in two weeks.”
Her encouragement doesn’t have much conviction behind it. Industry showcases are uninspiring at best. An opportunity for an opportunity for an opportunity.
And it’s another thing I’d planned on having Emelia with me for. I thought the two of us singing together could make at least some sort of impression, even though we aren’t the most marketable band.
“I just want to have enough fans to fill somewhere tiny,”
I say.
“People who care enough to sing along.”
“You write the songs, and Quinn and I will cover merch and promotion. We’ll get there.”
With her close to me, I believe it a little more than before.
“I guess you went after Emelia,” I say.
Cyprus nods.
“It seemed right.”
She pauses, considering.
“Being in the middle has me all strung-out feeling.”
I start saying.
“Does Emelia …”
then stop. I’ve been trying not to contribute to Cyprus being pulled in all directions by my breakup.
“Ask me anything,”
says Cyprus.
“I’m very capable of telling you that I won’t answer something.”
Deep breath.
“Does Emelia talk to you about me?”
“Yes, she does,”
says Cyprus.
“Her other friends don’t really know you as well as I do.”
“They’re probably good for when she needs to hate on me, though.”
“Definitely.”
“Does she hate me?”
Cyprus holds me a little tighter.
“There’s a big gap between being angry and shattered by someone and hating them. I mean, it’s not like you hate her.”
She’s so sure about it that I can’t even argue with her. I want to push back and say she’s wrong, to try to convince myself that I do hate Emelia.
“It’d be easier if I did,” I say.
“But the songs wouldn’t be as good.”
“True.”
“We should go in,”
says Cyprus, unmoving.
“Yep.”
“Got more questions?”
“Yep.”
“Want to ask them now in the name of, you know, graduating? I refuse to spend another year in this place.”
“Do you want Emelia and I to get back together?”
Cyprus hops down from the hood of the car, her boots crunching on the leaves in the parking lot.
“We should get to class,” she says.