5. Emerson
EMERSON
“What are you doing here?” Rumi’s eyes are wide as I walk into the back office of Hey Honey’s, closing the door to place my sweater and purse on the hook.
Her hair is in a braid that sits over her shoulder, her body frozen where she sits at Ava’s desk, having come back to Hey Honey’s to step in as manager while Ava is on maternity leave.
I lift a brow at her. “Working,” I answer, like it’s obvious. “What else would I be doing here?” A huff of laughter escapes my lips, but it’s too dry. It sounds more like I forgot how to inhale air properly.
“No, you’re not,” Rumi responds, standing up behind Ava’s immaculately clean desk. Even in her absence, we’ve been careful not to mess up the way she keeps things back here.
“Yes, I am,” I retort. “Why are you being weird?”
“I’m being weird?” Rumi puts her hands on her hips, her brows furrowing.
“Whoa there, babe. I didn’t mean to strike a nerve.
” I tighten the bandana tied around my head, shaking my bangs out of my eyes.
“I’m just confused as to how my normal Saturday morning shift is causing this much confusion.
” The typical playfulness in my direct demeanor doesn’t seem to land the way it usually does, and I watch Rumi’s cheeks redden in frustration.
“Emerson Roxanne Hasting. Are you being serious right now?”
I very rarely see my best friend and future-sister-in-law upset, and it has definitely never been directed at me.
When I met Rumi, she had just moved from Minnesota with her daughter, having fled her abusive baby daddy to start a new life.
At the time, she and my brother were trying to convince all of us that they were just friends, and not disgustingly in love with each other.
It wasn’t until both of them confronted their own issues and trauma that they finally admitted it.
Since then, Rumi has gone from the shy, quiet girl to the confident, sure as hell of herself woman who is standing in front of me.
And in any other moment, I would fucking love seeing it.
But right now, it’s kind of pissing me off.
“Deadly,” I deadpan, crossing my arms over my chest. “Are you going to tell me what has you middle-naming me this early in the morning?”
Rumi exhales sharply, closing her eyes for a second, and I notice the tension in her shoulders subside. When she looks at me again, there’s a blur to them. “Emerson, you’re not working today.”
I scoff, ignoring the way my eyes sting. “Yes, I am.” I grab my black apron hanging on the hook with my name, grabbing my name tag from the pocket.
“Em—”
“Don’t, Rumi. We’re not doing this.” I cut her off.
Rumi rounds the desk as I fumble with my name tag, but my hands are shaking.
And it’s fucking annoying.
I exhale sharply. “Fuck,” I grit through my teeth, watching as my fingers juggle the name tag, barely holding it in place as I try to close the safety pin around the fabric of my apron.
Rumi’s hands are warm as she closes them over mine, and it’s then that I finally look at her. There are tears in her eyes, and I hate that they make me feel so uncomfortable. I hate that I want to tell her to stop.
That vulnerability reminds me of my own that I can’t stand to give. Not when I'm using every ounce of energy just to stay standing. Not when she’s so open with her grief, and I can barely keep my own contained.
“Take a few days off,” Rumi whispers, slowly taking the name tag from my hands and dropping it into the pocket of her own apron. “A week. Maybe two. Please?”
A tear falls from her eyes, and I want to pull my hair out. Yell at her to stop. Tear my own eyes out to avoid the heaviness building behind my lids.
“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” she adds when I don’t say anything, and it takes everything in me not to take my hands and cover her mouth.
I shake my head, words evading me, but she doesn’t stop.
“I know you don’t want to hear me say I’m sorry, Em, but I am.
I am so sorry you lost your mom. I’m so sorry her cancer came back, and I’m so so sorry that you have to go through this. ”
Rumi isn’t the type to feed me the bullshit that everyone else does. That it’ll be okay, and that however I want to grieve is the right way. She’s not going to tell me that there’s a silver lining, or that God or Zeus or Odin or whoever the fuck people believe in works in mysterious ways.
She’s been through enough of her own shit to know that words like that have no real meaning, not this soon after losing the person you could never picture your life without. People say those things to make themselves feel better.
Rumi grabs my shoulders, looking directly in my eyes, and I can feel the weight of the grief build inside of me, molten and impossible to hold, threatening to burn through everything I've used to contain it. Like an arsonist, crafting a curated plan to destroy everything in their path. “Go home and sleep or eat three gallons of ice cream or scream into a pillow. Do whatever you need to do to make sure you feel this. No matter how much it hurts, no matter how much you don’t want to. You need to let yourself feel it all, Emerson.”
I watch another tear fall from her face, and it’s like a sharp breath to a match, blowing out the flame completely, and the familiar wave of apathy rolls through me, my feelings gone, extinguished. And suddenly her words don’t mean a thing to me.
“You can’t ignore this, Em,” Rumi says as another tear falls from her eyes, and I nod my head as I let the words dissipate in the air around us, letting them disappear. “Or run away from it,” she adds. “I know you know that.”
It’s almost the same thing I told my brother when he lost his best friend a few years ago and went to hide in our grandpa’s cabin for months, avoiding his grief just to come home and have it hit him almost harder than when Bennett died.
Jack ran. Just like our grandpa did when our grandmother died, just like our father did when my mom got her cancer diagnosis.
Just like I wish I could.
It’s the same thing a voice in my head is constantly trying to scream at me, so loud that sometimes I feel the urge to cover my ears just to get some reprieve.
“I know,” I say, to fill the silence. So she stops looking at me like she cares.
She does—I know she does.
But I wish she didn’t.
I wish she didn’t care enough to know that my mom’s death was like flipping off the switch to my humanity. Everything that makes me human—my love, my feelings, my grief—completely shut off. And the part of me that should care remains stubbornly silent.
She pulls me in for a hug, and I instinctively wrap my arms around her waist, resting my cheek on her shoulder. The embrace is warm, but in a way that’s uncomfortable, like the way your skin feels when you have a fever.
Pulling away, I meet my best friend’s eyes, wiping the tears from her cheeks and giving her a small smile, something in me needing her to feel better, despite it all.
“I’ll be okay, babe,” I tell her before agreeing that I’ll take a week off of work.
She promises to check in on me, and I know she will.
As I close the door to my apartment behind me, sitting in the silence of the space, feeling the stillness of the air, numbness wraps itself around me like a heavy blanket—like an old friend—smothering every spark before it can catch.
My feet carry me to my bed, my body sinking into the mattress, falling into a darkness I know all too well.
One where nothing matters.
One I wish I could stay in forever.