3. Elara
Elara
By Friday afternoon my brain has the texture of a sponge that’s been used to clean a bigger, more important sponge.
But the article is done. I’ve made Julie very aware of that fact.
I’m not saying it’s good — somewhere around Thursday midnight I lost the ability to tell a good sentence from a sentence that merely contained the correct number of words — but it’s done, it’s sent, and Julie replied with a single thumbs-up, which from Julie is basically a ticker-tape parade.
So I’m free. It’s Friday. The deadline is behind me instead of in front of me, which is the single best place for a deadline to be, and I have earned the specific reward of lying horizontally and doing nothing for the rest of my natural life.
And bonus? I got to keep both of my kidneys.
My phone rings.
It’s Ashley. Of course it’s Ashley. I answer.
“Don’t,” she says, before I can get a word out. “Your voice is already doing the thing.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You said ‘hello’ and it had a whole couch in it. You’re already lying down.”
I am already lying down. “I’m resting my eyes. I had a deadline. I suffered for my craft.”
“You wrote a listicle about why nobody wants to leave their house.”
“It was nuanced.”
“It was four hundred words and a quiz.” A car door slams on her end. “I’m parking. We’re going out. Wear something that isn’t technically pajamas.”
“Ashley—”
“I’m in the building, Elara, I’m not negotiating with a woman who’s horizontal.”
She hangs up. She does that. Ashley doesn’t end calls, she just decides they’re over.
I have known Ashley since we were nine and she told a substitute teacher that I was mute so I wouldn’t have to do an oral presentation.
She has never once asked me a question she didn’t already know the answer to.
There is no version of the next two hours where I win, and some traitor part of me is already getting up.
She lets herself in, because she has a key, because I did that. To myself. And now she’s halfway across my living room before the door’s even shut.
“It smells like a candle in here. Good. You’re trying.
” She drops her bag on the couch and does a slow lap of the apartment, like I’m hiding something from her.
She taps Gerald’s pot on the way past. “Hi, Gerald. You’re looking well-watered, which is more than I can say for your mother.
” She notices the row of skincare visible through the open bathroom door.
“Oh, we invested. Look at us. Isn’t one of these basically water? ”
“The essence.”
“The essence is water.”
“The essence is water-adjacent.”
She moves on, into the kitchen, where the pizza box from Wednesday is still on the counter being a monument to my week.
She lifts the lid, considers what’s in there, and lowers it without comment.
That’s worse than a comment. We’ve been friends twenty years; she has a whole vocabulary of things she doesn’t say.
And then she stops at my desk, where the note is.
I should not have left it there.
It’s the one from Wednesday, the one out of the serum box, and at some point this week it migrated out of my sweatshirt pocket and onto the desk, propped itself against the lamp where I’d see it.
A lot. Which I did not decide to do and can’t explain.
The best I can come up with? It moved on its own.
Ashley picks it up. “What’s this?”
“Junk. Recycling. Don’t—”
She unfolds it before I finish. “Your light reaches farther than you know.” I already know every word. She reads it again, slower and I watch the grin drop from her face. “Okay. That’s a little intense for junk.”
“It’s a skincare thing.” I used it once, might as well use it again. “They do affirmation-type things now. Hand-written. Came in my serum box. It tests well, apparently, with—”
Do you even hear yourself right now? I do…
I take the note out of her hand and set it back down, face-up, like that settles it. It does not settle it. My face is warm and I don’t love that.
“A skincare company wrote you this.”
“It’s a marketing thing, they all do it now—”
“And you kept it.” She’s not grinning anymore. “On your desk…”
“It just happened to be put there. It’s been there. Moving it is effort. You know how I feel about effort.”
“You moisturize in a four-step routine, Elara, you have effort when you want it.” Not going to think about that right now. “You kept the marketing.”
“Yes. I kept the marketing. Is that so weird?”
She holds my eyes, and to everyone’s surprise, she lets it go.
“Right, fine. Go pick a dress,” she says. “I’m getting my bag from the car. Do not lie back down.”
I do not lie back down. I’m annoyed I’m waiting for her and she knows it.
By the time the elevator opens, I’m standing in the hall outside my own door, very upright and not horizontal.
I’m holding the door for her because she’s slow and struggling, both arms loaded with whatever that is — definitely not just her bag — when Erik comes out of the elevator.
He’s got grocery bags and a jacket over one arm, the green one, the one he wears when it looks like rain — and I don’t know why I know that.
“Hey, Ella.” An easy smile on his face as he nods at Ashley. “Ladies.”
“Hey,” I say. Normal. Extremely normal.
“Big night?”
“We’re—” I gesture, which explains nothing. “Out. Going. It’s a Friday.”
“It is.” The corner of his mouth tips up. He shifts the bags to get his key, says something about the rain coming in, and have fun. And then he’s gone. It took all of nine seconds and I know I’m still staring at his door. I need to stop that. Now.
I force myself to turn around.
Ashley has not moved. Ashley is standing very still in the hallway with her bag over her shoulder and an expression I have known and feared for twenty years.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re about to.”
“Ella,” she says, and it’s not even a sentence, it’s just my name in a poor attempt at his voice. She walks past me into the apartment grinning like a woman who has found money.
“It’s a neighbor thing,” I say, following her in. “We’re neighbors. Neighbors have nicknames.”
“No they don’t.”
“This one does.”
“I have a neighbor of nine years. You know what he calls me? Nothing. He calls me nothing. He’s never once called me by name.
Hell, he might not even know my name. You want to know why?
Because we are neighbors.” She’s in my bedroom now, in my closet, flinging hangers along the rod with the brisk authority of a woman conducting a search warrant. “How long has Ella been happening?”
“It’s new.”
“How new?”
“Tuesday.”
“You know the day.”
“It was a memorable—” I stop. She’s looking at me. “It’s not a thing.”
“What color are his eyes?”
“Why would I—”
“What color are his eyes, Elara.”
“Brown,” I say, and it’s out before I’ve cleared it with myself, “but not flat brown, there’s a lighter ring around the middle, you only catch it if the light’s—” and I hear myself, I hear the whole sentence leave my body, and I shut it in the door too late.
Ashley turns around very slowly with a green dress in her hand.
“The light’s what, Elara?”
“I notice things.” My voice has gone up half an octave and I can’t get it back. “I’m a writer. I notice everything. It’s professional. I could tell you the eye color of the mailman. I could tell you the eye color of the little kid down the hall.”
“What color are the kid's eyes then?”
“…Brown.”
“Generic brown? Or a special brown with a ring?”
“That’s a trap.”
“It’s a little trap.” She’s delighted. She’s never been more delighted. “How tall is he?”
“I don’t—”
“Ballpark.”
“Six-two. Maybe six-three.” The numbers arrive instantly, with confidence, like a price I’ve checked. “I haven’t measured him.”
“You estimated to the inch.”
“That’s a range. An inch is a range.”
She holds the green dress up against me, eyeing the length, not even looking at my face anymore, just stacking the evidence one piece at a time and humming while she does it. “What does he drink?”
“Coffee.”
“What kind of coffee?”
“He gets a large, black, from the place on the corner, and on Sundays he gets the seasonal one, the one with the—” Stop. I can’t stop and now I’m too far in. “—the cinnamon thing, and he holds it weird, like he’s keeping it warm instead of drinking it, and—”
“And you’ve noticed his Sunday order.”
“I go to the same coffee place! It’s a coincidence of geography!”
“Every Sunday.”
“I like coffee on Sundays! I’m allowed weekend coffee!”
“No,” Ashley says, beaming.
“You didn’t even let me finish—”
“The answer is still no. The answer is going to keep being no.” She tosses the green dress onto the bed. “He nods at people. Does he nod at you?”
“He nods at everyone. He nodded at Mrs. Kaiser in the hall last week and she’s seventy-four.
It’s a nod. It’s a deeply meaningless gesture he distributes to the entire building like a—” I’m building a case.
I can hear myself building it, and somewhere in the middle I started arguing the wrong side and now I can’t find the way back.
“—like a man who nods. I should probably turn myself in.”
Ashley sits down on the edge of my bed. She’s stopped grinning, which is somehow the most alarming part of the evening.
“You know,” she says, “you don’t have to marry him.”
“I’m not—”
“I’m not done.” She holds up a hand, and she’s not teasing now, the bulldozer’s parked, it’s just her, looking at me the way she looks at me maybe twice a year.
“I just don’t want you deciding no before anyone gets a chance.
You do that. You decide it’s not for you before it’s even offered, so it never gets to be a thing that didn’t work out.
It just gets to be a thing you were too smart for.
” She picks at the comforter. “I’ve watched you do it for twenty years. I get to mention it once a decade.”
I don’t say anything.
The radiator ticks.
Gerald can’t even help because Gerald’s in the other room.
“Put on the dress, Elara,” Ashley says, gentler, letting me off the hook. “It’s green. It’s going to be annoying how good you look.”
I put it on. She’s not wrong.
“You ready?” Ashley calls.
“Yeah,” I call back.
“Coming.”
I look at myself one last time.
I am not thinking about anything except the dress.
I’m not thinking about his eyes or the jacket or the way the hall, for one second, when he passed, smelled faintly like—
Fucking forest.