Chapter 4 Not all friendship should last

Cal

Dominic was on the couch when I walked in.

He said something, a greeting, his usual easy opener, but I was already moving past him toward the kitchen. I stood in front of the fridge drinking water with my back to the room like if I didn’t make eye contact with anything the day would stop being what it was.

“Yoo.” I heard him sit up. “What’s the energy? Bad day?” I didn’t answer.

“Cal. You haven’t said a full sentence since yesterday. Talk to me. We’re partners, remember?”

I put the bottle down. I turned around and Leaned against the counter and looked at him properly for the first time since I walked in.

“Eight weeks of filming,” I said. “Reality show. Full PR campaign.”

Dominic went quiet for a moment. Then he stood up and walked toward me.

“You’ve still got the final game though,” he said. 

“That’s what matters. You’re not out. And I’m here,  whatever you need, however this goes.” 

He clapped my shoulder once. “Cheer up, man.”

“That’s not the problem,” I said.

Something in my voice made him stop. He looked at me with the specific expression he used when he had decided to actually pay attention. 

“Do you know Nora Ellis?” I asked.

I watched his face carefully.

“The girl you never talk about,” Dominic said.

“I talk about her.”

“You have never once mentioned that name to me.”

“Then how do you know who she is?”

He picked his cereal up from the coffee table, he had apparently been mid-bowl when I arrived and settled back into the couch. 

“You’ve mentioned her a few times. How close you were. How much she hurt you. You never said what she did but I could piece it together.” A pause.

“You’ve never talked about any girl the way you talk about her. Even when you’re pretending you’re not talking about her.” He looked at me steadily. 

“Did something happen between you two?”

He asked simply. Then he looked back at his cereal,  his way of saying the door was open but he wasn’t going to stand in it waiting. I had always appreciated that about him more than I knew how to say.

“Nothing much,” I said, picking up my phone from the table. “Not all friendships are meant to last.”

I headed to my room.

Behind me Dominic said nothing. But I could feel him smiling.

Shower, Change. Sit on the edge of the bed in the dark for a while not thinking about anything in particular.

Then I opened my laptop.

I told myself it was research. Knowing your subject was smart preparation.

I typed her name.

Her campus press profile came up first. The headshot was different from the cast sheet — more candid, caught mid-turn like someone had called her name a half-second before the shutter clicked. She was looking slightly off camera with an expression that wasn’t quite ready and was somehow more her because of it.

Three years and she just looked exactly like herself. 

I clicked through to her published work. I’d expected that but the reality was different from the expectations. Her writing had a quality I couldn’t name. She found the human thing inside every story,  the actual person underneath the event. A profile on an injured campus athlete that somehow became about identity. A housing investigation told entirely through one freshman’s experience. She didn’t write at people.

She wrote toward them.

I had read four articles before I noticed forty minutes had passed.

I clicked to her vlog series next. Ground Level, twelve episodes, two years of campus documentary shorts. I pressed play on the first one.

Her voice came through the speakers.

I hadn’t remembered it correctly. I had carried a version of her voice around for three years and it was wrong, the real one was lower, more certain, with a steadiness underneath it that the one in my memory didn’t have. She narrated the first episode like someone who had found the exact right thing to do with herself and wasn’t questioning it anymore.

I watched the first episode. Then the second.

In the third one she laughed suddenly at something off camera, completely unscripted, real in the way that things are real when nobody is performing, and something in my chest did something I wasn’t prepared for.

I put the laptop down.

Picked it up again.

Dominic appeared in the doorway at eleven-fifteen. He never knocked. In two years of living together he had not knocked once and I got used to it.

I minimized nothing. I was past that.

He looked at the screen. Then at me. Then back at the screen.

“Research,” I said.

“Sure,” Dominic said.

“I mean it.”

“I completely believe you.” He leaned in the doorway for a moment, something shifting in his expression into the version of him that didn’t perform. Then he pushed off the frame and walked away.

I rolled my eyes. Turned back to the screen.

His head reappeared around the corner.

“You actually okay though?”

I looked at the paused frame on the laptop. Nora mid-sentence, hands moving, explaining something to the camera with the focused energy she brought to Everything she cared about.

I thought about today. The three seconds in that hall before either of us moved, the specific quality of that stillness, two people absorbing a collision neither of them had planned. The way she had composed herself so quickly after. The way she said my name Reid like she had been practicing draining it of everything it used to contain.

I thought about twelve texts across two weeks. Unanswered. Every single one.

I thought about whether she had stopped responding because of what happened that night  because I had crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed. I had spent three years not being able to ask. The question had lived in me like something with no exit.

I thought about my father. About the rink at 5am and what it felt like to skate toward something when you were no longer sure what you were skating toward. About everything I had become in the years since she decided I wasn’t worth a single word back.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m good.”

Dominic looked at me for a long moment. Then he walked fully into the doorway, hands in his pockets, expression honest.

“She’s good,” he said, nodding at the screen. 

“The writing. It’s real.”

“I know,” I said.

He looked at me once more. Then, “Don’t stay up too late. Holloway will murder you at practice.”

“I know.”

He left. I listened to his footsteps down the hall and then the quiet click of his door.

I opened the laptop fully again.

Her page was still there. And with it,  the memories that living in the same city as her for a year had made impossible to fully bury. Messages sent and never replied to. Calls that rang through to voicemail. 

A summer break I had spent waiting for her to come back, telling myself that once she was back on campus things would make sense again.

She came back.

Walked straight past me in the quad like I was someone she had never met.

I had seen her once up close, late October, grey sky, she was crossing the open space between buildings with her camera bag over one shoulder and her head down. I was too far to call out to without making a scene so I just stood there. Waiting. We had always had a specific awareness of each other,  the kind that worked across rooms and distances without either of us trying. I waited to see if it still worked.

She looked up.

We held eye contact across the quad. One second. Two.

I took two steps toward her.

She turned and walked in the opposite direction. Deliberately,  I stood there for a moment.

Then I kept walking too. Different direction. As if it hadn’t happened. 

I deleted her number that night. Sat on the edge of my bed and went through my contacts and deleted it cleanly, I remembered it anyway. Of course I did.

Some things lived in you whether you invited them or not. 

I put the laptop away eventually.

Lay back on the bed. Tried the right side,  too loud in my head. Left side, no better. Face down into the pillow, arm stretched sideways until my hand found my phone. I pulled up the show’s schedule and scrolled through it without reading any of it until I stopped being awake enough to know the difference.

The universe really did think I needed to suffer.