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eyesfullofstars257 · 2 years

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Right Where You Left Me

Mae stares at the ceiling of her dorm room. Her other option is to stare at her phone, where a text from her best friend waits. Well—she isn’t sure that she can call Sophie her best friend anymore, but she also isn’t certain that the semantics matter much.

It feels impossible for her to get out of bed today, let alone think about someone who she loves enough to make her chest burn with anguish. But sleep is eluding her, and self-isolation may not be helping.

The text is brief. Sophie will be in town the following Tuesday and she would love to meet up and chat. Simple and benign, nothing more than an open invitation to see each other for the first time in almost a year and a half. Mae could ignore it, and what would really be different?

Everything might be different. The thought that this meeting might return her life to some sense of normalcy forces her to respond.

Her life since graduation has felt like some halfway ethereal limbo, trapped between the excitement of finally starting college and the emptiness of living alone for the first time. She’s been told that everyone feels that limbo when theyfirst move away, but she’s under the impression that the feeling isn’t supposed to last this long.

She was never particularly good at making friends. Her parents told her that friends would find her when she was ready, but apart from Sophie, that hadn’t happened. And even their friendship had been accidental, a result of Mae’s dad losing his job right before she started sixth grade. With her mother at work and her usual babysitter out of commission, she’d had to tail him around to job interviews.

In the lobby of one of the bland office buildings, there had been another little girl, reading alone in the corner. Mae felt especially lonely that day, enough to drive away the tendrils of self-consciousness that had already began to take hold of her heart. She had sat down next to the girl and pestered her until the book was forgotten and an imaginary world full of pirates and princesses was spun. Later, she learned that the girl was the boss’s daughter, and she would be joining Mae’s school for her first year out of homeschooling. And really, what better pairing is there than an anxious loner and a homeschooled kid?

But her trouble making friends had spilled over into her college years, despite her joining a handful of clubs that she really had no interest in beyond a fleeting curiosity. She’s tried to insert herself into group conversations after lectures, but it always seems that the group drifts apart with polite, disinterested smiles after she joins. Mae can count on one hand the number of times that she’s eaten dinner with another person instead of tucking herself into the furthest corner of the dining hall to avoid the pitying stares of her classmates that she just knows must be plastered across their faces. She doesn’t even have a roommate, someone to feel obligated with the burden of her presence.

Sophie answers quickly, probably not having to put herself through the agonizing debate over whether the offer is real or a thinly veiled attempt at mockery. They decide to meet at Starbucks, and Mae scours the online menu so she doesn’t have to make a decision in public. Then, she tucks her blanket back up around her chin and turns to fix her gaze on the wall.

“Hi!” Mae says, setting her cup down as Sophie stands to greet her.

They share a hug, awkward and forced, and Mae steps back quickly. “Hey, it’s good to see you,” Sophie says as she takes her seat again. “It’s been too long.”

There’s a stretch of silence as the girls study each other and Mae pretends that she is not looking for the subtle differences that are surely present after that too long span of time. Sophie, Mae notices, has stopped dying her hair. There’s the barest hint of faded pink at the ends of her hair, which is newly short. Lastthey had seen each other, Sophie’s hair had been blue. She decides that this is a good look. Mature, maybe. She can’t quite place her finger on how the change makes her feel.

“How are classes?” Sophie asks. She picks at the label on her cup with her thumbnail, turning her gaze down to the table.

“Bad, mostly,” Mae says. The bags under her eyes, worse than they ever had been, had caught her eye in the mirror earlier. “There’s just so much reading I have to do for all of them. And one of my teachers is so, I don’t know… arrogant.”

“Do you think you’re going to drop it?”

“It’s such a small class, and it’s for a requirement. I’d feel bad if I dropped it, you know?” Mae, full of more anxiety than any one person should carry, would never drop a class unless it was a crisis.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“How are you?” Mae asks, hungry to know everything she could about the new world Sophie has carved out for herself.

Sophie smiles again, her eyes lighting up like sunlight reflecting on water. “I really like Chicago. The parts of it that I got to see, at least.”

“When do you go back?” Mae knows this answer, of course. She had Googled the University of Chicago’s fall quarter start date in her car fifteen minutes ago.

“I’m flying out on Saturday, actually. The quarter starts on the 27th. That’s why I asked to hang out. I couldn’t leave without seeing you again.”

“It’s okay. I know that you’re busy.” There is so much more that Mae wishes she was brave enough to say. But she lets those thoughts sink away, never to be spoken but to be thought of often.

“One of my favorite things about Chicago is that I don’t know anybody there and no one knows me.”

“A blank slate, I guess.” Mae used to think she wanted that type of anonymity, that she would like to be something of an enigma to the people around her. She’s come to realize that familiarity is what makes her happiest.

“Yeah, a blank slate.” Sophie stares down into her cup, chewing at her bottom lip like she always does when she feels guilty about something. “But if I ever want someone who knows me, I can always talk to you.”

“Of course,” Mae says, with the false bravado of someone who desperately does not want to cry.

“We’ll keep in touch,” Sophie says, with such fervency that it seems like a sacrament.

Mae worries her way through the rest of her spring semester, and somehow, her grades stay high enough that her parents finally look at her with approval. They welcome her home with a fire in their hearts, sharing her favorite meal and a movie bad enough to captivate all of them. But their fire dies out at the end of the night, with the embers carefully ashed over. Her father always was a stickler for fire safety.

Mae spends most of her time out of the house, trying desperately to escape the cold silence that blankets life there. She gets a job that, thank God, demands unreasonable hours of her. Her evenings are spent driving aimlessly, an activity that used to petrify her with images of screaming twisted metal and broken bodies. She’s still petrified but staring at miles of blank road is better than staring at the blank faces of her parents.

Some evenings she puts Taylor Swift on and screams every word with the windows rolled down and the righteous anger of a woman scorned in her soul. Sometimes she skips every goddamn Taylor Swift song that comes up on her playlist because she remembers that Sophie introduced her to that music and songs about feeling lonely and misunderstood are dangerous.

When she returns home from putting needless miles on a car that’s already seen three previous owners, her parents are asleep. Sometimes dinner is wrapped up in the fridge, a gesture as thoughtful as they can muster. Those nights, she eats her dinner cold in the amber light from the streetlights that shine into the living room. On nights when there isn’t anything prepared for her, she stares at the pantry until apathy catches up to her and she goes to bed with a hole clawing itself into her stomach.

She has most weekends off, and she sleeps in until her body forces her to move. Her mother asks if she’s depressed and Mae laughs, assuring her that she’s just making the most of her last months as a teenager. Her mother then asks why she hasn’t been spending her free time with her friends, and she offers a list of half-baked lies as to why everyone she knows is too busy to hang out. Really, the thought of trying to make small talk with high school acquaintances makes her bones itch.

She’s learned her lesson with that.

‘We’ll keep in touch’ had stayed true for a while, until Mae’s texts started to go unanswered for days, then weeks. And,look, she gets it. She feels overwhelmed with her schoolwork, and she goes to a state school, not even some fancy, pretentious university thousands of miles removed from everything she knows.

She’d thought that the lack of communication would change when they both returned to their hometown for summer, but instead, she has to watch Sophie’s life through Instagram. She watches all the parties and group hikes and brunches that Sophie posts about while her texts remain ignored, her calls sent straight to voicemail.

She gets it, and she has no right to be angry. She gets it.

But goddamn if she’s not angry. Goddamn if the anger doesn’t fill her entire body like it’s a monster trying to claw out of her skin to rage and burn and scream into the night air the cry of loneliness and desperation.

And if that beast is a comfort to her, who is she to keep it trapped? Fiery fucking rage feels better than the sculpted indifference of her parents, better than the shining smiles she stares at on social media.

Mae tells herself that when she drives forty minutes into the woods until she can’t see anything in the inky dark of night. She finds a rock, fist-sized and smooth, in the weak light of her unlocked phone screen. It weighs nothing and feels like theworld unto itself and she throws it through the back passenger window of her car, shattering the glass and herself and making something feel like it’s right, finally.

And she turns her face to the sky, a mosaic of stars and the future, and screams until her throat is raw and her mouth tastes like blood. When she’s done and tears track down her face like rivers carving earth into canyons, she gets into her car and drives silently back to town.

When her mother finds the broken window the next morning, Mae pretends to be shocked and she searches through her car, looking for anything that might be stolen. But she doesn’t keep anything valuable in her car, she tells her parents, so the person who broke the window must have moved on after the destruction. They offer to pay for the replacement, but Mae insists that she can handle the costs.

She sweeps the glass out of her back seat before taping a black garbage bag over the hole. The rock, which had rolled under one of the seats, gets a new home in her glove box. Who knows, she might need it to break some more shit.

Right before her junior year, Mae finds a skeezy rental in a Craigslist ad. The walls look like they’re made of cardboard and the stove was probably around to witness the paleolithic, but it’s a far sight cheaper than the dorms and it has these big, gorgeous bay windows that she falls instantly in love with.

She sends an email and gets a reply back almost immediately, offering her a walk-through. With the day off ofwork and a desperate urge to get out of town for a while, Mae jumps at the chance. The drive from her hometown takes an hour and a half, and as the miles melt away, so does the tension built up in every inch of her body.

The landlord, Cyryl, as his email signature proclaimed, is waiting outside when she pulls up, leaning against a filthy Jeep and chain-smoking Pall Malls. He regards her with the same sort of suspicious disinterest that all of her uncles do.

“You Polish? Name like Baranski, gotta be a Pole,” he says, dropping his cigarette on the ground. He stubs it out with the heel of his sneaker, which was probably once a bright white, now a grubby brown.

“You know it,” she replies, shrugging. She looks at his stained wife-beater and the giant cross nestled into his carpet of chest hair, and she takes it as a good sign that he’s asking.

“Your mom’s side or your dad’s?”

“Both of ‘em.”

The man grins, showing yellowed teeth under the curl of his moustache. There’s a slight deranged glint in his eyes, and, well, there are worse places to get killed. Better places too, but this is pretty decent as far as things go.

“You goin’ to school here?”

“Yup.”

“Tell you what, I’ll knock a hundred off the rent on account of your bein’ a Pole and a student. Help a fellow out, huh?”

“Well,” she says. “When can I move in?”

His laugh is big and boisterous and she can smell onion underneath the gusts of stale cigarette air. He leads her up the steps and unlocks the door, leaning his weight against it to force it open.

“Door kinda sticks, but it’s like an extra line of security, you know? I got the locks all changed so you’d be the only person with the key. I don’t really care about pets or nothin’ but I don’t want no parties, okay? Hate to see this place get wrecked up.”

The house is in better condition than the pictures suggest, but Mae still doesn’t think that anything she’ll do would wreck the place. “Yeah, I’m not much of a partier.”

They walk through the rooms together, but there isn’t much to see. One bedroom and bathroom, a shoebox sized living room, and the stone age kitchen. “Guess the walls are kindadingy,” the man says, running his thick fingers over his moustache. “Not a good look. Could paint if you wanted to.”

“The walls are fine. Yeah, I mean, I’ll take it.”

He turns to her with another grin and holds out a sweaty hand. Mae takes his hand and shakes. Then she tries to wipe her palm off on her jeans without him noticing.

Luckily for Mae, there’s great secondhand furniture shopping around town. Unluckily for her, there’s no hope in hell that anything could fit into her car. When it comes time to move, her parents follow in her dad’s ridiculously oversized pickup. They’re hauling the basics: a bedframe and mattress, a couple of pots and pans, and a desk.

They pull up outside of the house in the early afternoon, and her parents stand there looking like they’ve seen a ghost. Mae doesn’t think that ghosts are out of the realm of possibility here, but she can deal with that.

“The landlord left the keys in the mailbox,” she says for her parent’s benefit, walking up the rickety steps. The keys are right where they were promised to be, and she unlocks the door and ushers her parents inside.

“Huh,” her dad says, scratching his balding head. “I guess it has some charm.”

“Are you going to be safe here?” her mother asks, taking a few tentative steps into the living room.

“I mean, Cyryl said that he’s never had any problem with crime. I’ll just get a baseball bat and keep it by my bed just in case. Or something.”

They unload what they have and haul it inside. Her mother offers to stay and begin unpacking clothes while Mae and her father go hunting for other furniture, and Mae agrees, steeling herself for a couple of hours of listening to her dad talk about woodworking.

The drive to the first store is silent, awkward. She leans her head against the window, making a mental inventory of everything she needs to get. School doesn’t start for another few weeks, so she should have time to get settled.

The store smells like mothballs and cat urine, and Mae finds the ugliest goddamn couch and armchair set she’s ever seen and falls head over heels in love with it. The storeowner offers to give it to them at a discount if they’re also willing to take a rug that could reasonably pass for a crime against humanity.

After they load the rug into the back of the truck, her father pauses. “Listen, honey,” he starts with a sigh. Mae's hands still, pausing in their attempt to brush the dust away from her clothes. “This has been eating me lately, and I... I want to let you know that your mom and I are proud of you. I know we don’t say it enough, Mae, but we are. You’ve come so far, and—and you’re such a bright light.”

“Oh,” she says, blinking rapidly. “I, uh.”

“You’re a good kid, Mae. Really.”

“Thank you, Dad.”

He claps her on the shoulder, flashing a rare smile at her. “Now, did you see the detailing on that bookshelf? Absolutely beautiful wood, huh? Looked like cherry.”

Mae does end up painting the walls. After a few weeks of staring at the yellowish white, she decides that lung cancer chic isn’t her style.

She elects to spend the first weekend after school starts working on the walls. The paint aisle of the hardware store freezes her in place with its tremendous amount of options. She curses herself for not looking up even the basics of painting before deciding to do this.

“Can I help you?” The woman’s voice is smooth and low, like what Mae imagines the personification of silk chiffon would sound like.

“How do I paint?” Mae asks, her voice like what she imagines burlap would sound like. “Like, a bunch of walls. All of the walls in my house.”

“You’re in the right place,” the woman—her nametag reads Afia—says. “How big is your house?”

“Small enough that my sweaty landlord only charges me 600 a month?”

Afia nods, bursting into a whirlwind of motion. Her arms fill with rollers and paint trays and drop cloths and Mae is enamored. She follows in a daze as Afia leads her to the counter. Once the supplies are dumped inelegantly next to the register, they turn to the paint chips.

“What’s the vibe?”

“The vibe is me picking up every plant I see left out on the sidewalk instead of going to the store to buy them.”

Afia doesn’t hesitate for a second to begin pulling paint colors, and Mae is left astounded that the riddles she speaks in are decipherable by someone else.

Together, they land on a sage green and a warm, creamy white. “You’re good at your job,” Mae says over the din of the paint shakers.

“I don’t plan on being more upwardly mobile than working at Ace, so that’s an incredible compliment.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, her face contorting into a grimace.

But Afia grins and shakes her head. “I’m being kind of serious.”

“Oh. Do you like it here?”

“That’d be putting it a bit strongly, but it’s not all bad. Pay is pretty good, for one. And sometimes I get to meet cute people who don’t know anything about painting.”

“Right. Yes. Right.” Mae nods emphatically, and when Afia laughs, it sends sparks down her spine. With a gentle hand and a pen royal purple like her fingernails, she scrawls her number onto Mae’s palm.

With her mind in an intoxicated whirl and instructions to call when she needs help, she leaves the hardware store.

It takes Mae a week and dozens of deleted messages before she finally asks for that help. Afia offers to come over after she gets off work, and it almost sends Mae into a panic.

She rushes around the house in a storm of cleaning supplies, frantically picking up the socks that she has a bad habit of leaving everywhere and vacuuming for the first time since she moved in.

When Afia knocks on the door, Mae has to take a moment to collect herself and repeat “Don’t fuck this up” to herself like a mantra.

Mae opens the door with a toothy grin. “I made snacks,” she says in lieu of a greeting, stepping back so Afia can enter. “I figured you would be hungry.”

Afia steps inside, casting her gaze around the eclectically decorated living room. She hums softly, and Mae’s heart drops with the assumption that she hates what she sees and this is another friendship that has shattered before it’s started.

“That’s so sweet,” she says, studying the poor man’s charcuterie board on the coffee table. She picks up a cracker and nibbles at the corner of it while Mae stares, unsure of what to do with her hands or her body or her eyes. “So,” Afia continues. “This place really does need painting. You’re lucky you’re so cute.”

They get started in the living room, working together to move the furniture—mismatched and ugly as hell, Afia notes with a chuckle—away from the walls. She lays down the drop cloth and pours a generous amount of green into the tray before handing Mae a roller.

The process is more therapeutic than she thought it would be. Watching that aged white disappear beneath the fresh paint feels like a renewal. Hours later, they sit together on the floor, a box of cheap, greasy pizza between them. Afia laughs at Mae’s dumb jokes, her eyes twinkling in the light of the setting sun. Splatters of paint stand out against her dark skin, the white and green like nature, like life.

Mae finally musters the courage to ask Afia out right as she’s heading out the door. She turns back and leans against the doorframe, a brilliant smile spreading across her face. “I thought that you’d never ask.”

Mae’s never been told that she’s charming before. But that’s what Afia whispers to her in the dark of the movie theater on their third date, and she spends the rest of the night forgetting to watch the movie because apparently she’s charming.

Those words repeat in her mind as she walks Afia up to the door of her apartment. They repeat as she pushes away her nauseating anxiety to lean in and kiss Afia. And again when they make plans to see each other again the next day.

Huh. Charming. Who woulda thought.

The ladder wobbles under Mae’s feet, and for a second, swooping fear plunges in her stomach. She almost drops thewine bottle, slick with icy condensation and made slicker by her clammy hands.

“Woah,” Afia says, dropping her armful of blankets to steady the ladder. “Careful there, tiger.”

Mae scrambles onto the roof, letting herself stall for a moment to catch her breath. She props the bottle against the chimney before looking back to the ground.

“You good?”

“Yeah, yep. Wanna throw the blankets up?”

“I don’t want to go to the emergency room tonight. I got it.”

Afia makes her way up the ladder slowly, balancing herself and the bundle of blankets far more gracefully than Mae could ever hope to. When she reaches the top of the ladder, Mae takes the blankets from her.

There’s a flat strip at the top of the roof, just wide enough for them to sit together comfortably. Once the blankets are spread out and they’re settled in, Afia twists the cap off of the cheap bottle of Moscato. “Here’s to the end of another semester,” she says, taking a sip before passing it off.

“Two more to go,” Mae says. The wine is almost too sweet, and it makes her wince. “Feels like forever.”

Once she gets used to the bite of the alcohol and the soothing kiss of the sugar, it gets easier to drink. Halfway through the bottle, she starts to feel loose and lightheaded.

��She lays back, letting one hand fall to the shingles and the other rest on Afia’s thigh. The light pollution is too bad for her to see the stars, but memories of the Milky Way enshrined in broken glass flit through her mind.

"What are you thinking about?" Afia runs her fingers through the ends of Mae's hair, her fingers gentle and comforting.

"About... something I did a year ago."

"Ominous. Did you axe-murder someone?"

Mae grins up at her. "You think I would tell you if I did?"

"Come on." Afia nudges her shoulder, taking another long drink of the wine.

"I sort of murdered my car window." She's expecting some snarky reply, but Afia stays silent. "I was angry a lot last year. At my parents, at myself, at... someone I used to be friends with. So I threw a rock through my window."

Afia nods. In the darkness, her expression is unreadable. "You've never seemed very angry to me."

"I try not to be. I just hate how it made me feel. Like, sometimes I got so angry that I felt like it was consuming me from the inside out."

“What did the friend do?”

“She was my first friend. My only friend, really. And she moved to Chicago and forgot all about me. All about us.”

“Feels like there’s something there that you’re not telling me.” Mae sits up, the pleasant warmth in her chest turning into a block of ice in an instant. “I mean, you have a falling out with your friend and you’re still thinking about it now? With your girlfriend? Talking about an ‘us?’”

“No, no, that’s not what I mean at all, I—"

“If it’s not what you meant, why did you say it?”

“Come on, Fi, that’s not fair.”

“How fair do you think you’re being right now? I never have any fucking idea what’s going on in your head, and I find out that this is it. What am I supposed to do with that, Mae?”

She tries to stammer out some answer, but her head is fuzzy and heavy and panic is clouding her judgement. Afia stands up, wobbling on unsteady legs until she catches herself on the chimney.

“Were you in love with her?”

“I don’t—I don’t know.”

“I’m just gonna go home. Talk to me when you straighten your shit out.”

Mae watches her leave, tears stinging in the corners of her eyes. She doesn’t know. And that might ruin everything.

Mae cranes her neck, trying to see the audience past the sea of impatient graduates. She’s already sweating underneath the polyester of her graduation gown, and the punishing sun isn’t helping. The ceremony hasn’t yet started, but she already wishes it were over.

She gives up on trying to look past the people seated behind her and turns back towards the stage, resigning herself to watching the tech department as they scurry around in an attempt to fix the broken sound system.

After an agonizing wait, the speeches begin. After that agonizing wait, they finally begin to call graduates onto the stage. By the time they reach Margaret Baranski, she’s certain that her heart is on the verge of failure.

Being up on that stage, with hundreds of eyes boring into her soul, makes her feel like the world is going to fall out from beneath her feet. She takes her diploma and shakes hands with people she’s never seen before, all the while searching the crowd. Her eyes land on her parents and Afia sitting towards the back of the field and she breaks into a grin.

When she switches her tassel over, she’s met with a round of cheers and whistles from Afia, who had made her disdain for institutional decorum known years ago. Mae’s cheeks are still blushed pink when she takes her seat again.

When the ceremony ends, Mae takes her cap off and runs her fingers along the vines and flowers that Afia had lovingly painted a few nights before. She throws it into the sky as high as she can, laughing giddily as she tracks its descent.

Breathless and more than a little nauseous, she fights her way through the crowd to where they’re standing. Afia tackles her in a bear hug, pressing a kiss to the top of her head before letting her free. She hands off her cap and diploma to Afia before turning to her parents, wrapping both of them in a less crushing hug.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Mae says, wiping her sweaty hands on her gown. “Anyone else down for tacos?”

The next morning, Afia and Mae sit at their kitchen table, stuffing and signing envelopes with grad party invitations. She hadn’t thrown one for her high school graduation, but her parents were determined to Do Better this time around. If she’s being honest, Mae doesn’t really care much for all of the fuss. But it’s sweet how much effort they’re putting into this, and she doesn’t want to crush their spirits.

Distance, Mae thinks, has worked wonders for their relationship. She doesn’t want their fledgling closeness to be shattered. So, she’s relented and allowed her parents to invite every goddamn person in the universe to celebrate her. They’d insisted on paper invites, too, even though digital invites would be so much easier.

Mae stuffs envelopes while Afia, with her remarkably better handwriting, addresses them. She hums some vaguely familiar tune as she sticks stamps on and stacks the envelopes in a neat pile.

“Thank you again for doing this,” Mae says.

“You don’t have to thank me. You know I could walk out of here any second.”

“And lose out on this choice piece of real estate? As if.”

Afia laughs that enchanting laugh that made Mae fall in love with her in the first place as she pulls another stack of stuffed envelopes to her side of the table. “I could charm Cyrylinto evicting you and renting to me.”

“Yeah,” Mae says with an exaggerated sigh. “You could.”

They fall quiet as Afia flips to the next page of their guest list. Halfway through addressing the envelopes for this page, she pauses with a frown.

“You okay?” Mae asks. Afia nods quickly, signing the envelope with a flourish.

“Yeah. Just fine.”

Mae has the urge to press the issue, to find out what’s wrong. She stops herself with the reminder that it’s okay not to worry about every single change in inflection. If something was wrong, Afia would tell her.

When they’re done with the invites, Mae takes them and props the door open with the former window-shattering rock. She drops the envelopes into the mailbox and flips the little flag up. She nudges the rock out of the way, letting the door bang shut behind her.

Mae isn’t as stressed as she thought she would be. As it turns out, her mom isn’t a half-bad party planner. She knows how to make incredible use of dollar store decorations, at least.

She had been all but banished from the kitchen by her grandmother and Afia. Despite her proclaimed plans to stay at Ace for the rest of her working life, Afia has been kicking the idea of going to culinary school around. She’s learning the Correct Way to caramelize onions right now, something that any self-respecting young lady should know how to do. Apparently.

Her job right now is to greet—and hug—the flood of family members that she only very vaguely remembers. She doesn’t think that she’ll ever get the smell of drugstore perfume out of her sweater.

The party really gets underway when her grandmother and Afia bring out the platters of pierogis and onions, kielbasa, and mizeria. Her grandmother lays the makowiec in the middle of the table, her chest swelled with pride.

“Lookin’ pretty good, huh?” Afia asks, coming to a stop with her hand resting on Mae’s hip.

“It’s great. You and Gran really killed it.”

“She’s a great teacher.” Afia grins, almost vibrating with the excitement of all that she had learned. “Hope you don’t mind if I do some experimenting in the kitchen this week.”

“Not at all. She’s probably so happy that she finally has someone to teach.” She grimaces, thinking of her own disastrous track record in the kitchen.

She picks at the fruit platter, accepting congratulations from everyone who stops by her on their way to the food. Her little cousins run around the yard, playing some game that she doesn’t have any hope of deciphering. She’s certain that this is the first time so much of her family has been together in a long time, at least since she was a little girl. It’s nice to see so many people gathered, laughing and eating together. Even some of Afia’s friends, who had become her own friends by association, had come down for the party, lured by the promise of free food and at least one family fight.

But after a few hours, Mae escapes to the front of the house for a few minutes of desperately needed alone time. The questions from her family members are beginning to suffocate her. (No, she doesn’t know what she’s going to do now that she’s graduated. Yes, she is living with another woman. No, her house only has one bedroom. Figure that one out for yourself, Uncle Simon.)

She’s sitting on the front step, chilled for the first time that day because of the shade. She listens to the wind rustling in the tree she was too scared to climb as a child and the laughter rising from the back of the house like a siren’s call.

Just as she’s about to head back down to the party, her social battery somewhat reset, another car pulls up across the street. The windows are tinted enough that she can’t see who’s inside, but she assumes it’s another one of her aunts. She isn’t sure where they’re all coming from, or if she’s even blood related to half of them.

She plasters on a smile as she approaches, taking her duty as the welcome wagon very seriously.

But she stops dead in the middle of the street as she watches Sophie get out of the driver’s seat, a small, wrapped box in her hands.

She stops a few feet away from Mae, a sheepish grin on her face. “Hi,” she says. “It’s been too long.”

“Yeah,” Mae says breathlessly, searching every corner of her brain for the right words. “Hi. What are you doing here?”

“I—I’m here to see you.”

“Who invited you?” Mae shakes her head, trying to remember if she’d seen Sophie’s name on the invite list.

“Your girlfriend, I guess. I got an Instagram message from her, asking me to come. And I got an invite in the mail a few days after that, so… here I am.”

Since their fight, neither of them had even mentioned Sophie. Mae knew that, for the sake of her relationship, she had to leave the past. She isn’t that same hotheaded child, fueled by mock injustices and frozen in time. She’s just not.

But Afia invited her. She reached out and personally told Sophie to come, and that feels like an olive branch.

“What did she say? In her message?”

Sophie shakes her head, scuffing the ground with the toe of her flats. “That’s a question for her. But she sounds really lovely, Mae. I can’t wait to meet her.”

Despite the yawning time and distance that has separated them, she feels comforting familiarity drape over her like a quilt. “I have so much to tell you,” Mae says, her mind flying with everything that’s happened in the past years, everything that she would have told Sophie about on a late-night phone call.

“We have lots of time. I’m back for good.”

They’ll have all the time in the world to ruminate on the past. Right now, it’s time to step into the future.

Mae holds out her hand, and something about it feels like coming home somehow.

#original fiction #writing #wlw #queer fiction

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