Body
This one is angsty. Sorry, no married couple having kinky sex. Maybe next time.
I met Sadie in the library. Not the one on campus—the big one, the one that towers, all old and dignified, over the municipal garden. November was dark and dreary, made out of soggy brown leaves and overcast skies. It made the library, an otherwise imposing building at odds with the surrounding glass and iron, almost fit in.
I liked the central hall. Ceilings so tall you could feel your mind float above you, untethered. Cold (how do you warm a space so big?) with floors that made shoes squeak offensively. I imagined the kind of shoes people must have worn when the library was built and my sneakers seemed inappropriate, disrespectful.
My frozen fingers felt separate from me in the gloves. I’d pictured myself a scholar. A serious person hunched over the archival texts. White gloves. A magnifying glass. But I was wearing polyisoprene and heavy-rimmed glasses instead.
“Oh, shit!” In the prohibitive silence.
My eyes snapped to her, a small figure one row from me. She bounced away from the table, a ping pong ball in motion, coffee dripping from the edge. I fished in my backpack for tissues.
“Thanks.” Her hand extended blindly. She dabbed at the spillage briskly, her laptop at stake. I felt like a box of Kleenex on a coffee table just a little bit out of style. I left the package of tissues on her desk and went back to mine, to my 1930s brittle newspapers.
A tiny plastic package, blue. A hand. Delicate, wan like wax. Statement rings a little too big. A sweater-covered arm, the sweater grey mohair. A smile. Slightly crooked teeth, fine lines in the corners of a small mouth. And, “Thank you, really. You saved two hours of writing.”
“It’s okay.” I made no motion to take back my tissues. There were probably two left. She held her hand like that a couple seconds longer then withdrew it, smile wavering. Was I rude?
“I should learn to hit ‘save’ once in a while.”
It hit me then. That’s how people made friends. Other people, people braver than me. People who approached strangers and shared about their little idiosyncrasies. People like Sadie.
***
Sadie lived far from campus. It was a narrow house in faded pink, walls that had collected years of brown dust without a single repaint or a spruce up. Two stone steps led to her front door. She unlocked it matter-of-factly and I imagined for a moment what it would feel like to live in an old, two-story house with a white Toyota parked in the driveway and invite a new friend over, asking “What kind of tea do you like?”
Sadie was the kind of person who had a selection. While I knew tea as “herbal” or “fruity”, Sadie had white vanilla tea, black tea, green tea, green jasmine tea and a few she said were not really tea like cinnamon apple caramel. I chose the cinnamon apple one. I wanted Sadie to notice, the way people do on TV when one character would have coffee and the other one would make a comment like “Two sugars, huh?” I wanted her to tease me about it.
As Sadie put the kettle on the burner, something slid between my ankles and I squealed. A fat orange cat hopped on the counter, one eye missing.
“Oh, that’s just Bob.” Sadie waved away my alarm.
“Bob? Your cat’s named Bob?”
“Yeah, he has the personality for it.”
I didn’t know what she meant. I imagined her cat an accountant—beer belly and a balding patch at the back of his head. He would stay late at the office and then go home to his estranged wife. His two teenage daughters would barely know him, they’d wonder what to get him for his birthday each year.
Was that what Sadie had seen in Bob? Was that how her mind worked too?
Sadie poured my tea in one of those short cups with wide brims that always stood atop little plates. She put a small cookie on the side the way you would boop the nose of a baby. We went to the living room, bracing tea cups on our palms.
Sadie’s home was old. It wasn’t an intentional kind of old. Some cabinet doors were hanging by their hinges, drooping like an old lady’s cheeks, and the parquet floors creaked beneath my socks. I could tell which items were hers and which ones were inherited from whoever had owned the house before her. She had some of those asymmetrical vases, empty. Decorative candles that had never been lit. Books on the shelves that looked brand new, hardcovers. An ottoman for a coffee table, sage green.
Bob followed us, swift for his size, and hopped on the closed standing piano.
“Do you play?”
“No.” Sadie glanced at it as if she hadn’t known she had a piano. “This was my grandmother’s house.”
“What was she like?”
She thought about it. She stood in the middle of the room like she was stopped by the sudden realization she didn’t know what she was doing there. Her eyes were distant for a moment. Then she said, “She was a bit of a tyrant.” She said it casually, almost as a joke.
I left my tea cup on the ottoman so I could browse her books.
“Are some of them yours?”
Sadie tilted her head, squinted at the shelves. “That one.” She tipped her chin. “The one with the green spine.”
It was not entirely green. Specs of yellow dusted the cover. At first, I couldn’t make sense of the picture. I stared at it: a mosaic of sorts, a puzzle. No, tiles. Window panes. Green, yellow, shades in between. Through the window panes: a body. I noticed the title, Part. Part of what? I turned to the first page, a note. Handwritten in hasty cursive. To Leah, the part that was missing.
“Who’s Leah?” I asked. Then I thought, this was tactless.
“My ex wife.”
“Oh.” I felt like I should say more. A friend would, wouldn’t she? She would ask about it, “How long had you been together?” She would make a thoughtful comment like, “Sometimes when people grow, they grow apart.” But all I could think of then was a faceless woman turning the pages of Sadie’s book, thinking “Every word here is for me.” How must that feel? To be the part that was missing.
“You can borrow it.” Sadie tipped her head again.
“Thanks.” I opened my mouth to say more, but felt like my thoughts were out in the open, and blushed. I turned to the bookshelf to hide it. I didn’t recognize most of the titles. Sadie read across genres. Genres I never ventured into. I felt how narrow my world was. I wished I could read all of the books on Sadie’s shelves, but then no—No, I wished I could be Sadie reading them. I wished I could be a grape seed in the pit of her stomach so I could feel what she felt. I thought if I asked, her words wouldn’t get close enough. There was always some space between what we felt and what we could say about it.
Sadie sat in one of the armchairs and dipped the cookie into her tea. I’d made a point to remember what kind of tea she had. It felt like a pertinent detail, like a dot on a map.
I mirrored her, taking the other armchair. The cookie crumbled in my mouth, a little soggy from the tea. “I’ve always wanted to live in a house,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, I’d like to have a backyard. Even a small one.”
“So you can throw a summer party?” She said it with a hidden wink. Her voice had a ringing to it that made her sound younger.
“So I can plant lilacs.”
Sadie’s smile was fond like she was looking at an old friend and half of her affection was nostalgia. “I’ll plant a lilac shrub in my garden for you,” she said.
I tried to picture where she might plant it—a backyard I hadn’t seen yet, the corner of a fence. It was hard to imagine the shrub as a sapling, so in my mind it was tall, taller than Sadie’s fence, branches heavy with bloom. I’d cut some off—I’d learn how—and bring them in for one of Sadie’s empty vases.
That would mean that in the future I come to her house often, wouldn’t it? I turned my head away. “Does it still work?”
Sadie shifted in her chair. “No, I don’t think so.”
The record player under the window was old too, not one of those hipster things people bought to look cool. I sat on the floor in front of it and tinkered with the buttons. The records were unfamiliar, corners worn, colors faded. Faces looked up at me that I had never seen, their big puffy hair a remnant of a time I’d never witnessed. I placed one on the platter. The needle skipped at first, then a slow song started. A woman’s voice. A song about love. Presumably, a happy one if the lyrics were to be trusted. But old songs always sounded so tragic, even the happy ones.
“Dance with me.” I stood and stretched my arms for Sadie. The record player worked and for some reason, it made me as happy as if I had fixed it. Sadie shook her head, but a smile curved her lips regardless. “You don’t like oldies?”
“I’m not as sentimental as you are.”
I laughed. She was teasing me. In the span of one day I’d become someone she teased. I swayed to the song, rhythmless and graceless. It made Sadie look at me with that fond smile again. As though she found me endearing.
***
I started visiting Sadie often. Sometimes I’d work on my paper in the library and she would be there, quietly beside me, working on her book. Then we’d go to her house, exhausted, and order Chinese. We talked about nothing in particular, our minds offering only silly jokes and loopy nonsense. Sadie was easy to laugh with. As we held our cartons of Lo Mein, I liked to pretend we had a huge pile of laundry we were avoiding. Then everything we said became a procrastination effort and I tried to see for how long we could put off our imaginary laundry.
At other times I made us dinner. I liked to skip Semiotics on Friday and go to Sadie’s instead. She would open the door, cheeks pink from how warm she kept her office, glasses hanging low on her nose. The first couple of times she looked at me as if she wanted to seem disapproving. The pretense of it made my bones feel like a tower built from matchsticks. When she said “You shouldn’t skip class”, I heard “I’m happy to see you” in the way the corners of her mouth twitched.
Sadie’s chopping block was solid wood, maimed by thousands of cuts, deep and shallow. While I chopped carrots on it, lacerating the surface some more, Sadie sat on the other side of the counter and watched me like a sous chef in training. No part of Sadie’s face was diminutive and yet all features together made her look like if you were to cradle her in both hands, it wouldn’t seem out of place. She often wore her hair down, tucked behind her ears, and I’d try to think of a better color for it than just brownish.
“It was blond when I was little,” she said. I pictured Sadie as a child. Thin limbs and blond curls, someone who dreamed of being an adult, not an astronaut or an actress.
I wanted to reach back in time. To find her on a bench in the park, watching other kids play in the sand, and tell her “It turns out okay.” And then I wished I could’ve been her friend, that we could’ve grown up together.
Quantum physics says that there could be parallel universes. There’s no consensus about it, but there could be. So everything you imagine, every possible scenario, could exist somewhere, in a parallel universe.
In one of those parallel universes I would be chopping carrots and Sadie would be watching me do it, except my glasses would sit on the bedside table upstairs, atop the book I was reading. My clothes would hang in the closet, the sort of clothes someone would wear to a work party before she grabbed her coat, saying “I promised my wife to be home early.” And when I looked at Sadie watching me chop carrots, I’d smile and she’d ask me what I was smiling about, but I wouldn’t say. I would be thinking how not only would I get to see her grow old, but how I’d already seen her grow up.
“Potatoes,” I said. Sadie laughed, softly. She bent to get some potatoes from the wicker box under the sink, her hair swept over one shoulder. I stared at the back of her neck. The little bump of her vertebra peeking from the neck of her sweater. If I were her wife, I’d bend down to kiss it.
“More?” She placed two on the counter. My face felt warm and I turned back to the tiny cubes of carrots.
“No, two is fine.”
We ate at the table by the window. It was a breakfast nook, made for pouring cereal into a bowl and spilling milk all over it. I often made soup, it was December. Sadie liked her soup with croutons, regardless of what variety I made. Minestrone, with its floating bowties, was just as in need of croutons as cream of potato.
Bob joined us, plopped on the windowsill, silently begging for croutons. Like mother, like son. Or maybe my croutons were magic. I popped one in my mouth. No, just dry bread.
Sadie asked about a book I had borrowed. We talked about everything, even books my professors would frown at. She wasn’t precious about ideas and she saw nuances other people missed or didn’t care for.
I told her I liked it, but I couldn’t sympathize with the protagonist.
“Oh? Why?”
“She’s too harsh with her daughter”, I said. Sadie argued that it fit the story, that it made sense because of the character arch. “Yes, but on a human level…” I looked down at my bowl of soup, feeling too naive for this conversation. My mom had been harsh, maybe I was transferring. Or no, was that only a thing you did in therapy?
I told Sadie, “My mom used to do this: ask me to help her with something, then tell me I’d done a poor job. She always told me I should try harder, even when I thought I’d done something right.”
I raised my eyes to Sadie’s face, wondering if she knew what I meant. I wanted her to say she did. Sadie tilted her head. “She was only trying to help you.”
“But she didn’t. She wasn’t—” Something scraped the back of my throat. “...helping me.”
“Maybe she thought she was.”
I shook my head. The soup felt too hot in my stomach, and I touched the bowl to check, peering into its pale contents.
“I get the sense this is a painful topic. Let’s talk about something else instead.” Sadie looked around the room. “Do you want tea?”
My insides felt like a bubbling cauldron. Another hot liquid was only going to make things worse, but I said yes and Sadie got up to get the kettle. The smell of cinnamon apple caramel wafted from an open cupboard.
On my way back, I hunched into my coat. Fresh snow crunched beneath my boots, glittering like the concrete did in the blinding shine of the sun in summer. A flurry of snowflakes danced in the orange light of the street lamps. In my mind, Sadie was saying “Oof. That must have been hard. I get why you wouldn’t like Monica.”
But then that wasn’t Sadie. I could hear her voice wrap around the words, but they weren’t hers, they were mine. I stopped at a red light, watching the cars drive by. The sounds of traffic were muted the way they got in winter. People walked the streets, their chatter wrapped in cotton. I looked at them and thought, I’m glad Sadie says the wrong thing sometimes. If she always said the right thing, she wouldn’t be Sadie. She would be one of those people you made up in your head when you needed someone to talk to, limited by what I could imagine her say.
In the parallel universe, we fought over words and their meaning. Or rather, we bickered, the way married couples do. I crossed the street thinking how lucky I’d be to go to bed on a Friday night and turn to Sadie and say, “You hurt my feelings.” And to that she would reply—
I hugged myself tighter. It was cold.
Carrie was asleep on the couch, Netflix asking, “Are you still watching?” from the bright screen of her laptop. I quietly closed the lid and covered her with a blanket.
I brushed my teeth, holding my phone like I possibly had a bad habit of it. “Look up from it, kid. At least once in a while,” in my father’s voice, my play-pretend father. I imagined I was a sorority girl with a French manicure waiting for a text from her boyfriend. I checked the time: almost half past ten. Sadie could be asleep.
I sat on my bed, my toes skimming the carpet. Back and forth, back and forth. My thumb hovered over the screen. Our chat was long for a chat between people who saw each other so often.
“You hurt my feelings,” I typed under a meme she had sent. The way I’d say it if we were sitting in bed, side by side, Sadie rubbing chamomile cream into her hands. When the three dots appeared, my breath stuck in my throat. Sadie was up. She asked me to elaborate and I said, “I felt like you dismissed me, I needed you to understand.”
As I hit send, I thought, but you’re not sitting in bed side by side, and I felt the edges of our friendship closing in on me. Drawing a circle.
“I’m sorry.” Her message came fast. “I didn’t mean to be dismissive.” Then, “Thank you for telling me this.”
I stared at my phone. “Look up from it, kid.” The dim glow of my bedside lamp made everything seem softer so I reread Sadie’s words, moving my mouth over them. I let my hand glide over the duvet, feeling the coolness of it.
No one had ever thanked me for telling them they’d hurt my feelings.
***
I cut my winter break short so I could be with Sadie. It was that liminal time between Christmas and New Year’s when everything was moving slowly, even the cars that would otherwise speed. I had late cereal breakfasts in my faded pajamas and thought that was very luxurious.
It was a biting kind of cold outside, but Sadie’s home was warm, so I wore a tank top under my sweater. The process of shedding layers at her door felt like taking apart one of those Russian dolls. Sadie patiently waited.
“Have you had breakfast?”
“Yeah, Cheerios,” I said.
“Cheerios is not breakfast.” She seemed to find it some kind of amusing.
“If you have old bread, eggs and milk, I can make us French toast.”
“How old does the bread have to be?”
Day old was fine. As I whisked eggs and milk, Sadie read to me. She said it was like a podcast and laughed. “Don’t you listen to podcasts when you cook?”
“This is not a podcast,” I argued through a grin. But I let her read to me from a book I couldn’t quite grasp, because I’d missed the beginning. Sadie’s voice dipped and rose, curling around the words. The kitchen smelled like cinnamon.
We took our French toast to the living room. Sadie didn’t have a tree. She wasn’t big on Christmas. I’d offered to help her decorate, but she said Bob would tear down whatever decorations she put up. So her living room was just as I’d left it a week ago, like Christmas had never happened for her. My idea for a gift—one of those old glass ornaments—remained just a sentiment.
Sadie sat on the couch, her laptop open on the coffee table. She said cartoons were essential if we were going to have French toast. I asked what cartoons went with it and she smiled, a little deviously. Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
“Are they mice?” I squinted at the screen.
“They’re chipmunks,” Sadie said and her face had that beautiful radiance of joy. I held in my breath as if the sound of it could disturb it.
I watched the show, entranced. Not by the detective chipmunks, but by the piece of history Sadie had shared with me. Her nostalgia seeped into me and for this one brief moment I could feel exactly what she was feeling, and maybe nostalgia was not the right word. There was no word. Just the light in Sadie’s face. It was the kind of light you only got to experience once as a child, on a Saturday morning after a sleepover at your grandmother’s house.
I set my plate on the coffee table and Sadie said, “You can lie here if you want.” She put a throw pillow on her lap. “I could play with your hair.”
My mouth felt glued by the cinnamon stickiness of the French toast.
Sadie’s hand, extended, holding the pack of tissues I’d left on her desk, and her smile wavering, one parallel universe ago.
I didn’t want her to retract her offer or feel silly for making it.
I lay my head on the pillow and stretched my legs, my toes reaching the armrest. Sadie’s fingers wove into my hair the way you sink your hand in the ocean, fingers splayed. I inhaled like my lungs were made out of paper. She scratched my scalp lightly, brushing my hair back, almost half-consciously. My skin prickled and I hoped she wouldn’t notice. I wanted her to keep touching me so badly I felt nauseous.
I asked to wash the dishes, pretending they bothered me. Sadie followed me into the kitchen, Bob on her heels.
“I finished my draft yesterday,” she said. There was a celebratory air around her. I stopped, leaving the dish in the sink, soapy sponge on top of it.
“You’re telling me now?” I felt the corners of my mouth stretch so far it hurt. “Can I read it?”
“What, now?”
“Yes, now.”
Sadie was a little self-conscious as I sat cross-legged on the couch, her laptop in my lap. She busied herself, first reading the book she’d greeted me with, then tidying some shelves behind me.
From the first few pages I could tell this novel was going to be different from her last. I’d really liked Part. Though it wasn’t the kind of story I’d pick up in a bookstore. A dystopian future, people missing parts of their bodies that we, in the non-fictional world, had no purpose for. I didn’t read sci-fi. But Sadie’s book wasn’t sci-fi. I could barely put my finger on it, but it was something else. It was the way she wrote about absence. It made me trace the plane of my stomach for a scar where my appendix should be.
This draft was a change. Sadie’s words were precise, her sentences short. I could feel the softness between the characters, the humming tension of each scene. Her writing had a more mature quality to it. But saying that would sound pretentious. I pictured a plump man in a chef’s coat and a hat, maybe even a moustache, critiquing a dish. “Hm, yes, the notes blend nicely, I see what you’ve done here.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. I was only two chapters in, knowing I’d read it in one night if she let me.
“Yeah? You like it?”
I looked at Sadie and I didn’t know how to say that I loved it. That I could tell she’d changed. That I wished I could’ve known her back then, that I wished I could’ve witnessed each moment.
In a parallel universe, I was sitting at her desk, looking up from the laptop. The lines around Sadie’s eyes were deeper. She would stand by the door and ask, “Well?” And I’d say, “Even better than your second.” I would look at her with this deep understanding people had when they’d been paying attention. The sort that was learned.
I said, “It’s good. It’s really good. Will you send it to me?”
Sadie smiled and for a second I thought I heard her exhale.
It was late in the afternoon, dusk had almost swallowed the orange of the sunset. In Sadie’s vestibule, it was dark. I pulled the sweater over my tank top.
“Maybe we can go out and celebrate next Friday,” I said. Sadie made a small sound.
“We should. But not next Friday, a friend is staying over for the weekend.”
“Oh. What friend?” I shoved my feet into my boots and bent to zip them—it was harder to do once my coat was on.
“Joan.” She pronounced the name like it was ordinary, but I heard staying over for the weekend.
“Is she a close friend?”
Sadie tilted her head as if considering my question. “No, I wouldn’t say close. We see each other sometimes and…you know. Like a friend with benefits.”
Something in my stomach surged up. It lodged itself in my throat. I wished I could look away from Sadie. Seconds ticked by. I willed my voice steady and said, “Oh. Hm. Isn’t it hard staying just friends? I mean, with someone you’re sleeping with.” Like I was asking Carrie about a boy.
“Not really.” Sadie said the words like a shrug, something that didn’t mean much either way. “Joan is not interested in a very close friendship, so it’s easy to draw a line.”
I tried to imagine that, not wanting to be close to Sadie. To look at her and not see her.
I stared at Sadie’s blank expression and wondered what it must feel like to compartmentalize like this. To say “she’s a friend” and really mean an acquaintance. To say “we have sex” and really mean—
“Okay, so not next Friday, then,” I said.
“Yeah, I’ll text you.”
I almost told her to have fun, the way a friend would. Someone different. A sorority girl with a French manicure. She would toss her hair and smile, and wink. But I didn’t. I put my coat on and left, waving.
Carrie raised her eyes from her phone when I entered, her suitcase by the door. “Are you okay?”
I said I am, then something squeezed my insides and I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. I bent over the kitchen sink to vomit.
***
I watched a girl pet every stray dog on her trip to Sri Lanka. Then a primary school teacher in China sing Taylor Swift to her class. A woman trying to decide whether or not to have another baby. A tutorial on how to grow spider plants. A DJ doing bad mashups. I wanted to read a book, even my coursebook, but my mind felt like mercury spilled on the floor from a broken thermometer.
Sadie hadn’t texted me all weekend and I carried this tension in my abdomen from room to room, like I was about to get my period, but I didn’t. I wondered if I should text her first, I wondered if Joan had left already.
I had never seen Joan, but I imagined her very different from me. Someone with a sharper jaw, wider shoulders, a skin that didn’t prickle. I pictured her tongue prying Sadie’s lips apart, her hand gripping Sadie’s hip. Like it was just a hip, anyone’s hip. Anyone’s lips.
And then I wished that Joan would love Sadie. That she would look at her and notice the way Sadie blinked and smacked her lips when she talked.
I thought about Leah, the book inscription, the way Sadie said “ex wife” like it had been so long ago. I knew about Leah—her habit of leaving her clothes on a chair, not in the closet, and the way they’d often argued about it—I knew she had left. I could see her toothbrush abandoned by the sink. I could see Sadie stare at it in the morning.
In the living room, Carrie was watching something, her headphones on. She glanced at me the way she’d started doing recently, like asking “Are you okay? Are you sure?”
I poured myself water and tried to decide if having dinner would make my stomach ache better or worse. I grabbed my leftover bowl of cereal from the fridge and plopped down on the couch. Carrie took off her headphones, she was watching Is It Cake? She didn’t say anything, just let me sit next to her as the people on screen replicated everyday objects with fondant.
When I got back to my room, Sadie had texted. Hey, how are you? I didn’t know what to say.
My second term started and I busied myself with homework in the evenings. Sadie was understanding. She seemed absent-minded when I visited. She stopped reading to me when I cooked. It was harder to make her laugh.
January passed somehow. The snow melted in February. March brought the sun back, though there was still a bite in the air.
The sun didn’t set until 7 p.m., and in Sadie’s kitchen, its rays projected the curtain’s floral pattern on the wall. We were making pizzas with store-bought dough. Sadie was in a good mood again and it was easy to pretend it had all been just the winter blues. She put pineapple on her pizza, and I feigned outrage. Bob got salami and a little cheese. He didn’t like the cheese.
We ate on the couch with the window open, the crisp air of a sunny evening making the living room feel new. I could see myself sitting in front of the record player, watching the tree outside grow green.
Sadie talked about a vacation she had planned in May. An old friend she visited every year. She showed me photos of the countryside house, the hills that surrounded it, the nearby forest. It looked exactly the way spring should look like outside of the city—blooming apricots and apples, and chartreuse grass. I pictured Sadie among the blooms and felt lighter. Her eyes crinkled as she smiled and the moment stretched, and stretched, and stretched.
A cold gust hit my back and I got up and closed the window.
Sadie’s kitchen was already swallowed by the grey of the dusk when I tidied the dishes. As I placed them in the sink I saw two wine glasses already there. I hadn’t noticed before.
My first thought was Joan. But Joan visited for longer.
I stepped back from the sink. The tips of my fingers started tingling and there was this odd ringing in my ears. In the living room Sadie was choosing a movie.
I don’t remember what movie we watched. Sadie was unusually talkative as if my silence made her want to fill the space with chatter. She asked me a couple of times if I was feeling okay, if I liked the movie, if I wanted to lay my head in her lap. I declined.
As I was putting my jacket on in the vestibule, Sadie asked me if she’d done something to upset me. I stared at her. The tension in her brows, the concern in her eyes. I hated lying to her, but I said no. She didn’t react.
I left my phone in my room and watched Love Is Blind with Carrie on the couch.
I had classes the next day so I turned off the notifications sound, telling myself I was avoiding distraction. I wondered if I could forget my phone in the auditorium. I imagined it dying without a charge. And then if someone found it, even if they charged it, it would still be inaccessible without my face or my passcode.
I felt bad thinking about it. I pictured Sadie trying to call, worrying. At first she would blame herself. Did I say something to hurt your feelings? I try to be more sensitive, but sometimes I miss the mark. Then she would get sad. She’d walk into her kitchen and notice the cardigan I’d left behind, hanging on the chair I used to sit in.
I went to her house after classes to get my cardigan. I rang the bell, but no one answered. I rang again, she could be up in her study. She got distracted sometimes when she was writing. I rounded the house, I didn’t know why, and I found Sadie in the backyard, her gloved fingers buried in the flowerbeds.
“What are you planting?”
“Sweet peas,” she said and I watched the afternoon sun turn her hair a light shade of copper. Right now the garden was barren. There were snowdrops in February, but by the beginning of March they had all withered. I imagined Sadie’s sweet peas blooming in June, pink and purple, and it felt distant like something that had already happened.
“Can we go inside?”
“Yeah, I’m almost done here.” Sadie brushed sweat off her forehead with the back of her gloved hand and a smear of earth was left behind.
She cleaned up in the kitchen, Bob swiveling around our ankles. She asked about my classes, my thesis, if I had an idea yet. I stared at her, followed her with my eyes from the sink to the fridge, to the table, noting how her skin had turned golden from the sun.
In a parallel universe, Sadie had grown up wanting to be an astronaut, not an adult, and when I wrapped my arms around her, she leaned into me and she sighed. And I wished that were the universe Sadie got, even if I weren't there to lean into.
“Is everything okay?” Sadie sat across from me, and the air in the kitchen hummed.
I felt the words expand in my throat, clogging it. “This is hard to say, um…I…It’s getting harder for me to—to keep doing this.” My hands were shaking so I pressed them together between my knees under the table. “I don’t have this kind of friendship with anyone and…I’m starting to fall for you—I think.”
There was a phantom pot of water rattling and sputtering on the burner, filling the kitchen with the clatter of the lid.
Sadie tilted her head, her face growing softer. “Oh, honey.”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
***
We sat on the high chairs by the window, watching the people go by. Carrie was quiet, tired by the dry heat of June and a morning spent typing. I hadn’t started working on my thesis yet.
“Your ice cream is melting,” Carrie reported.
“Hm.” I looked at the gooey mixture of citrus and chocolate in my bowl. “Imagine if we’d sat outside…”
I pictured a cone in my hand, ice cream running down my fingers as I walked through the park, down the big alley that slashed it in two, under the canopy of the beech branches. Sadie would laugh and grab my wrist, and steal a taste, and look at me with that fondness she always had in her eyes.
My hand twitched. Outside, a woman passed and in the sun her hair had a tint of copper. I followed her with my eyes until she reached the crosswalk and hid from view among the traffic.
I wondered if Sadie had visited her friend in the countryside. If she was editing her book. If she had read the one I was reading. If Bob still took his meds.
I pictured the sweet peas in her garden near the fence, pink and purple. In a parallel universe, there was a lilac shrub in the corner, its branches reaching for the sky, vibrant green, its bloom already spent.