I’m clearly going through something because I feel bad. Maybe all this fresh air is poisoning my brain. I shift awkwardly and look around, like I’ll find a guidebook carved into a nearby tree trunk. You know: So Your Old Best Friend Admits She Was Wrong and Hating Her Is Getting Exhausting. Something like that. But before I can find any handy-dandy instructions, Celine speaks again.
“You were…” She swallows hard, but her jaw is harder. “You were embarrassed of me. That was the problem. That’s what makes you the bad guy.”
Aaaand my stomach is on the floor again. “That’s not true.”
“You told me not to—”
“I apologized,” I interrupt, because I know what I said, and I don’t want to hear it again. “I told you I was sorry. I told you straight away.”
“As if I was going to believe a word out of your mouth after that.”
I know what that was. I can see it now: me dragging Celine over to the lunch table with all my new friends. The more she talked, the quieter they got, and the quieter they got, the more she talked. Nervous. A bit too loud. Repeating herself. About aliens, obviously—and how smartphones listen to everything you say and target political advertisements accordingly, advertisements designed to radicalize you into proudly destructive apathy or conservative extremism, and a load of other stuff pretty much no other fourteen-year-old was going to appreciate, and I wanted this to work, I wanted everything to work, so I told her after lunch that maybe the next day she should just—
Keep that stuff to herself.
And she said, “But why?” And I didn’t want to say, “Because I need them to like you,” so instead I said,
“Come on, Cel. It’s just…a bit…weird.” I knew as soon as I said it that I’d made a mistake. Sorry, sorry, sorry—
Too late.
“I am weird, Bradley, and I don’t care. Sorry I’m not pathetic enough to fake my entire personality. Some of us actually have integrity.”
You know how things hurt the most when you’re scared they might be true? “I have integrity!”
“Sure you do.”
“Well, sorry people like me but not you, Celine.”
“One day they’ll all find out how weird you really are, Brad. You know that, right?”
Yeah. I knew. Just like I knew this whole fight was a mistake.
“Will your new friends want you then?” she’d snarled.
“Of course they will!”
Except it stung because maybe they wouldn’t.
Things went downhill after that. And by downhill, I mean Celine called me a knock-off Ken doll with an inferiority complex, so I told her aliens weren’t real and her dad was just a dick.
Jesus. Five minutes ago, we were wandering through the woods and suddenly, somehow, she’s plunged me into a vat of the past and I feel like I’m drowning. I knew I should’ve stayed away from this girl. Around her, I am nothing but trouble.
“You realized you could fit in,” Celine says now, “and you were gone. Like that.” Her fingers don’t snap properly; they’re too wet. “All you had to do was leave me behind, so you did it. It’s not a big deal. I just wish you’d admit it.”
“You’re wrong.” I don’t like to think about this stuff—it’s twisted and messy and I don’t do mess—but the truth is, back then, I had a very clear plan: football, and friends, and still-Celine. Always-Celine. It’s just, the closer I got to those first two things, the more she turned away from me. And I know it was deliberate. I know her. “I wanted you to sit with us at lunch—”
“What the hell was someone like me going to do sitting next to Max Donovan? Isabella Hollis? Any of them?” She laughs, like she can’t even come close to understanding me. Like I’m on another planet.
“What’s…what’s wrong with Isabella?” I ask hoarsely. I mean, I know what’s wrong with her from my perspective: she’s my ex-girlfriend, and it was pretty brutal when she dumped me last year. But I always sort of hoped Celine would like her, and—
“You knew no one liked me,” Celine says, and Isabella falls out of my head.
“I knew people could like you,” I correct, “if you’d just talk to them! Properly! You never talk to anyone, not the way you did with me—”
“Piss off, Bradley.”
I raise my voice over hers. “If you’d’ve just…If you could just be—”
“Well, I couldn’t!” she shouts. “You could, and I couldn’t! So you left me.”
“I left you? You…you iced me out completely.” I run a hand over the nape of my neck, my stomach lurching as if she’s dragged me back in time. As if I’m in the cafeteria watching her eat lunch on her own with that bored expression and her head held high, like anything, absolutely anything, was preferable to me. “We were best friends for years and then suddenly that was it! Like we never even happened.”
“Because you weren’t you anymore. You were a completely different person like…like—”
“Like I’d been abducted by aliens,” I say in realization, the words coming slow and flat. And it all falls into place: why she wouldn’t accept my apology, why she wouldn’t even let me try. Why we’re standing here with nothing between us but an ancient argument.
She looks at me, her expression mutinous, her jaw tight. Like she’s daring me to make something of the connection.
I don’t even know what to say.
This thing we have, it’s like throwing a tangled chain into a drawer, hoping one day it’ll come out untangled again: the knot gets even bigger while you’re not looking. I couldn’t find the right piece to pull, couldn’t get a good grip on the links, even if I wanted to. We’re just too…done.
She takes a breath. Her voice sounds like the edge of a saw. “The way I see it, we weren’t ever meant to be friends. Whatever we used to be was…accidental or circumstantial or…”
It takes me a minute to understand those words, just like if someone punched into your body and ripped out your kidneys, it’d take a while to realize you were bleeding out. So I let her get deep into her bullshit before I manage to interrupt. “What?”
She closes her mouth. The wind howls through the trees.
I repeat, “What did you just say to me?”
She lifts her chin.
Something in the middle of my rib cage snaps. “For fuck’s sake.” I. Am. Too. Hot. I rip the hat off my head and throw it toward the ground. “I can’t stand you.”
My hat hits her in the knee, somehow. She throws it back. Misses me. “Yes! I’m aware!”
“Don’t throw my hat!” I shout, and pick it up from the mud, and then accidentally throw it again.
“Fine!” Before I know it, she’s crouched down, scooped up a handful of wet mud and rotting leaves and God knows what else, and launched it my way. There’s a visceral splat as it hits my chest, and I see satisfaction on her face for about 0.2 seconds before the expression vanishes like a snuffed-out candle. Her jaw drops. Her eyes are wide. She’s a bit like that painting, the one with the scream.
I look very, very slowly down at my filthy clothes.
“Brad!” she says, like she doesn’t know what else to say.
This outfit is pretty fucked now. From head to toe. It’s not as if I’ve never been muddy before—you should see me at Sunday matches—but this isn’t a wide-open, manicured field and I am not in uniform. God knows what’s hiding in this forest. I’ve seen mushrooms in here. Mushrooms are fungus. I am fully contaminated.
“Oh my God,” Celine breathes.
Accept the thought, my common sense reminds me.
Right. Yes. On it. I officially accept that I am tragically doomed to contract rabies from the poop-infected unidentified forest mud Celine just threw, and promptly die.
“I’m so sorry!”
Check for distortions.
Okay, fine: it’s entirely possible that my imminent death is not a reasonable conclusion to this story. It’s also possible that the rabies thing is inaccurate.
Technically. I suppose.
“Brad?”
Refocus.
I tip my head back and count all the branches above me. I must not fear.
“Brad, please say something. I’m sorry.”
I breathe out once, deliberately, through my mouth. Only I will remain.
Okay. Okay. I’m fine.
But Celine looks a bit like she’s going to cry. Or maybe that’s just the rain. “What?” I demand.
Her eyes widen. “I…Do you need…Is it…”
I bend down, scoop up my own handful of mud, and throw it right back. Splat. Now her coat is a mess too.
She stares at me in astonishment for one second, two, three, before her shock fades and the mud fight officially starts.