Can You Hear the Ocean?

Chapter 4

"It was..." Mia searched for the normal words – boring, fine, exhausting. But instead, she settled on, "weird."

"Weird? Getting some strange customers again?" Julian asked.

"Nothing like the guy with a top hat who came into your bar a few nights ago," Mia said, giggling some.

"What was it, then?" Julian asked.

Mia twisted her fingers into her bedsheets. "I ran into someone I knew. From a long time ago."

"A guy?" Julian automatically asked.

"No! Nothing like that," Mia assured him "It was my old friend from when I used to live here as a kid. I haven't seen her in so long. It was...weird. I don't know."

"I thought you said you didn't know anyone here anymore," Julian explained.

"Well, I guess there was always the possibility she would still be around. I just didn't expect to see her living in the same place as when I left," Mia explained. She ran her fingers through her hair and sighed.

"Why do you sound upset? Did you two have a falling out or something?" Julian wondered.

"No. I don't think so," Mia said.

"You don't think so?"

"Mm, 's complicated," Mia murmured, letting out a yawn. She was still groggy from her nap.

"Everything seems to be complicated with you," Julian teased.

"I don't know. Like...like I feel weird she saw me working in a coffee shop. That she saw me here, in Maine again. I feel like a—" Mia let her words drawl off. A failure.

"You wanted to move back here, I thought," Julian said.

"Yeah. Sorry. I don't know. I think I have a bit of a headache still," Mia said, pressing her palm to her forehead. "How was your day?"

She laid back on her bed, letting Julian ramble as he often did about the ins and outs of work as a bartender and living at home with his parents. Mia nodded and hummed in agreement, but her eyes fixated on the shell sitting on her nightstand. She reached for it and ran her fingers over its grooves.

"Mia? You listening?" Julian asked.

"Yeah. Sorry," she said, setting the shell back down on its normal resting spot. "I hate to cut you off, but I said I'd FaceTime my college friends at five. Can we catch up again later?"

"I guess that's alright. We can talk some other time. Talk to you later, Mia. Love you," he said.

"Love you, too," she murmured.

In her few moments of silence, she tried to fix her appearance by brushing her hair and straightening out her t-shirt. She moved from her bed to her desk and opened up her laptop, trying to will herself to smile before she joined the call.

As she did so, a chorus of excited "Mia!"s echoed from her laptop. It was easy to smile from that point further. It had been a month since the last time Mia had gotten the chance to speak with her friends from college. She glanced at their different boxes on the screen, happy to see June and Alana in the same frame. With both of them continuing on to graduate school, they were lucky enough to continue living with each other. Phoenix was below them in a separate window, clearly lounging on the couch in their new apartment.

"Mia! It took you long enough to get on," Phoenix said. The last time Mia had seen them, their hair had been dyed green, but now it was a fiery orange.

"They let you dye your hair that color at the engineering firm?" Mia wondered.