What Happened That Night

8 ~ w i n d o w

Bex and I met when we were working at an ice cream parlor the summer before my high school's late spring reproduction of Into The Woods and the summer before Griffin Tomlin finally noticed me, standing on stage, wearing golden slipper that was actually a black heel that someone bought from a thrift store and then painted a shimmery gold, and in between dunking ice cream scoopers in plastic cups filled with lukewarm, somewhat milky water and informing customers that we did not serve frozen yogurt here, we became friends. We would sneak handfuls of multicolored sprinkles when the place was dead and swap Seventeen magazines back and forth, reading aloud the most embarrassing stories toward the end of the magazine. We blasted music from her iPod-song artists like The Vamps or Jason Reeves crooning through the tinny speakers of her iPod dock-until she got so sick of the songs that she stole my iPod from the pocket of my jacket, the fabric dotted with dark spots from the rain outside, and plugged it in while I was in the bathroom. When I was washing my hands, I heard the unmistakable sounds of Elphaba and Glinda singing their disgusts for one other, hating their faces, voices, and clothing.

"What is this?" she asked when I emerged from the bathroom, my fingertips still dripping wet and there were soap suds lingering in the gaps in between my fingers, and behind me, I heard the door closing itself with a distinct ka-jung. She was staring at my iPod, clad in a soft silicone cartoon fox cover, nestled in her dock on the seat of a rusted metal chair, some of the paint scraped off, and her eyebrows were furrowed close to her dark green eyes-it was actually the first thing she said to me when she saw stepping into the ice cream parlor a few months ago, application in hand, that my eyes were green, just like hers. "Is this . . . Broadway?"

At first she thought it was pretty weird, that the songs were either too long or too short, that too many of the notes were belted rather than simply sung, and that they all sounded like they were from a Disney film, but one day, as she was flipping through some of the pages of a Seventeen magazine, lazily munching on some crushed M&Ms, I heard her humming the melody of Take Me or Leave Me from Rent, and then the next thing I knew, she was cast as the Baker's Wife, trying to rip off golden painted slippers off of my stocking clad feet and kissing my husband. We cracked jokes about trading shoes and husbands and looked up spoilers for the movie that was coming out next year. We made plans to ditch our families Christmas Day to go and see, singing along to the songs until an usher would come and kick us out or we got everyone else to join in in a massive movie theater sing-along.

But we never did start a massive movie theater sing-along because we never went.

Because the next March, we just stopped hanging out.

We barely even saw each other.

Until now anyway.

"Hey . . . Clare," she said to me, taking a step closer to me as I stood on the curb, wondering in the back of my mind if Kolby Rutledge was still watching me from where he leaned against the chilled, glinting, silver railing near the school's entrance or if he wandered off, beginning his long and cold walk home, and I bit down even harder on my lip as she hitched up her purse, an icy blue faux leather material that I was almost certain I could still smell the store chemicals on. She smiled, somewhat hesitantly, at me, and took another step toward me, and I caught a whiff of her floral perfume. It was her winter perfume, I knew, because Bex always needed to have a signature perfume for each season. What she wore in the summer was what she wore in the summer, and that was that. "Hey, wow. I haven't seen you in, like, forever." She laughed, awkwardly, and I blinked. I knew what she was doing, that she was trying to pretend that the past ten months never happened and that we never spent them apart, that I never quit my job at the ice cream parlor.

That we were still best friends.

But the thing was?

We really weren't, anymore.