𝐀 𝐂𝐀𝐒𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐘𝐎𝐔 • Robin Buckley

Chapter 5

Robin couldn't place how Halloween had come and gone so fast, and every day at school that followed was spent looking down every corner and through every class window until she caught a flash of that head of bouncy blonde hair. She saw her once on Thursday in a soft pink sweater tucked into thickly-belted jeans. Robin wanted to run over and say something, anything really, but she was heading into the room that they did student council meetings with her brown messenger bag hanging from her shoulder.

She hadn't seen her since.

After school the next day, she headed to a record store to pick up Joni Mitchell's album Blue on cassette, and it was all she was able to listen to now. Even now at noon on a mundane Saturday, she sat at the square table in her kitchen annotating her side by side translation of Dante's Inferno whilst "California" ran through her walkman and into her ears.

She sort of imagined the lyrics as a love letter from her future self in Europe to a future Monica. No matter how much the place was a dream of her's for all that it was, it wasn't her real home in the form of a teenage girl waiting for her in California.

She was so taken by the lyrics and strung up on this alternate version of her life where she was sitting on park bench in Paris, that she hadn't noticed her mother trying to get her attention from the kitchen doorway. It gave her no choice but to cross the threshold and tap the table twice by Robin's open copy of Inferno.

She pulled down her headphones. "Ciao."

"You have a gorgeous friend at the door for you," her mother says warmly. "So pretty."

"Milton's molars are still coming in. Gorgeous is a slight overstatement," Robin let her headphones hang from her neck and began to make a final note by one of the verses.

"Not Milton, honey. Monica." Robin's head shot up. "I can't believe you've never mentioned her."

Robin rushed to her feet from where she'd been gawking at the open doorway, forgetting Inferno altogether, and sprinted to the front of her house where Monica patiently stood in a v-necked brown leather dress that ran down to her mid-calves with a long suede coat that fell down a little higher. She had on necklaces and a skinny fringed scarf that looped around her neck, but even more interestingly, her hair was pinned back kind of shaggily almost, as if it was a last minute decision.

She was zeroed in on one of the art pieces Robin's parents had hung up on the wall—an abstract, geometric style her mother had been newly trying out.

"Hi," Robin says, not realising how out of breath she was.

Monica turned head first, a hesitant smile with enough teeth to count brightening her face as she met Robin's eyes. The brunette never looked lankier with her shoulder's postured back stiffly, her dark tee tucked into her belted jeans and beaded necklaces hanging lamely onto her chest.

"Hey." The rest of Monica's body turned, too, and she pointed at Robin's headphones. "Joni."

I said a week, maybe two... Just until my skin turns brown... Then I'm going home to... California... California... I'm coming home...

"Yeah," Robin quickly pressed pause on her cassette. "What are you doing here?"

"That's a great question," Monica awkwardly laughs, fiddling with the rings riddling her fingers, and Robin noticed the brown fur on the cuffs of her coat sleeves just as quickly as she noticed how nervous Monica was becoming. Robin didn't know that nervousness was an emotion she was capable of expressing. "I was wondering if... Well, first of all, I should apologise for just turning up like this. You're probably busy. You could've had a shift, I hadn't even thought of that—"