Best Served Fake

fifty-two // some sort of harley quinn

"Of course not," I said emphatically. "I would never have even... approached Kai if I had thought for even a second that she—" I looked at Sydney's guilty countenance; the nervous way she fiddled with the ends of her hair, a habit I'd never seen on my brash, unapologetic friend. "Did you always know?"

"I did," Sydney admitted.

Poor Cora, I thought. I'd never been the best friend to her. I wanted to be, and promised myself I would be in the future. But I hardly deserved her. For all her faults, Cora was loyal, and would sacrifice her own happiness for mine. She'd supported my romance with Kai, even when believing I knew she liked him and was dating him anyway, just because she could see how good we were together. She'd never even complained about Sydney's affinity for him. Imagine the kick in the guts when she thought I wasn't serious about him; that I'd intentionally disregarded her feelings to enact revenge. Oh, Cors. I'm so sorry.

"How could you do that to her?" I asked. I wasn't angry with Sydney. I was burned out of anger, as if the fire of my rage for months had finally burned out, and left only the shell of an ashen house, the framework intact but everything important melted by flame. Fire taking everything I had, and leaving me with nothing left to give.

"I didn't really like her much, you know," said Sydney. "Not because she's a bad person or because she deserved it. We just didn't really click. Or maybe just because she didn't like me, and that made me feel stupid and insecure. I don't know. I think I felt... superior to her, in a way. So I was selfish and condescending and really shit friend. I thought she had a bad case of puppy love with Kai, like she was just romanticising the first guy that needed saving, and I told myself I was doing her favour by helping her move on."

Crickets rung in the lawn, and the light above us flickered. I could see the sun lowering, continuing its trajectory around the planet. We would have made a picturesque image, Sydney and I, but no picture could have captured the emotion of the moment, like two soldiers on the opposite sides of the war, deciding they were two tired to do anything but lay down their weapons.

"Sydney," I said slowly. "That's shit."

"Oh, I know," she agreed. "I don't think she really loves him, though. It doesn't make it better, what I did, but it might make a difference for you."

"How?"

Sydney bit her lip. "If she really loved him, she wouldn't forgive you. But I saw her at school today."

"And?"

"And she'll forgive you."

I hoped so. My friendship with Cora was longstanding, and I didn't want to lose it. She was a good person, the best person, and I wanted people around me like that.

People better than Sydney, who had tried to date her close friend's crush on purpose, just because she thought she could. "Were you really that enamoured with Kai? To make it all worth it?"

"I never cared about Kai Delaney, not really," said Sydney. She glimpsed my obvious bewilderment and laughed quietly; it was barely a laugh, more of an amused exhale. "I know it makes what I did to Cora worse. I told you; I thought I was doing her a favour. But otherwise, it wasn't really about him. I didn't know him, Valerie. I liked spending time with you, and scheming was fun and normal and... helped things to make sense."

"What things?"

She considered this. "I felt like I needed to justify things by having an obsession with an attractive guy."

Justify things.

"Were we ever..." I didn't know how to put it into words. More than friends? Something else entirely? I didn't think so, but I also couldn't have said it definitively. It wasn't something I'd ever considered throughout our friendship, but hindsight provided a lot of perspective. And, you know, all the people telling me about it.