Friendship for Dummies

Chapter Twenty-Nine

            “I couldn’t,” I say, tears still pricking my eyes. “It was too much to handle.”

            “I thought you didn’t care about me. I thought our friendship meant nothing to you. We were only eight, but… you broke my heart, Georgie.”

            A stab of guilt that’s worse than anything I’ve ever felt before attacks me. As his gaze meets mine, the pain increases tenfold. His eyes are glazed by such raw emotion; instantly, I’m filled with regret. Why couldn’t I have faced my fears and said goodbye? Obviously, it would’ve been painful, but any sort of closure surely would’ve been better than what we’ve been left with now. Whilst locked away from the reality of Connor’s departure, I hadn’t even stopped to think about how it would hurt him.

            Setting off for New York without so much as a word from his best friend.

            The best friend he loved.

            “I desperately tried to convince myself it was just a misunderstanding,” he says, shaking his head. “I thought… maybe you didn’t feel well. Maybe you overslept. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed possible. It had to be just a misunderstanding. So as soon as we moved in, I wrote you a letter.”

            The word sends my heart lurching, triggering another set of flashbacks. It’d lay forgotten in my mind for years now, but the mention of Connor’s letters proves the memory is still as vivid as ever.

            “For a week I waited desperately for a reply. Nothing. So I wrote you another, telling myself it’d just got lost in the mail and that was the only reason you didn’t write back. But what happened? Still no reply. Letter after letter I sent you, hoping that you were missing me enough to write back just once…”

            I tune out of his story as it all comes rushing back to me. A couple of days after he’d left, I’d come home from school – red-eyed and struggling to adjust to school life alone – to a letter presented to me by a smiling Mom. It was Connor’s; I could recognize his wobbly handwriting a mile off. It was almost two pages long, the print getting messier and more frantic as the lines wore on, detailing how much he missed me and how everything in New York was so different. I must’ve gone over it at least a hundred times, each repeat a harder punch in the gut when I realized I would never see this boy again. I had wanted to reply – even planned out in my head how I could pour my heart out onto the page – but each time I tried, my fingers trembling with concentration as they curled around the pencil, no words would come. I’d end up sobbing, teardrops staining the paper until it was as fragile as tissue.

            Eventually, Mom caught onto how upset the letters were making me. Despite my protests, she stopped letting me read them. At first I’d been angry, adamant she was only making things worse, but it took a surprisingly short time to get used to being without my other half. A girl called Ava had transferred to our class, and it didn’t take long for us to become friends. I still thought about him, but with each day a piece of his memory faded, until he became nothing more than a hazy event of the past.

            “I…” I want to speak, to justify my awful actions of years ago, but the words seem to be stuck in my throat. “I couldn’t…”

            The temperature outside seems to have plummeted, although I’m not sure if it’s my imagination. A frosty breeze nips at my exposed skin and I regret not picking up a thicker sweater. It doesn’t help that a chill courses through my body every time I catch sight of Connor’s solemn expression.

            “I was a wreck,” he says, and I find myself wondering whether I’m imagining the shininess of his eyes. “An absolute wreck. I didn’t fit in at my new school. I was the weird kid, the sappy one pining after a girl they were convinced I’d made up. Couldn’t have made a better target.”