By Sadie Lallier
I met her for the first time in my junior year of high school. She walked into geometry class wearing a hoodie for some band I can’t recall and black leggings, her dark hair thrown haphazardly into a ponytail. She smiled at me, and I don’t remember what happened for the next thirty seconds after that. It was just that smile, her smile, playing on repeat like an old roll of film from the 1900s, cutting and looping, cutting and looping. Just her, only her.
I liked that smile a little more than was warranted for a random girl like me who had never seen her before.
Then, I turned and she was in the seat next to me, leafing through a blue binder.
“How the hell did I end up in honors geometry? I literally suck at this shit,” she muttered under her breath, only loud enough for me to hear. She flashed me that smile again, but there was something more sly in it this time. I decided I liked that one, too.
She sat next to me from then on. One day, she asked for my number so I could send her some notes. Exchanged numbers turned into conversations outside of class, which turned into FaceTimes every night, which then led to hanging out on weekends.
I wish I could say I was surprised when she kissed me on that rainy Saturday, standing on my porch just before she left, but I wasn’t. The downpour quickly made a wet dog out of her, but the smile she gave me before turning onto the sidewalk was the same as it had always been.
I don’t remember much of senior year. I think I blocked most of it out.
But I remember her. I remember every little thing about her.
We still talked every day. She critiqued the ways I structured my essays, and I taught her the trigonometric identities. She helped me memorize the important battles in WWII, and I corrected her when she said that radium had eighty-eight electrons and not seventy-eight—seventy-eight was platinum. I listened to her play the piano chords her instructor gave her, and she told me that the eyes on my self-portrait were too small.
She kissed me behind the bleachers at the football game, and I took her face in my hands when the hallway was empty.
I told her I loved her, and she told me she loved me.
We broke up the summer before college. A mutual thing, I think.
She told me she still wanted to be friends. I said okay.
We spent the last day of summer break sitting on the beach together, watching the sun cast the sky in vibrant, ever-transforming hues of joy and sadness, reminders that the world keeps spinning and time keeps passing. It just didn’t work out, but it was okay; we would be okay. Sailboats dotted the horizon, shifting with the waves. Families and friends enjoyed their last couple of carefree days before they’d inevitably be overwhelmed with work and school, paperwork and homework, stock inventories and algebraic equations, like clockwork.
She took my hand in hers.
Gave me that smile, but it was different this time. I didn’t know if I liked this one.
I turned back to the ocean.
The longer you stared at the sailboats, the smaller they became.
We remained best friends for the entirety of college. A miracle, given the circumstances, if you ask me, but no matter how many times I tried to find other people, to move on, I kept being drawn back to her again and again, day after day, year after year. She was the drug I couldn’t quit, and God, it hurt so good.
But it was a little different now. There were days we didn’t talk as much. When we did, there was always something lingering in the background, the movement on the very edge of your periphery that you can’t seem to catch fully before it’s gone. A certain heaviness that showed up every so often and liked to stick around. But I think I was the only one who felt it.
We were on completely separate sides of the country—I endured cold New England winters while she basked in the eternal summers of the southwestern coast.
She was so smart. God, she was so smart. I was always so confident that she knew exactly what she was doing with her life.
She started seeing someone halfway through our freshman year, a guy named Noah. He was from our hometown, and he was nice. He made her happy, but I couldn’t help the way I went numb when she said it. It was a kind of dull ache, like thumbing a bruise just to see if it still hurt.
Two days before I graduated, she announced they had gotten engaged.
Two days later, she was screaming with my family as I walked the stage.
Later that night, after a tearful embrace, she took my hands and smiled at me, really smiled. It was familiar, like coming home.
I felt that ring against my skin like a brand. I wondered if Noah ever saw this smile.
Two years later, I was sitting in her dining room with her, nursing a glass of too-sweet wine while she pored over her tax forms for that year.
It was quiet, comfortable. Maybe because Noah was at work and I didn’t have to look at him, to be reminded of this slammed door, this disconnect tone of a phone, what could have been and wasn’t anymore. Maybe because briefly, for just a second, I could imagine that this was us, that this was how we turned out. Doing taxes and drinking wine together. That this was our house, that I put that ring on her finger, that my car was in the driveway because it belonged there, that I had a role in the child currently growing within her. Eight weeks along. Still so tiny, so fragile.
I noticed, halfway through telling her about the strange client I had the day prior, that she had stopped writing and simply stared at me, her expression soft yet almost… pained. She was wiggling her pen between the index and middle fingers of her right hand, a quirk she’d had since high school, something I knew meant that she was thinking.
I wish I could say I wasn’t surprised when she rose suddenly, rounded the table in three strides, took my face in her hands, and kissed me, but I was.
When she pulled away, she didn’t wait to hear my response before declaring that she and Noah were moving across the country, back to the town where they went to college together.
I asked her why.
She was quiet for a few seconds, her thumb stroking gently over my cheek, before telling me that she was afraid of what she would do if she had to live the rest of her life so close to me. That she had devoted too much of herself to this life, to him, to the family they were going to have, to turn back now.
Two months later, I waved goodbye from what used to be their doorstep as they backed out of what used to be their driveway in that wretched, ugly moving van. Just before they sped off, she turned her face to the passenger side window and smiled at me, her real smile, my smile, one last time.
That was the last time I ever saw her.
Since then, every text I’ve sent her never goes through. Calls go straight to voicemail.
Maybe it’s for the best.
Author Bio
Sadie Lallier is a freshman at Emerson College pursuing a BFA in Creative Writing. Originally from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, she came to Boston in pursuit of her own career as an author in the fantasy genre. She loves to read and started writing her own stories at a very young age (but those stories had fewer words and more pictures). Although she has never submitted to any publishers in the past, she is currently employed under Emerson’s own Stork Magazine and Generic Magazine and is currently in the process of getting her work out into the world.
