I wrote this instead of packing.
I.
The moment my cell phone rings I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
It’s hours after our final Fringe performance, and we’re gathering at our director’s house for a bonfire in the dark. The sun is still setting, and I’m standing in her kitchen with her and one of our stage managers. I take a deep breath and answer my phone.
“Hello?”
“Where are you?” my friend C asks. She’s in a distant suburb at a party a friend of ours was hosting. It’s possibly the last chance to see some of our friends and classmates before we all head our separate ways for college. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to make it, but I knew I’d see her at least once more before we left.
“I’m at the cast party,” I tell her. “For our Fringe show.”
“You’re coming later, though, right?” she asks.
“Um… I might,” I reply. From the moment the words escape my lips, I know it’s the wrong answer.
She starts telling me about all the things going on there, the people there, how it’s our last chance to all hang out together. I think of my sister, who’s seeing a movie with our mom, who doesn’t want to go at all, whose trust I feel I can’t betray.
The doorbell rings, and for some reason, I feel compelled to answer. It’s the mom of one of my castmates, dropping in before our bonfire begins. I let her in, still on the phone with my friend.
“So are you coming or not?” she asks. She’s beginning to lose her patience with me.
“I’ll think about it,” I answer, praying she won’t be mad. We’d see each other again before the summer was over, right?
“You’ll ‘think about it’?” she responds, putting bitter air quotes around my words. She says nothing more. I can tell she’s furious. She hangs up. My heart is pounding. I look at the floor and begin to worry.
Later, during the bonfire, my sister texts me, telling her that our friend called her, too. She tells me that she sounds even angrier than before. My heart sinks even further. I try to reassure her — a hard thing to do over texts — and try to make sure she thinks things are alright, even if they aren’t.
My sister texts back a few more times over the course of the evening, sounding more and more worried each time. I eventually get home a little before midnight. We agree that our friend was overreacting, but it’ll all blow over and we can get together with her and say our goodbyes over the next week.
II.
A few days pass. It’s time for the last picnic of the summer. One of my good friends has left for college already, but the rest of us are still in town with at least a few days left. This, I think, is the perfect chance to see my friend, apologize for not making it to the party, and have at least one more fond memory of her before we leave.
My sister and I show up with our friend R while the picnic is in full swing. We’re at Lake Calhoun on a gorgeous evening in August. After making it through some pretty bad traffic, we walk over to the group’s picnic blankets with our coconut popsicles and hesitant, apologetic smiles. We sit down across from C, showing her we’re still there for her, wanting to make amends. But she doesn’t acknowledge us. She mutters something to the people sitting next to her and refuses to make eye contact.
The whole time we’re there, she doesn’t say a word to us. She goes off with a group to swim in the lake. Every once in a while, we look over nervously, waiting to see if she’ll come back over to the picnic blankets and talk to us. But she doesn’t. We explain the situation to one of our other close friends, but she has no advice for us. We decide to wait it out until the picnic disperses.
When people are beginning to leave and the sun starts inching closer to the horizon, we decide to try to talk to her before we get going. Once we’re all done cleaning up, my sister and I walk over to our friend.
“Hey, can we talk to you?” my sister asks her.
She pauses for a moment. “Sure,” she says. “What do you want to talk about?”
My sister and I look at each other. It hits us that we don’t even really have to apologize to her — right? It wasn’t her party, we knew we’d see her again, we don’t know why she’s making such a big deal out of it. But here she is, glaring at us, demanding an explanation. So we say we’re sorry.
We tell her these things, we try to get her to smile, to accept our apologies. But she’s still hurt. She tells us that she was sure it was the last time we’d be able to see her, and we didn’t want to go. She turns to me and says, “You said you’d ‘think’ about it. That you weren’t sure.” She looks disgusted.
“Well, we’re here now,” I say, trying to stay cheery. “We knew we’d see you. We wanted to say goodbye, too, it’s just…” I look over and notice that my sister is starting to cry. Our friend says nothing, offers no words of consolation or apology. She’s still fuming.
To this day, sometimes I still wish I’d fought back. Sometimes I wish I’d tried to defend ourselves more. Sometimes I wish I could’ve just said “fuck you.” But in the moment, I put my arm around my sister and simply walk away. R joins us in a moment, unsure exactly what’s going on. Our other friends look on with mixed feelings. C just stands there. R tells us that C said, “I feel kind of bad,” but did nothing else. I’m quietly outraged. We start our drive back home, snaking around Lake Calhoun on our way back to Saint Paul. I wonder if things will ever be the same again.
III.
It’s Saturday, a week since the party. The day before, C posts an open Facebook invite to a midnight showing of Ferris Bueller at a theater in Minneapolis. She texts me later, asking if I’ll come. My sister has left for college, and C leaves in two days. I’m hesitant, but I at least want to talk to her in person about what happened on Thursday. I text back, “I’ll be there,” prepared for a showdown.
I get to the theater at around 11:45, wondering if anyone else will show up. Eventually C shows up with three of her friends (they were my classmates, too, but I didn’t know them as well as she did). We sit next to each other in the theater, laughing at the same moments and sharing looks occasionally. I’m still a bit uneasy, but I’m glad we’re at least making eye contact again.
When the movie’s over, she asks me if I want to go to a lake. She and her boyfriend were planning on jumping into one at night, and she wants me to come along. I say, “sure,” offering to drive her on the way there. We get in my car and she says she’ll give me directions.
We talk for a bit about getting ready to leave, packing, college, and whatnot, before our conversation finally turns to what happened a few days earlier.
“Listen,” she starts. “I’m really sorry about the picnic. I really shouldn’t have said those things.”
I look at the brightly lit street ahead of us. “Oh, you know, it’s okay,” I say unconvincingly.
She tells me about how stressed she’s been, getting ready to move to Germany, to leave her family and go to a university on a different continent. It’s been hard, she says, and I slowly begin to forgive her. Things seem better. Good, even.
We keep talking pleasantly until we finally get to the lake. Lake of the Isles, the west bridge. Her boyfriend’s made it there too, and the three of us walk over to the bridge. It’s around 2:00 in the morning. Another group of would-be jumpers comes over, but decides not to when it starts to rain. “You’d be getting wet anyway,” I consider saying, but decide against it.
I start thinking about all the change that would be coming into my life soon. The new people I’d meet, the new place I’d be in, the new experiences and classes and ideas I’d start to learn about. As the two of them prepare to start jumping, I tell them I’ll just sit on the bridge and watch. The rain is soft, the downtown skyline is bright, the air is cool but mild. I sit and watch them jump a few times, each one seeming more exhilarating and terrifying than the last. I stare out across the lake. I look at the shimmering reflection and the ripples that each jump makes. I can still see it in my mind as clearly as I saw it that night.
That’s the last time I saw C. We’ve Skyped a couple of times since then, but things still aren’t quite the same between us. She and my sister haven’t talked at all, only exchanging messages on Facebook. I wanted to Skype again sometime over the break, but it never ended up happening.
I keep thinking of something she wrote in a message to me earlier in the summer. She was telling me about the camping trip she went on, about how trips like that can produce “fragile new friendships.” I just wish our friendship, old as it was, hadn’t been fragile at all. The true test will be if we ever see each other in person again.
That night, as we said our final goodbyes, she hugged me and told me to jump off some (metaphorical) bridges once I left. I told her I would. I thought about that as I got lost a few times on the way home. I’ll do it, I thought, but only if she’s there to jump with me.
