To Chill Out [On Hiatus]

01 | better days

There are too many things people don't bother to warn you about.

This, November thinks, is one of them. Waiting for your best friend to show up so you can celebrate your birthday together and she doesn't show up. (She's even coined a term: platonic ghosting.)

The glass door behind her opens, and her mother delicately steps out onto the coldness of the balcony. "I don't think she's coming, Ember."

"She has to." She moves her glasses to the bridge of her nose and fixates her gaze on the front entrance to the condominium. "She can't not. I went to hers, remember?"

"Oh, very much so."

"And yet, she's not here." She turns to glance at her mom, who appears to be holding back a sigh.

"Well, come in. It's cold out here, and I think your father managed to light your candles without burning himself for the second year in a ro—"

"Alicia!"

"That's on me, I jinxed the man. Coming!"

This has to be a joke. Jessie would be here by now.

If she was going to be late, November would know. They're closer than the HM Cancri, and those white dwarfs orbit each other every five minutes.

It's going to be fine. She'll show up. She'll be here.

She checks her phone. The last conversation she had with Jessie—before her 'hey, are we still on for tonight?' text sent forty-two minutes ago, which wasn't even read, let alone replied to—was on Friday. The thirteenth. Jessie had jokingly told her to watch out for ladders, and November had replied saying she wasn't superstitious, to which she had replied with 'you can lie to yourself all you want, November, but don't you dare lie to me.'

(Which, retrospectively, was a weird response in an otherwise lighthearted conversation.)

She only gets up when a neighbouring condominium starts setting off fireworks. Thanksgiving was last weekend, moron.

"It's okay that Jessie's not here, you know," her father says as she enters the kitchen, holding a cold washcloth over his hand. "You have countless birthdays, and thanks to Doctor Gilbert and her team, so does she."

She stands eye-to-eye with him. It's almost funny, really: she's tall for seventeen and he's short for thirty-six, yet they're the same height.

"Yeah, but like, not really."

Her mom—who had been putting the cake on the table—places the lighter cautiously on the counter before giving her a worried look. Before anyone can say or do anything, she launches into a tone-deaf rendition of 'Happy Birthday.'

Her father makes the unfortunate decision of turning it into a round halfway through, giving November an extra ten seconds to suffer.

She blows out the candles, her parents cheer, and then they all have some cake.

(Not all. Jessie's still not here.)

"So I received a...shall I say rather interesting email from school this afternoon," her mom says through a mouthful of cake—rainbow sprinkle, the most colourful flavour.

"Oh?" November replies, raising an eyebrow while jabbing her fork into her slice. "In that case, before you say anything, Jaxon got only what he deserved and nothing more, and that I didn't technically make contact with him in any way."

"I—what?"

Oh, boy. "I take it this isn't about Jaxon Martin's pre-graduation revenge senior prank in which Jessie and I toilet paper his car, watch his reaction? Which ends in a mob of girls beating him up after he tries to run us over?"