Trapped✔️

8

N I N A

Two Years Ago

The bell rang, and Nina gathered her things, trying to navigate through the horde of students also escaping the ennui that was math class. When she finally made it into the hallway, she was shoved into a row of lockers by some beefy football player, making her drop her books and most likely bruise her side.

"Hey!" Nina shouted. "Watch it."

The jerk continued jogging haphazardly down the swamped corridor, brushing by people rudely. Nina huffed, picking up her stuff for the second time.

"Here." She looked up through her curtain of hair, and saw a hand offering her a pencil, her pencil. The hand was calloused at the fingertips. A guitar player's hand - Holden?

She voiced the question as she took the pencil from him and stood up. 

"Nina." He looked down at her - when had he gotten taller than her? How had so much time passed between them and their friendship, every second ticking away, chipping at their relationship until it crumbled?

He had put his hand on her shoulder; she felt, rather than heard, his voice in her ear. Holden's words, echoing in her head, comforting the way it had always been. She nearly let herself relax, with his fingers on her bare skin.

But she couldn't.

Memories ran through her mind like a slideshow, that simple touch repeated in several of them. Nina closed her eyes. She knew that when she opened them, all emotions - past or current - would be wiped away like her tears.

"Thanks," she murmured. "I have to go."

She had to run. She always had to run.

Present

"Penny for your thoughts?" It was Holden.

They'd moved from the waiting area to inside her mother's room in the maternity ward, watching Holden's dad fuss over his new baby.

"I was just... thinking about the past." Then, trying to keep it light, she added, "That baby is going to be so messed up when they grow up and find out that two of their siblings are dating."

"Dating?" He looks at her, grinning, green eyes dancing. "Is that what we are?"

"Yeah," she said quietly, savouring the feeling of being with him. It felt like home. It felt like an adventure waiting to happen. "We're dating."

"Well, then you're paying for our next date, since I probably lost my job for spending my first day stuck in a cornfield," Holden teased.

"Hey! It's not my fault you forgot you had a map," Nina quipped, poking him. "And do things always have to be so either / or? We could split the bill."

"True." He smiled. She didn't know how she'd spent so much time without seeing that smile, that jubilant expression on his face. "You're right."

"Thanks for finally admitting that." She looked away from him to see her mother in a wheelchair, coming over to her, looking haggard in a paper-thin hospital gown.

"Hi, sweetie," Her mother whispered. "Would you like to hold your baby sister?"

Nina peered at the pink, wrinkled face of her new sibling. Delicate, fragile, innocent. "Are you sure it should be me?"

"Who else?"

And then her new sibling was thrust into her arms, both heavier and lighter than expected, warmth and the scent of spit-up clinging to her. She was a new beginning, a clean slate, a happy ending yet to happen.

"What are you going to name her?" Nina asked, making cooing noises at the infant.

"Well... we were going to go with Chloe." Her mother looked apologetic. Time and distance warped their love into quiet companionship and rare visits that made Nina miss her family - what it used to be, what she'll never get back.

"That's pretty," she murmurs. "Just like her."

Then she handed the baby back, and both relief and loneliness fought to swallow her up, but she had Holden next to her, her mother on the other side, and promises waiting to be kept.

"Can we go home now?"

:::

On the drive home from the corn maze - Nina had left her car there, and now Holden was driving it because frankly, she couldn't concentrate enough to avoid veering off the road, into a pedestrian, or into another car - she spotted two children holding hands, skipping down the hot, cracked pavement towards a community pool. Nina could recall a scrapbook's worth of days like that with her best friend at her side, the world theirs to explore and claim and savour, every moment full of possibility.

And it still was, she thought. With Holden, some things never changed.

"Why are we stopping?" She asked, as the car came to a halt.

"We're going swimming," Holden answered, his smile mischievous. A troublemaker smile, a rebellious look, the expression that had gotten him in trouble thousands of times when they were children even though it really had been Nina who'd broken the vase or spilled the milk.

"I didn't bring my suit!" She protested.

"Well, then you can swim in your underwear," he responded, undoing his seatbelt and getting out of the car to open her door. "But like it or not, we're going."

"I thought we were going home!" She answered, stubbornly refusing to leave the vehicle.

He smiled at her, a different expression from the one he'd had on moments before. Adoring, happy, sweet. "Home is wherever I'm with you."

"Being cheesy won't get you out of this," she grumbled, as they strolled towards the chain-link fence that led to the pool.

She could hear children splashing and laughing, could smell chlorine and shampoo. The sun hit her face, bouncing off the water in a way that made her wish she had sunglasses. Nina shielded her eyes.

"Here," Holden said, handing her his baseball cap. It was a little too big for her, but did the trick. He wore cheap, beat-up sunglasses that she suspected he'd found underneath the driver's seat of her car.

"Thanks," she murmured grudgingly, thinking back to the similar conversation so long ago, in the school hallway: so much had changed, but they never did.