Youth

Four

We checked twice that we had everything. I wanted to check a third time, but Atle called me a worrywart, grabbing me by the shoulders and steering me out of my kitchen and closer to the front door. Lewy agreed with her, and it was the surprise that they agreed on something, no matter how inconsequential and targeted against me it was, that had my feet cooperating with their wills.

It was only when I reached the front door that I realised my key was still sitting on the kitchen worktop. I retracted my steps to grab it. Lewy waited for us outside. Atle lingered in the doorway, far enough away from him to not have to administer small talk.

I flashed her the key but reached for her before she could slip away, grabbing her elbow to swing her in front of me.

"Why are you being so haughty?" I demanded in a low voice.

Atle's eyes widened, and I was drawn to the slight smudge of mascara, weeping from her lashes. Her lip shook. Outrage seemed to be on the tip of her tongue. "I'm not haughty," she refuted heatedly. "I simply don't like it when people encroach on what is mine."

"I am not yours," I told her. "And if I am, Apple, then I'm his too."

She tried to shake me off but I held onto her arm fast. "Don't call me that," she hissed. Her cheeks were pink and there was more than annoyance in her eyes so I didn't call it her again.

"You'd get along if you gave him half a chance!" I said instead.

Atle avoided looking at me. "I'll give him a chance when he proves he is worth one."

I knew it was the best I was going to get. It wasn't that she was unkind, simply she spent too much time alone to know her company was worthy of someone who mattered, someone she could count on.

She didn't know Lewy, and yet I had faith that, despite the incendiary collision they created when together, they might get along, if only for my sake.

Atle shrugged my hand off and stalked out the door. I called after her, "I think he'll surprise you!"

"You, of all people, should know, Imani- I don't like surprises!"

What she meant was that she didn't like variables. She didn't like being unprepared for things that could so easily be taken off her. If she wasn't given the appropriate time beforehand to take measures to ensure they couldn't be ripped away, then she would push it away herself. You couldn't lose something you'd already given up, I suppose. You'd have thought she'd have gotten good at it over the years, but she failed with her mother every time she came back and left again. She failed with her father before she'd even known she could. She failed with me, even though I thought of her as a sister, as the only thing that kept my heart beating. She even failed with the one person she never wanted in her life in the first place.

It seemed she was fated to have him when she didn't want him and to want him when she couldn't ever possibly have him. But Tragedy always seems simpler in retrospect.

At the time, I stood alone in my hallway, shoulders already aching from the weight of my bag, key dangling in hand. There was a wriggling in my gut, and I wondered if the summer would be spent trying to juggle my two best friends on two very separate and spaced out hands as they clawed and swung for one another. But I was fine with letting time do the only thing it could do: persist.

I gave them a week. Surely, civility for the sake of civility would have to conquer. You can't hate someone forever. Eventually, you just run out of the energy to.

My hand was sweaty around my key as I fiddled with the lock. It kept slipping off, then jamming. All I could think of was the note I'd left my mother, scrawled on the back of a shopping list she'd written three weeks ago and still not gone out for. I didn't even know if she'd read it, but it was better safe than sorry. My phone was next to it, on the countertop. This summer was about shutting off, so Atle and I had agreed beforehand that we were going to strip everything back to basics, including technology. How were you meant to escape if you had something tying you down?