The first time Don realized he and Violet were friends was when he and Maggie broke up. He was in the hotel and couldn't stop watching the video. She called him—at three in the morning—and it wasn't like he had anything better to do, and he needed to hear someone's voice, someone who wasn't saying When you fall for a guy and he's going out with your best friend, it doesn't work out—so he picked up. In the back of his mind, he wondered why she was calling: they'd only had a few conversations since running into each other in the lobby.
Silence.
"I was expecting this to go to voicemail," Violet said after a good fifteen seconds. "Um. Uh, so you know that thing with the pot and you put a plant in it and it becomes an animal—"
A Chia pet. She was talking about a Chia pet. He said, "A Chia pet?" but what actually happened was he said, "Maggie and I broke up," and burst into tears. (It was the one time he ever considered himself beginning to cry as actually bursting into tears.)
"Oh," Violet said. "Oh, Jesus—want me to come over? I have chocolate cake."
"Yes," he said, and wondered why the hell he had. He swiped at his face with the heel of his hand, which did approximately nothing. "I'm at the Sheraton on Seventh Avenue."
"Did she kick you out of your own apartment?"
"No," he said, intending to explain, and stopped.
"I'll be right there," she said after a moment.
And in fifteen minutes, he was letting her in. She was in pajamas and a hoodie and holding a giant cake Tupperware. He was still crying, the ugly, gasping sobs kind of crying, and could barely see straight. She came in and closed the door and put the Tupperware on the desk and started turning on lights. When that was done, she took off her shoes and came over to where he was still standing by the door sobbing, and she pulled him into a hug.
She stayed the night. They ate cake while watching some very bad very late night TV; he managed to tell her about the video, which she then watched while he cried too hard. They leaned against the headboard of the hotel bed, shoulder to shoulder, her ankles crossed, his knees drawn up to his chest. When the TV stopped having anything they could even pretend was worth watching, she produced a book from her hoodie: The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, and she read it aloud. All of it. It was to try to get him to go to sleep, but he got too wrapped up in the story, so she finished it. She drank three glasses of water and started it over again. Then he fell asleep. When he woke up, she'd left a note telling him to take a mental health day—and turned off his alarm, seeing as it was noon.
Looking back on it, he supposed it was a little strange. They'd been acquaintances, but for some reason she'd called him at three in the morning. However strange, it cemented their friendship. They'd had each others' backs ever since.
There was nothing remotely romantic about it.
There was nothing remotely romantic about the first time he fell in love with her, either. He didn't even realize he had until a full 24 hours later.
It was a rainy day. He'd stayed up too late the night before working on a condolence letter to a friend of his mother's (condolence letters always took forever for him to write), and it was a very slow day, so he was half asleep in his chair. His feet were up on his desk; he'd put a blanket on. The sound of his door opening woke him most of the way, but he couldn't bring himself to open his eyes fully and accept that he wasn't going to get any sleep.
Violet slid in, a spring in her step. She was singing softly, something about Xes and calendars and summer being on its deathbed. She danced across the room, put a book on his shelf, and danced back across to his door. About halfway there she saw him, seemingly asleep, and stopped all singing and extraneous movement. "Sorry," she whispered, which was adorable, because if he was asleep, why would she apologize, and tiptoed out. Don couldn't identify the warm, fuzzy feeling the moment filled his chest with. For a full day.
That was the first time he'd fallen in love with her, and while it was certainly not the last, it was the most memorable.
