Childhood best friends to enemies to lovers.
Alina wants nothing to do with the rebellious bad boy, Liam Somner.
Which is difficult, because he goes to her school. And lives on her street. And keeps showing up at her apartment, and sitting in her ki...
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Summer presses herself heartily against the edges of fall, this year, like she's insisting she'll stay until Thanksgiving. It's hard to believe, when the air feels like warm bathwater, that this weather will ever break; that we'll ever need to pull our coats and scarves out of storage.
I stayed up way too late last night, naturally, sitting on the fire escape where once in a while the breeze will brush past and remind me that I'm alive. The past weeks I've been suffering from a desperate melancholy, like I'm grieving for a life I've never had. It's the bitter end-of-summer nostalgia, that makes me think I've missed something, but I don't know what.
Sometimes it's like a word on the tip of my tongue, like I can almost taste the thing that's hiding from me, and if I just reach out I'll grasp it, but then it's gone again like a dream and I'm left sitting on that fire escape, with the sound of sirens below, watching the moon make its lonely path.
This morning, the sky is sitting low across Brooklyn, suffocating us. Summer is still here, she reminds us. And the AC unit in my bedroom is broken, which means there's no relief from the sweltering heat.
I crawl out into the kitchen of my apartment, where my mom's fancy coffee machine beckons me. It's almost noon and my mouth is dry and my eyes are heavy, but I know coffee will cure me. Coffee cures everything.
Even after opening the drawer, it takes me more than a second to realise it's empty. I stare at the thin paper drawer-liner, my last two brain cells bumping around in my head for a long time until I register that there are no espresso pods. No coffee.
"Mom!"
I collapse onto a seat at the kitchen table, at a loss of what to do next.
The curtains over the kitchen window hang limply in the nonexistent breeze. Outside, the sounds of NYC float up to me - sirens and shouts and dogs barking and children screaming with laughter. On the table in front of me is an empty bottle of wine, two empty glasses, and a pack of playing cards; evidence that my mom and her best friend had wine last night.
They spend way too much time together, but that's what best friends do, even at my mom's age. My dad may have been Mom's husband, but Sonja Somner is the love of my mom's life. Not in that way... they're just closer than sisters. A friendship and sisterhood that's lasted a lifetime.
That's what I want, desperately. That's the taste on my tongue when I feel nostalgic and melancholy. I crave a best friend like I've never wanted anything in my life. It's in my blood: a female friendship, lasting a lifetime. I know in my heart that it's my fate to have a friendship as close as my mom and Sonja's, or as close as my grandmother's friendship with her best friend Margret. It's practically written in my bones. And yet I'm alone, with no best friend to call my own.
Alone on this desperately hot last day of summer. With no coffee.
"Mom!"
No one answers my call. Mom must be at Sonja's apartment, across the street.
