“I guess. I just know I need those songs, need to hear them.” She fell silent, hesitating, and added, “All of them but one.”
“Which?”
“‘Here Comes the Sun.’ Not that one.”
“Why not?”
Leah slid her finger over the veining of the wood in the table, stroking it slowly, following the trajectory of that small imperfection. She looked at me and sucked in a breath. “That’s the song that was playing when the accident happened. The song I asked my mother to put on.”
“I didn’t know, Leah.” I stretched out a hand to put it on top of hers, but she pulled hers away before I could.
“Talk to me about you, about your bad times.”
“There have been a few. The worst was when your parents died, but there were others. Moments when I felt a little lost, you know, like everyone when you don’t really know what you want to do. And then I had to figure out how to handle the frustration when I realized I didn’t want to paint; I had to make a choice… Sometimes you hope for things in life and they don’t come. Maybe it’s our fault for planning too much, for marking out paths that we never end up taking. I guess that disappoints us.”
We didn’t say anything while we finished eating. Then, unhurried, we returned to Byron Bay, and Leah asked me to drop her off on Blair’s street.
“Should I pick you up later?”
“No. I’ll walk back.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“You got your phone on you?”
Leah sighed and opened the car door. “Axel, don’t treat me like a baby.”
“Hey!” I lowered the window to call to her. “Remember to brush your teeth if you eat something! And don’t take candy from strangers.”
She knitted her brows and flipped me the bird.
I shook my head, laughing and happy to see her that way.
45
_________
Leah
Blair came outside soon after I rang the doorbell, and we walked down the street together under the sun. A soft wind was blowing and we decided to sit on the patio of a café we used to go to before. I used to always order a coffee and a banana-chocolate muffin that was almost as tasty as Georgia’s cheesecake. Blair was more for savory foods, and sometimes would get a small order of fries while we chatted away. We used to spend the whole day together, just the two of us.
“I didn’t think you were coming,” she said.
“I went diving with Axel and it got late.”
“Diving?” She smiled. “Sounds wonderful.”
“It was all right,” I admitted.
Actually, it had been much more than that. Stimulating. Intense. Floating in the middle of the ocean, feeling weightless while the fish whirled around me like dots of light dancing in random patterns. And Axel there by my side.
“I’ll have some fries and a soda,” Blair said when the waitress came over. “What about you?”
“A banana muffin and a decaf with milk.”
“Sure thing, ladies, I’ll be right back.”
“You know what? This reminds me of that day we played a joke on Matt and filled his locker with glitter, and we ended up here laughing about it, and then we saw him in the distance and we took off running…,” Blair said. “But he caught us because I turned around to grab the last bit of muffin I’d left behind. I remember. Also his books were sparkly for weeks.”
Blair started laughing and I ended up doing the same. She had a way of making all those moments add something to laugh about rather than subtract it. She had been my best friend in the world, and I had struggled for months to keep her away from me because somehow I knew, if I kept her close, I’d wind up hurting and disappointing her.
“How’s school?”
“A lot better than before.”
“You going to go to college, then?”
I shrugged. I didn’t want to talk about it. “You happy at work?”
“Yeah, I love it. It’s exhausting though.”
“You’ve always liked kids.”
They brought us our order, and I started breaking off pieces of my muffin and eating it, distracted. I savored it slowly, thinking of Axel’s words, enjoying the contrast of the banana and the soft bitterness of the chocolate.
I looked up at Blair, uncertain. “I think I’ve got feelings for him.”
“You mean Axel, right?”
“Yeah. Why…why is this happening to me?”
“Because you like him. You always have.”
“I’d like to be able to fall in love with someone else.”
“We can’t choose these things, Leah…” She gave me a gentle look. “How is living with him?”
I thought it over. I’d been in that house in the middle of all that nature for four months. I didn’t remember much about the first two months, which I spent shut up in my room. March had been chaos. I got mad at him, I lost control at Bluesfest, and I started actually painting again. When April arrived, Axel had tightened the reins, forcing me to make a decision. And sometimes, being the way you are is easier, more comfortable, than facing change.
“Up and down. It’s good right now.”
“Be you, Leah,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I grew tense.
“In everything. With Axel too. Be like you were before. Let yourself go; don’t think about things. Don’t you remember? I used to laugh when you said your breath stopped when you saw him or you’d die for a kiss from him, but I was used to it because you’ve always been a little over the top.”
I brought my hand to my chest. Blair was right, but I still felt very far away from all that, even if sometimes a memory flared up, even if it vanished as quickly as it arrived. These were peaks, but they were unpredictable. I still had on my raincoat, despite all the holes in it, and it was hard for me to recognize myself in that girl I’d left behind, the one who wasn’t scared to take a leap without asking how far it was to the ground.
I pushed that image and the nostalgia from my mind. “Talk to me about you. You going out with anyone?”
“I wanted to talk to you about that, but I wasn’t really sure how.” Blair shifted, uncomfortable. “Last month I went out a couple of times with Kevin Jax.”
I smiled almost from inertia. Kevin hadn’t only been the boy who’d given me my first kiss in front of the golden trellis at my home; I had also lost my virginity to him a couple of years later, when I decided the time had come to be realistic and admit that Axel would never look at me like a woman instead of a girl.
“So how was it?”
“Nice. Too nice.”
“How can something be too nice?” I put a bite of muffin in my mouth.
“Leah…” she grimaced. “I told him I couldn’t keep going out with him until…until I’d talked to you. You all were together for a while. And we’re friends. That always comes first.”
I felt a slight tingle in my nose and blinked to keep from crying. I looked at Blair, so transparent, with her dark hair tousled and that sweet expression on her face. I didn’t deserve her. I didn’t deserve a friend like that, so loyal even though I had ignored her calls for months and had pretended I couldn’t see her every time she came to my house to see me, telling Oliver to open the door and make up some excuse.