APRIL YU
Jack-and-Janette
Beneath the bloodless October moon, I pretend the pumpkins know my name. Big ringed Cinderella pumpkins swollen with burnt orange, tiny shriveled Jack-Be-Littles crowned in ghost-white stumps. They whisper Janette the way lovers pronounce each other’s syllables: as if the owls hooting and wolves howling and girls heckling dissolve into negative space, as if this pumpkin patch is a smorgasbord of secrets and one faulty tread could unearth them.
When Leanne called tonight, it was 11:30 PM and I was drooling to sleep on my calculus homework, ring finger stamped red in the indent of my pencil. “You cannot be studying on a Friday night,” she’d laughed. “Climb out your window and we’ll pick you up.”
I’d gripped my phone so hard, the fingerprint stains would never fade. I had forgotten how it felt to play this role. Familiar enough a friend to be teased. To be called up at eleven thirty. To sneak out as a group effort, not a personal one.
She hung up before I could respond. We both knew I would say yes.
Obediently, I’d brushed out my hair. Put on my tiniest top, swiped lipstick over my mouth, shoved my feet into flats. Looked at my stomach and face in the mirror like I didn’t know my own body. The window creaked open and I let the night steal me.
When They pulled up in sunglasses and ruby lips against the midnight sky, I slid into the backseat and pretended I wasn’t looking. Wondered if they could hear how fast my heart was beating, as if on the verge of eruption. Is this deja vu for you too?
Back before our friend group cleaved itself into Them and Me, we had been a table of girls fermenting in a sixth-grade classroom: Mira, Bri, Leanne, me. Once, watching others had been my armor. Years of it had told me Mira and Bri were two keys to the same door, that Leanne watched in a way that seemed to skin you open.
I’d leaned toward Leanne, pasty sweat thrumming my adrenaline. “I would kill to be able to apply makeup like you.” Please let her actually be wearing makeup.
She’d laughed through a mouthful of gum. She didn’t look half as intimidating when her eyes caught the light. “Thanks—I stole all of it from my mother’s dresser.”
Bri’s head had snapped up. A tube of something brown and goopy appeared beneath her desk. “Wait, me too!” she whispered. “This really cute family friend goes here, so I need it.”
Mira had locked eyes with me, braces indented into a smile. “Bri’s been trying to drag me to buy makeup with her forever.” Her expression was enigmatic, so infinitesimally confidential that it skipped my heart three beats ahead.
As the day flowed on, spaces of silence filled themselves with words. Hallways, a four-person lunch table, laughter combusting against leaf-swept sidewalks. The next morning I pulled them into the bathroom to watch me smear my mother’s greasy lipstick on, streaked crimson down Leanne’s cheek. Laughed in bubbles of champagne at her look of abject horror.
The months slipped away like crests of waxen moon. Sleepovers, matching bracelets, strawberry shortcake and twelve candles smeared across Bri’s face. Bathroom walls and glittering tears. Face masks at three in the morning as we watched our shadows in flashlight-illuminated walls. On nights we fell into companies of one and not three, it would always be Mira-and-Bri and Leanne-and-Janette. Leanne and I twisted our twin moon necklaces and braided our hair together and talked until the solar system ran dry of ideas. Makeup, movies, music, money, malls. Mothers and models.
During that car ride, a final M-word haunted the October chill between our seats. Memory. I listened to Their laughter, felt my fingers and three pairs of eyes skimming the gooseflesh on my bare arms. Watched them fall over each other in shades of moonlight. Wondered if my body remembered how to slot with theirs.
I remembered the sliver of Mira’s face by night three years ago, promising I’m going to be the best driver of us all, and I’d bet I could do better. I caught Mira’s eyes in the mirror, blurred by the rocking of her car, and felt the words on my tongue: you still owe me five bucks. Then the eye contact broke like every promise I had made.
The years had seeped into each other like grains of sand, and before I’d known it, we were sixteen, we were different. I no longer laughed at the way they loved each other with drama in school bathrooms. They no longer laughed at my naivety, my prim ways. When Leanne and I fell silent, words lost in drought, I was watching Mira and Bri—how they collapsed onto each other in laughter, let their eyes shine without a hint of pretending—and knew I could never be that person for anyone.
Now we are knee-deep in pumpkins after hours and the night sky glitters around Them. They gossip, stumble over each other and the ground, Cinderellas, Jack-Be-Littles, heave pumpkins into their arms, laugh hysterically.
We are not meant to be here. They want to be here. Do They want me to be here? I am on the side, unmoored, untethered to Them. I am desperately searching for an anchor I dislodged five months ago.
I trip over a pumpkin and grab for Leanne’s shoulder. She turns. Her breath reeks. Alcohol. “Leanne…”
“What?” Her speech slurs.
“Why did you invite me?”
“To have fun! To have fun. Obviously.” She smiles, crooked, a slanted crown atop an undulating chin. Watching was never their armor, but Mira and Bri by her side know how to do it now, skin me open like Leanne once did. “Come on, let’s go find pumpkins!”
You saw them leave once already. Don’t let them again. “No,” I gasp, as if the night air will flush out the wraiths of memory between us. Reach for her hand, find its weight a foreign familiarity. “I…we never talked about how this all ended.”
She turns, pupils stumbling around her eye whites. “Nothing to talk about. You didn’t want to be our friend.”
“It isn’t that simple.” Once, I transplanted Bri’s fleece jacket, Mira’s flannel, Leanne’s cardigan onto my body without a second thought. Now the autumn wind slashes my bare stomach with its loneliness. “I knew you for four entire years.”
“Then, what?” For a second, Leanne’s laugh sounds almost sober. “What do you have to say?” Beneath the reek of alcohol is something like a plea. Just say the right thing, Janette, and there’s hope to earn back the friends you pushed away.
For months I had looked down on them, their silly, shallow, girlish things. I thought I’d outgrown them, but maybe they outgrew me while I wasn’t looking. Let me think my loneliness was their fault. Rendered me the shallow one. I can imagine if I was still their friend now, resentful, berating them for the alcohol in the air until I curdled into a clump of sour milk.
“I’m sorry.”
It’s too little, too late. Leanne twists her face into a smile, half painful, half disoriented. “It’s all good, Janie. It’s all good.” Then she turns back to the other girls, blinks. It’s as if she’s reset herself, as if we never happened, I was never here, I never spoke a word to her in that sixth-grade classroom. They giggle giggle giggle. “I love that pumpkin so much! It’s huge! Let’s get it, guys!”
Hysterical laughs, stumbles across the soil. Like pumpkins deserve to squash beneath their heels. Like the beer on their lips wards ghosts. Drunken reconciliation isn’t reconciliation, it is pity, it is a story to mock once sober. Even to me, this night has been as wasted as they are.
Mira-Bri-Leanne. Janette.
I kneel beside the Jack-Be-Little closest to me. Scour its imperfections, the way it shrinks into itself, hypertonic. Among the gradient of orange, this one is the one to be stamped beneath six-inch heels, to eviscerate before knowing pumpkin pie or candles within its belly. Before knowing.
The pumpkins’ calls have been slashed into silence. We sit here for a second, suspended into nothing. Eclipsed by three silhouettes. Making our own shadows. Then: Janette. At least they know my name. At least I have not pulled myself away, broken them open in the carnage of my insecurity as I escape with only grief in my palms.
I heft the Jack-Be-Little into the crook of my elbow. We will eviscerate together.
An earlier version of this piece has been published in The Incandescent Review.
April Yu is a teenage writer from New Jersey with an affinity for language, running, and human anatomy. Although she was indeed born in April, her favorite season is winter. Her work has or is slated to appear in Milk Candy Review, The Aurora Journal, and Lit. 202, among others. She is a graduate of the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. Visit her on Instagram @aprilblossom, Twitter @aprilgoldflwrs, and at aprilyu.carrd.co.