ARI FITZGIBBON

CW – mentions of alcohol, damage to personal property

Lifeline (Phone a Friend)

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My best and only friend from high school has posted on Instagram for the first time in four months, and when her face surfaces out of a sea of sunset pictures, my scrolling finger jerks and my phone takes a kamikaze dive out of my hand, rebounds off my barely-broken-in IKEA mattress and clatters to the hardwood floor, loud enough to wake up my roommate except wait no she’s over at her boyfriend’s tonight thank god, so I snatch it up to check if the screen is cracked and yeah there’s a hairline fracture across the top but I barely remember to care because all I really see is her: cheekbones bright with sweat under the strobe lights, both hands wrapped around a red solo cup, each too small to hold it alone—I used to tease her for those hands, flatten my palm over hers and giggle at how I dwarfed her—the hems of her jean cutoffs barely peeking out from under a college sweatshirt, which at first I think is the one I gave her for Christmas, the one I hit purchase on the minute she sent a picture of her early acceptance letter, but no, the font across the chest is wrong, did I choose a bad font there were only three options how did I choose one that was so wrong she dropped forty dollars on—no, no, she wouldn’t, that’s stupid, maybe it’s somebody else’s sweatshirt—like who, her boyfriend? could she have a boyfriend? no, she would have told me if she got a boyfriend, right, just like she would have told me if she went to a party, her first party, because we never went to any in high school, not over four years of Saturday study sessions passing Fritos and flashcards and the aux cord back and forth, four years turning down every bass-blasting house-in-the-hills shindig she got invited to and I got told I could come along too I mean if you wanted to, four years I knew were worth it when she got in where she wanted and I got a scholarship that can keep me from beating off loans with a stick til I die, and she looks so happy with that foaming cup in hand, smile so big you can see the canine she always tries to hide, the one she’s hiding in the photo she posted in May of us in graduation gowns, her on tiptoe stretching to fit her arm over my shoulders, me towering over her, leaving her in my shadow for once, and her caption says bffs! and I want to leave a comment asking what she thinks forever looks like, is it more like four years of cramming for chem and physics and world geo or like four months of plans to hang out endlessly rescheduled, no urgency now with nothing to study for, her taking rain checks over and over til the cloudy day we both flew out, me just six hours before her so it wouldn’t have made sense for her to say goodbye at the airport, obviously, obviously, and I want to do one thing that doesn’t fucking make sense, I want to steal one of the Coronas my roommate’s boyfriend buys her out of her minifridge, I want to download some dating app and scroll until I find a girl who looks like she’d hold my hand in both of hers and smile like I make her forget everything she doesn’t like about herself, and I want to text the girl I don’t know if I can call my best friend anymore and ask stupid questions I don’t want the answers to, but what I do instead is throw my phone at the wall, and I know even before it hits that when I pick it up the fracture will run deeper, deep enough that when I take it to the Apple store the employees will play rock-paper-scissors with their eyes, loser has to step forward and tell me I’m sorry, we can’t put this back how it used to be.

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