Looking to make sure it came out, she began to chuckle. “Ashley looks so happy, and you’re sticking your tongue out at her.”
I turned to him, overtaken by airy giggles as he held the pose, looking me dead in the eye with his tongue poking out from between his lips. “Well, I love you, too,” I laughed at him.
“Okay, okay, take it again,” he said to Ellie, flapping his hand dismissively as he gave up on the expression. Before posing for the actual photo, he turned to me with a grin, wagging his finger at me sternly. “Don’t even think about doing the same thing I just did, because that, my friend, would mean war, and I sincerely doubt you’re prepared to deal with my arsenal of ridiculous expressions.”
I was still giggling when Ellie took the second photo, and the shot was apparently sweet enough to make her smirk to herself. “You two are adorable.”
A flush of red washed over my face as my eyes found the ground, butterflies wavering about in my stomach. I could have stood there, basking in Danny’s warm light and enjoying his embrace for the rest of my life, but just as the words were out of Ellie’s mouth, Evan scooted his way down the line. “No way, dude,” he confronted Danny, “these two are my friends. Go make your own.”
Danny mocked his best friend’s words in a tone that sounded absolutely nothing like him, letting Ellie and I laugh at him. “Fine, but I’m warning you guys, he sucks.” It earned him a hard nudge on the arm, and he chuckled as he turned to us one last time. “It was awesome to meet you guys. Have a good rest of your night.” With that, he slid down to the next group of eager fans, starting a conversation with them before I could even attempt to get another word in.
The rest of the time behind the club came and went with minimal excitement. Ellie had me take a photo of just her and Evan, thrilled beyond belief that he remembered us from before. The band finished making their rounds, and people began to clear out of the back area. Once we were finished talking to Jack, the rhythm guitarist for the band, Ellie and I began to trek back to the public parking lot down the street.
“So, it’s officially official that I’m going to forget all about Ryan and get married to Evan instead,” my best friend sighed, wiping her hand through the air to paint a picture for me. “Eloise Manning. It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?” I grunted to acknowledge her new plan. “And speaking of marrying cute boys in bands, could you possibly have swooned over Danny any harder? For dreaming with him all the time, or whatever, I expected a little more from you than just stammering. Your eyes literally did the cartoon thing where your pupils turn into hearts. I saw it happen.”
“I got nervous,” I replied with a giggle. “It was a big moment. It didn’t exactly go as I planned, but it was still nice, I guess.”
She turned to me as we waited at a stoplight to cross the road full of emptying concert traffic, her entire aura dialing down a few notches before she spoke up again. “Are you okay?”
I didn’t want to clue her into how genuinely dejected I was feeling. If Danny did recognize me, he certainly didn’t act like it, treating me like he would any other fan. I talked to his rock star persona, took photos with the person he is in the public eye. It was time to face the music that, maybe, it really was just a dream. He and I had shared secrets, helped each other, and just seemed to connect, or, at least, I thought we had.
I needed time to sort out how I was feeling about the thing I put all my faith in being one, tremendous, heartbreaking lie. Not wanting to get into it with Ellie, I sighed. “I guess.”
“Well, look on the bright side – now you can stop putting so much stock in your dreams,” she told me, wrapping her arm through mine supportively as we crossed the street, heading toward Joey’s SUV, “and pay attention to what you really do have. Sure, guys in bands are fun to fantasize about, but the boy waiting in that car right now is head over heels in love with you, Ashley, and now that you know Danny isn’t a factor, you can fall just as in love with him, too.”
When I got home after we grabbed some food at a 24-hour diner in the city, I didn’t bother to do much besides kick my jeans off before I climbed into bed. What did it even matter, at that point? I knew my dreams were going to be vacant, desolate, and that night, I didn’t even bother to go looking for Danny like I’d done in the past few days, because he wasn’t going to be there. He hadn’t been there, and it didn’t matter, because none of it was even real.
Regardless, I could have used him, could have used the comfort of believing that someone was there. Things were changing in my life at such a rapid pace, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a little overwhelming. Even if Danny wasn’t there, the idea of him being there was enough to get me through.
I needed the delusion of it all, needed something to hold onto as my world began to liquefy around me. Danny was my something constant, what I used to distract myself from how wildly different my life had become, and I needed the distraction, lest I be forced to think for a moment about who I was, who I was becoming. I’d used Danny as a blindfold so I didn’t have to see anything that was going on, and now that he’d been torn away, I had no choice but to look at my life, to look at myself, and I wasn’t so sure I was entirely happy with the person looking back.
I knew too well that disaster was on my horizon; I couldn’t see the train yet, but I could certainly feel it rumbling down the tracks. I feared I was going to unhinge without Danny around to keep me in check, and, knowing myself, that was anything but good.
Chapter Seventeen
With every day full of things to do and people to see, those days began to pass me by in a blur I couldn’t seem to make sense of. It was something new with someone new all the time, and I wasn’t able to pause and make sense of it all. Soon enough, days gave way to weeks, and before I knew it, a month had passed since the Tragic Magic concert. Since then, I’d officially shed the cocoon of the awkward outsider and completed my metamorphosis into a social butterfly. My life was getting bigger, bigger than I’d ever imagined it could be, and that was kind of scary.
People who used to hate me orchestrated what I did with my time. I could almost never find a minute to myself without someone wanting me for something, and if I did get one of those rare moments, my phone would be buzzing left and right. I always worried that I’d get sick of having a boyfriend if I had to see him all the time, but no matter how often I saw Joey, it always felt like a treat, like an indulgence, and I could never seem to get enough of him. People liked the two of us so much that we’d been nominated for prom court at my school, and he didn’t even go there.
I didn’t have the strings to my own life anymore. I seemed to have dropped them someplace in the hustle and bustle that my life had become, and now, it felt like dozens of people worked together to move my limbs and make me talk, giving life to a puppet who had none before. It equal parts delighted and terrified me.
Danny had become pretty much the only anchor tethering me to the girl I was before I got involved with Joey. Now that he was gone, the dreams confirmed to be nothing but a figment of my hyperactive imagination, I had no reason to hold onto the person I was before, and therefore, she got lost in the madness. She was gone for the most part, but there were still remnants of her that remained inside of me. I could feel her in there, always lingering.
She was the shield I had used to protect myself when things weren’t so good for me, but lately, they had been. Everyone I encountered loved me. I was never home much anymore, drastically reducing the odds that Roger would knock me down and ruin my progress with his negativity and abuses. The chemo was beginning to work on Mum, and her sickness was slowly but surely heading back into remission. It was easy to want to let the old me go, because I couldn’t see why I would be her again, why I would ever want to come down out of the clouds.
I didn’t paint as much anymore. I hadn’t purchased new books in weeks, and the few I had left to delve into, I didn’t have time to read. I didn’t struggle to talk to new people anymore because I just assumed that t
hey’d like me. All the old parts of me were disappearing.
The one thing I never thought I’d have to sacrifice was my friendship with Ellie, but I suppose such massive personal renovations didn’t come without a few unforeseen adjustments.
For those weeks, I could see that she was becoming irritated with the life I was living. She kept trying to tell me how in over my head I was, but I didn’t listen to her. Any time she’d start trying to get negative, I’d give her some space to cool off for a few days, and go hang out with people who wouldn’t try to drag me down. Ellie was the one who, before all of this began for me, would ramble about how we’d dreamed as children of being the queens of our school’s castle. I just chalked her negativity up to her being jealous that it was my reality and not hers.
I didn’t know just how bad her distaste for my life had become until the end of May, the day before our class’ prom.
That day, Yosuke picked me up from school so we could go meet up with Ellie. The plan was to see a movie together before he had to get to The Arigato for the dinner shift, and then Ellie and I would use the time alone together to make sure everything was all set for prom the next night. I’d skipped all my formals the previous years, so I wanted to make sure everything ran as smoothly as possible for my big celebration, and my best friend was happy to indulge me in that regard. She’d gotten Josh to pick her up from school early that day, since he texted her about a surprise he had waiting. She didn’t want to cancel our plans, though, so she asked us to just swing by her house to grab her after school let out.
Yosuke and I shot the breeze the entire way to Ellie’s house, chatting about nothing in particular. Throughout the past few months, he’d become one of my most trusted allies. I liked to think he earned his stripes by being friendly with me before I met Joey, no matter how close he cut it to that deadline. Yosuke was one of the very first people to prove to me that maybe there was nothing wrong with opening myself to the possibility of new people every now and again, and without his reassurance, I don’t know if I’d have made it through my first date. Unlike Ellie, he didn’t seem to mind my new friends, and he and Sam tagged along on group outings when they could. He’d become like a sibling I’d never had, and although I wasn’t always vocal about it, I’d forever appreciate everything he’d done for me.
When we pulled into Ellie’s driveway, it didn’t look like anybody was home, but the music pouring from her open bedroom window served as our hint that she was there. A raspy-voiced woman crooned morosely about what a burden love was, the lyrics to the song somber and sad.
“This can’t be good,” Yosuke noted as we climbed out of his car. When I shot him a skeptical look, he rolled his eyes at me. “Is it anything like Ellie, the upbeat off-color renegade girl, to listen to stuff like this? Something might be wrong, Ashley.”
“She’s probably just being a drama queen,” I started to tell him, but before I could finish my sentence, he’d already taken off up the walkway to pound on the front door. When she didn’t answer, he turned to me with obvious unease as I trudged my way toward him. Only Josh and I knew about the spare key her parents left taped to the underside of the ornate bench on the porch, so I grabbed it and opened the door, since Ellie, apparently, wasn’t going to.
We headed up to her bedroom and I saw her immediately – or, rather, what I knew to be her. On her bed was a quaking lump buried beneath her pastel blue comforter. I paced to the stereo and turned down the blubbering, melodramatic song. “Elle, come on,” I said, now confident that she could hear me. I went over and yanked the covers off of her, depositing them in a heap at the foot of her bed and revealing her to be face down in her pillows, refusing to move. I wedged my hands under her stomach and flipped her over, if she couldn’t be bothered to do it herself, so we could talk and get to the bottom of what was going on.
The thick, black smudges on her face were evidence enough that she’d been crying for a while, if the measly sobs hadn’t been already. Her eyes themselves were a blazing shade of red, and she stared blankly up at the ceiling instead of looking at us. “It’s over,” she muttered weakly, lingering in the bizarre state of nothing between hysterics and the calm after the storm. “We’re over.”
“What happened, Ellie?” Yosuke probed with the utmost concern in his voice, taking a seat beside her and putting a hand over one of hers. I, however, opted to remain standing, arms crossed tightly.
Through a thick, nasty sniffle, Ellie managed to get out, “After all this time, Josh broke up with me today.”
“That’s crazy,” Yosuke empathized in a soothing tone. “Did he say why?”
“Apparently, he thinks ‘we’re not working out anymore’, and he wanted to end it before we went to college so we can ‘take the summer to clean our slates and start fresh in the fall’,” she croaked miserably. “He was going to do it after graduation, but ‘didn’t want to ruin my fun by not being as into it as me’, because I’m totally going to be able to have any fun after this.”
Yosuke looked like something about this was in any way surprising. Everybody knew Ellie and Josh’s relationship had long been marked for death, including Ellie and Josh. He’d simply made it official; to me, it hardly qualified as newsworthy, much less like it should prompt a reaction like hers.
As she began to ramble about how she was somehow shocked to hear about the dysfunction that plagued their relationship, I made my way down to the kitchen. Throughout our entire friendship, whenever either of us was upset about something, we always went to baked goods for comfort. I figured a snack might shut her up and breathe life back into the possibility of enjoying my night, so I rummaged through her pantry until I found a package of cookies before heading back upstairs.
I dropped the box onto the bed next to Ellie, and she looked at me without much of an expression. “Here you go, sport. Eat up, because the movie starts in a half hour, and I don’t want to miss the previews.”
She narrowed her eyes at me as she pointedly said, “Thanks for your sensitivity, Ashley. Really.”
“What do you want me to do, Elle?” I asked, flinging my arms out as I dropped into the beanbag chair by her desk. “We all know that you hated Josh and that he hated you. He’s obviously moved on from the weird something you guys carried on with for way too long, and it’s time you do the same.”
For a long, drawn-out moment, she and Yosuke just looked at me, neither saying a word, until she finally piped up. “You really just don’t get it, do you? Even though I tried to explain it to you time and time again, you still don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?” I shot back, unimpressed with her tone, combating her dirty look with one of my own. With my new friends, I’d grown used to not being challenged; usually, what I said went. “That you two are obviously not meant to be? That you haven’t given a damn about Josh in years? That there’s absolutely no reason for you to be this torn up about something you don’t even actually care about? Because, yeah, I understand that pretty well.”
Ellie shot immediately into a seated position, eyes burning into me. “Do you remember what I told you in your bedroom the other day, when you were kind enough to spare me a moment of your precious time? I told you how things were changing for us. With you so busy running things in your weird little teen movie of a social life, I’ve been with him a lot, since I don’t think I’ve made it a secret that I hate the friends that Joey’s loaning to you, and they don’t seem to have much of a taste for me, either. It felt like he and I were getting things right, and I was beginning to fall for him all over again.”
As Yosuke turned to her to say something, I pulled out my phone while she was distracted so I could shoot Joey a text. “Ellie’s raging. Come get me from her house when you have a minute, please?”
I’d barely hit “send” before she noticed I wasn’t paying attention to her theatrics. “And look at you now! Texting someone else, while I’m here, putting aside my breakup to try to reach out and actually connect with you, like
I have been for the past few months since all of this started!” She grunted, adding more flare to her production. “Who even are you anymore, Ashley?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I fired back at her, crossing my arms. “I didn’t realize that making fun of everything I was interested in, discrediting my thoughts and opinions, and getting in every snide remark that you could qualified as ‘reaching out’. Maybe we should all just leave this reality and go live in the make-believe world of Ellie Land. Wouldn’t that be just so fun?”
She gasped at me in disgust. “Who was the one who’s continually tried to stay your friend, even though you’ve made it clear you’re pretty well over me? Who was the one who was there for you before all of this craziness started? Before you met Joey, you were all by yourself, and I was the only person who actually wanted something to do with you. I’ve tried for weeks to stomach this new socialite persona you’ve adapted, but it doesn’t suit you, and I cannot stand it anymore.”
“You were never a good friend to me in the first place, Ellie,” I yelped at her, sitting up a bit more. I’d been irritated with her for so long, and it felt like then was a good time to lay it all out for her to see. “Even before all of this started, you sort of sucked at being a friend. You told me openly that you thought it was weird that I stayed home all the time. You always suggested that my less-than-stellar home life would brand me as a misfit forever. You thought I was insane when I’d talk about Danny Chatman. No matter what it was, you never once believed in me.”
Yosuke perked an eyebrow. “Wait, the guy from Tragic Magic? What?”
Ellie ignored him, flinging her legs over the side of the bed so she could get up and begin to pace back and forth in the space between us. “Ashley, it isn’t normal to stay cooped up in your bedroom all the time so you can try to avoid the world around you, be it your parents or your place in the social hierarchy at school or the possibility of living an actual life. You didn’t want to face your problems because, if you stayed hidden away all the time, you could just create this happy dream world for yourself and pretend they don’t exist at all, but that isn’t how the world works. I was never making fun of you for any of it; I was worried about you, because I care about you. That’s why I introduced you to Joey in the first place, so maybe, you’d snap out of it. And you did snap out of it, and into a totally different, way more horrible fantasy world where you actually believe that anything in your life right now is genuine and worthwhile.”
Lucid Page 16