by Sara Ryan
“Well, you know who that is with her, don’t you?” she asks.
“No,” I say.
“It’s Kevin.”
“Oh my god, you’re right!”
For approximately five minutes, I can’t even talk because I’m laughing too hard. Isaac and Katrina ignore me and actually dance to some random gushy number. Battle stands next to me, waiting for me to recover.
I take a deep breath, and say, “Okay, I’m all right now. That was just too funny. God, I don’t want to have to talk to them, do you?” I ask.
“No way,” says Battle. “We should, as they say, blow this Popsicle stand. Let me see if I can rouse the lovebirds.”
She pokes Katrina and explains the situation. “Thank God—I hate this music,” says Isaac. “And it’s really hot wearing a long-sleeved shirt in this weather, and I can’t see a goddamned thing.”
“All right, we can leave. I just wanted one dance with you, my sweet,” says Katrina.
We decide to walk to the river. Woods, river, courtyard: the big three destinations I will remember from this summer. I should have Isaac take pictures of them, too.
For a while, all four of us walk together, but Isaac and Katrina are slow. Katrina keeps finding flowers she wants to pick, and every time she stops to pick a flower, she and Isaac have to kiss again, and what with one thing and another, soon Battle and I have left them behind. My heart starts beating faster as soon as I realize this.
Battle and I have been holding hands on and off all evening, but that’s all. We’re close to the river now, and I say, “Want to sit down?” Battle nods. For a while, we just sit in silence, watching the river, watching the clouds and the stars in the sky.
“Look at the color of the sky right now,” I say, speaking more softly than usual. “Doesn’t it look like the way things look when you’re remembering them? All soft and fuzzed out around the edges?”
Battle looks at me in the way she has that means I should either kiss her or keep talking, and I’m too scared to kiss her right now because maybe she doesn’t really want me to. So I keep talking.
“What I’m saying is that it’s like we’re already gone. You’re sitting in your room at home, thinking about this summer. I’m walking down the hall to class, and I bump into the wall, because I’m thinking about it, too. And this—” I wave my hands to encompass the soft dark blue sky, the trees, the rock we’re sitting on, the river, “—this is what it’s going to look like in our minds.”
“I’m going to miss you so much,” Battle says.
“I can’t even tell you how much I’m going to miss you,” I answer. She reaches out for my hand, and I grab hers like a lifeline. We squeeze each other’s hands so hard it makes us both laugh embarrassedly, and drop them.
“Eh, you think you’re so tough,” says Battle, rubbing the hand I grabbed with her other hand, as though to restore the circulation.
“Damn right,” I say in my best tough-girl voice.
But not tough enough to stand losing you, Battle. Never that tough.
My eyes are going all blurry, and I know I’m going to cry again. I’m suddenly so furious that my voice comes out almost in a shriek when I demand, “How are we supposed to stand it? How the hell are we supposed to blithely pack our things and leave this place and pretend that everything is fine when we have to go back to the stupid, pointless, idiot, moron world again? It’s not fair!”
Battle looks at me as though she might cry, too. Lighten up, Nic. I take a deep breath.
“Okay, I know—we’ll just chat online all the time. We’ll stop traffic on the Internet.”
Battle smiles a little, and says, “Carrier pigeons.”
“Singing telegrams. We’ll raise them to an art form.”
“Smoke signals . . .”
I lean my head on Battle’s shoulder. “I want a happy ending, dammit.”
Battle says, “It’s not an ending. We’re not even in college yet, for God’s sake.”
“Hey, there’s an idea—we could go to the same school. All of us! You and me and Katrina and Isaac—”
“And Kevin?” Battle teases me.
“Screw Kevin. No, don’t. Kevin can go to some nice music school a long way away from wherever we end up.”
“It’s a deal.”
We shake hands solemnly. Then we look at each other. I’m struck by how ridiculous it is for us to be just shaking hands, after everything that’s happened. Apparently she is too, because she suddenly puts her arms around me and starts kissing me, hard.
“They’re probably wondering where we are,” I say. The last thing I want to do is move right now, but we’ve abandoned Isaac and Katrina for quite some time. And it’s getting a little cold out here.
Battle strokes my hair and laughs. “They’re probably not either.”
“Well, yeah, but where the heck would they be? I don’t see Isaac being the type for a woodland frolic somehow, do you?” I ask. I sit up and reach out to retrieve my shirt, which has ended up several feet away from us.
Battle giggles. “I think he’d be the type for a frolic on nail-strewn concrete if it was with Katrina. Uh-oh—this dress is in pretty sad shape.”
The postmodern Tinkerbell costume is severely grass-stained, and there are a lot of sequins missing from the bodice.
“I don’t think she’ll care,” I say.
Battles giggles. “No, probably not. Zip me up?” she asks. I comply, pausing to kiss the back of her neck before I pull the zipper completely closed.
We link arms and start walking back toward Prucher Hall.