by Sara Barnard
My heart feels like it’s jumped right out of my chest. Flick. Tagging me? Why? What post? How does she know about this Instagram account?
I don’t tap on the notification, just watch it slide back up the screen and away. I’m waiting for my heart to calm down and the weird, uneven feeling of approaching tears to leave me. There should be a word for when you feel like crying without crying; like how you can be nauseous but not physically sick.
I used to look at Flick’s Instagram all the time when we were friends, back when I didn’t have an account of my own. She was “low-key annoyed” that I was “too good for Instagram” but she seemed to accept my explanation that I thought it was a waste of time.
Of course I hadn’t added Flick when I’d started my adventurer account after I first arrived in Canada. I haven’t even looked at hers the whole time I’ve been away. How has she found my new account?
I leave the queue and head out the doors back into the car park, where I lean against a railing and open Instagram to go straight to my notifications. I click on her post and it opens, filling my screen. Flick, exactly as I remember her, half smiling at the camera with her arm held up crooked to her forehead. At first I’m disorientated, because there’s a drawing on her arm, the one I did for her so close to the end—my drawing of the phases of the moon. I can hear her voice in my ear as real as if she’d come to stand beside me. “Pey-Pey! It’s amazing!” But how can it still be there, months on? Why hasn’t it washed off by now? And then, almost in the same moment, just as I scroll down to read the accompanying text, I realize.
flickabrick
Finally 18 and got my FIRST TATTOO! It looks incredible, thanks @inkartsurreywest for the ink and @peytontheadventurer for the design. SO happy with it!
I stare at the picture for a long time, taking in her familiar smile that is not quite a smile, the way her eyes are not exactly sad, but not happy, either. She’s wearing a black T-shirt and black skinny jeans just visible at the bottom of the frame, a black baseball cap that I recognize as Eric’s on her head. She looks sober. I hope she is.
I scroll lower to see the replies, which are mostly wishing her happy birthday, telling her the tattoo looks amazing. Someone with a handle I don’t recognize has said, That design is gorgeous!! Flick has replied, I know!! My friend is a literal artist :)
That’s when I start crying. Big, ugly sobbing, right there in the Tim Hortons car park. I drop my phone into my lap and give in to the tears, letting them fall into my hands, wet and hot. My friend is a literal artist. Every time the phrase runs through my head, the tears resurface. That’s how she thinks of me, still? Her friend? This is her way of telling me that? No phone call, no message, just a tag on an Instagram post weeks after she abandoned me.
I get it, though. It’s so Flick. For all I’ve been telling myself that we shared nothing over our year of friendship, I did know her. I can feel that knowing, just looking at her face through the screen. It’s such a weird sensation, like a pull from the past. A tug somewhere inside me, saying, Remember? And I do.
They’re all still there, living their lives, having birthdays, going to college. Maybe I’ve been able to pretend to myself while I’ve been away that that all stopped happening, but it hasn’t. I can’t make the rest of the world stop, no matter where I am, how far I go.
I really feel it then, the fact that I’m on the other side of the world from her, from all of them. And not just them, but my family, who I love and miss and didn’t mean to abandon. My whole life. Is it still there, waiting for me, in a generic town in Surrey? Would I have it back, if I could?
No. I scroll back through her feed, past the multiple photos of her and Eric, the selfies, the group shots—until I get far enough to find myself in the images. Long enough ago that she couldn’t tag me, but there I am. I existed in that life with her. I come across a photo of all of us where I am snug against Travis, smiling giddily out at the camera, his arm around me, a confident grin on his face. Looking at Travis doesn’t give me the same kick of emotion that I get looking at Flick, which makes no sense but also makes all the sense in the world. My hopes had been pinned on Flick, not him. He may have been my romance, but he had never held my heart like she did. There should be a word for friend love. It burns as hard, just in a different way.
“Peyton.” The voice is soft, questioning, and I look up, wiping my eyes. It’s Seva, coffee in hand, concern on his face. “You are okay?” he asks.
I love how he phrases this question. You are okay. “Yes,” I say, smiling, wiping at my face. “I’m okay.”
“I can get Beasey,” he says.
“I’m fine,” I say. “This is an old sad.”
Seva nods, understanding. “Ah,” he says. “The worst kind.” We’re both quiet for a minute. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No,” I say. “It’s enough that you asked.”
BEFORE
My friend is a literal artist
aka
Remember how you did actually like each other, sometimes?
aka
The nice memories hurt the hardest
I wasn’t thrilled about starting year thirteen. As much as the summer had been a bit of a let-down, it was still better than being at college, having to sit in classrooms for most of the day, taking notes, preparing coursework and then doing coursework.
Still, it didn’t take long to find myself settled back into the usual routine. Back to seeing my friends every day, sitting with them in the same spot in the common room, trying to do my reading for English while Flick chattered on happily beside me. The workload seemed to have doubled—I’d kept up four subjects instead of three on my parents’ advice, which I realized after about two days was a mistake—and my time to myself shriveled away. Between the demands of college, my friends, and my boyfriend, I barely had time to do anything on my own except sleep. My studio was practically gathering dust. My sketch pad went unopened for days.
Sometimes, I daydreamed about faking illness for a week so I could just sit alone in the blissful silence of my bedroom and sketch or paint or do literally anything creative. I would tell everyone I was ill, even my friends, even Travis.
But I didn’t. I was too worried about what everyone thought of me. Even after all that time, even through my disillusionment with my friends, there was still a part of me that was worried they’d forget about me if I was out of sight for too long.
Basically, it had been a year, but very little had actually changed. I was still the same neurotic ball of anxiety I’d always been, except instead of worrying about how I could get people to like me, I worried about what I’d inadvertently do to make them stop. People I didn’t even like. It was exhausting.
Casey was still spending most of her time with her girlfriend, so it was usually just me and Flick spending time together with the boys and without. Flick had started talking about getting a tattoo, showing me design after design until she remembered “Hey! You draw!” and asked me to design one for her. The problem was her flightiness; she’d love a design on Monday and hate it by Thursday. She’d be certain she wanted it to involve flowers—a daisy chain round her ankle, a rose on her inside hip—then dismiss flowers as “too girly.”
“You’re impossible,” I said. “Whatever you get, you’ll be bored of it within a month.”
“Ugh, you’re right,” she said, resting her head on her crossed arms. “I’m the worst. You should just not listen to me at all; design something for me that you think is good for me and I’ll get that.”
“Oh, no way,” I said. “I’m not falling for that.”
“Please?” She fixed me with her most beseeching look. “Seriously, what would you choose for me, if you had to?”
I thought about it, giving her a slow once-over. She sat up and squared her shoulders, grinning, lifting her chin and turning her head so she was in profile.
“How about one of those moon-cycle ones?” I said. “You know, like, the phases of the moon? That’s very you. C
hangeable.”
“Show me,” she demanded, shifting closer in her chair. I pulled up the browser on my phone and did a quick search, handing it over so she could see. “Oh, cool,” she said. “Like, on my arm?”
“Sure,” I said.
Flick leaned down to her bag, rooted around and pulled out a black pen. She pushed it toward me, pulled up her sleeve, and rested her arm on the desk between us. “Try it,” she said.
“Right now?” I asked, laughing despite myself.
“Yes! I’ll see how I like it.”
“What if I screw it up?”
“You won’t,” she said. “I trust you.”
I think that might have been the nicest moment of our entire friendship. The two of us together—I don’t know where everyone else was—in the common room, sober and relaxed, not performing for anyone or each other. Her stating so simply that she trusted me, smiling when I touched the pen to her skin and made little hissing noises to imitate an imaginary tattoo needle.
For all the memories that make me sad from our time together—and there are lots—for some reason this is the one that makes me saddest. I don’t know what it is that makes happy memories more painful with hindsight after a relationship breaks down, but it’s real.
That can’t have been long before the end, because Flick still had my design inked on her skin the night everything went so wrong. I remember catching a flash of it when she reached up to fold her hair into a temporary ponytail and her sleeve dropped away to reveal it.
“I love it,” she’d said that day in the common room, looking down at her arm with something like awe. “Pey-Pey, it’s amazing!” She shook her head. “God, you’re so fucking talented.”
“Wear it for a while before you get it for real,” I said, trying to control my beam of pride. “I can top it up for you when it fades.”
We had different classes that afternoon. When the bell rang, she hugged me, still giddy-happy, and we went our separate ways.
NOW
WHISTLER—JASPER
Later, when we cross the border into Alberta—according to the satnav—I make Seva stop the RV so I can say goodbye to British Columbia.
“We’re still in Canada,” Khalil says.
I roll my eyes at him. “Obviously.”
I’d hoped there’d be a Now Leaving British Columbia sign, perhaps with an accompanying Welcome to Alberta! sign, so I could photograph them, but there’s nothing. I’m disappointed, and I say so as everyone spills out around me. Stefan bounces on his feet, smiling; Beasey rolls his neck, closing his eyes.
“We’re on the wrong route for a sign like that,” Seva explains.
“They can’t exactly line the highway with them,” Khalil points out. “That would be weird.”
“Draw one,” Maja suggests. “With all of us.”
I take a whole page and draw the highway running through the middle of it. On one side, I write BRITISH COLUMBIA and add a couple of waterfalls, the gondola at Whistler we couldn’t ride, some mountains. On the other, I write ALBERTA, with lots more mountains. I add cartoons of all seven of us, standing by Justin the RV, looking off in all different directions, like we’re waiting to see what will happen next. At the top of the page, on the BC side, I write NOW LEAVING… and at the bottom, on the other side… NOW ENTERING.
“My ears are not that big,” Stefan says.
“They are gigantic,” Lars says affectionately. “So big. You can see them from space.”
I decide to take it as a compliment that they no longer feel the need to tell me how good my drawings are. A boundary of friendship crossed where things are less grandiose but smaller, quieter; more familiar.
Everyone piles into the RV while I stop outside to take one last look at the view, smiling against the wind, breathing it all in. And then I hear the scratchy clunk of a door closing, and I turn in time to see the RV pulling away from the roadside, away from me.
It takes about four seconds for the RV to stop, the door to swing open, and Khalil’s laughing face to appear. Four seconds. But in those beats I see the RV getting smaller, disappearing into the distance, leaving me behind. I see myself stranded on the side of the road, left. Abandoned. Alone in a foreign country with no bag, no money, no phone. No friends.
I can’t tell you what it does to my body, those four seconds. The panic is like nothing I’ve ever felt, visceral to the point of physicality. I am ice cold and white hot at the same time. My hands burn. I think I let out a whimper.
I stumble toward the RV, willing my legs into motion—they feel wobbly, like they don’t quite belong to me—and step up beside Khalil, who is still grinning, not getting it yet, not seeing in me what they have all just done. “Gotcha,” he starts to say, but he falters midway through and it tails off into a confused question. The boys, who had been laughing, stop, bewildered. Maja’s face falls in understanding as she takes in mine, even as the boys still look baffled.
“We were just joking,” Lars says.
“We wouldn’t actually leave you,” Stefan adds, but it comes out uncertain, like he thought it was so obvious he doesn’t know how to say it properly.
My body is pulsing with the sobs I know I’m not going to be able to contain. I am going to cry beyond all normal crying, and I can’t do it in front of these people, but there’s nowhere to go. I tell my feet to move and manage to make it to the bathroom, swinging myself inside and locking the door. It’s just in time, because the sobs burst out of me, loud and mortifying and uncontrollable. I try to stop myself, crushing my hand against my mouth, squeezing the other into a fist and smacking my leg. Stop, stop, stop.
There’s a voice outside the door. Scottish and male. Worried, insistent. My name, repeated. Apologies. “Please come out?”
I can’t reply, and the voice goes away. I still haven’t gotten control over myself when there’s a different voice at the door, female and German. Calm. “Peyton? The boys have gone. It’s just me.”
I unlock the door and let it fall open to reveal Maja. She’s not frantic with worry, just solid and steady. “I didn’t know they were going to do that,” she says. “I would have told them no. I’m sorry they upset you. They thought it would be funny.”
It would have been funny, that’s the thing. For basically anyone else. It’s just me who’s spoiled the joke, and that’s not their fault. I know that, rationally. But there’s no room for rational in me right now. The residual panic is just too loud.
God, they must all think I’m so pathetic. A pathetic, whiny baby.
“Come outside,” Maja says. I haven’t said a word, and I know it’s weird. “Fresh air will help.”
I leave the bathroom and follow her outside. She sits me down on a patch of grass, pats my shoulder, and then opens an arm to me. I let myself fall into it, the tears I’m still trying to suppress coming out in humiliating little squeaks.
Softly, Maja says, “It’s okay to cry. Don’t try to stop yourself. Just cry.”
“It’s stupid,” I manage.
“It’s not,” she says. “Let it out.”
So I do. I imagine the dam inside me crumbling, the tears spilling. I cry into her shoulder and she hugs me with one arm, not saying a word, just occasionally patting. I don’t know where the boys are but I sense they aren’t far off.
The whole thing is beyond mortifying. But still, when the tears finally stop, I actually feel better. Sated, even. I wipe my eyes. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Maja says again.
“I totally overreacted,” I say. My breath is still coming out scratchy, choked in my throat.
“We all get emotional sometimes,” she says. “Especially if…” She looks at me, and I know she knows. Not the specifics, obviously, but that whatever’s brought me here is the same thing that has just set me off. “If there’s pain,” she finishes.
I nod, and we’re both quiet for a while.
Finally, she says, “It might help you to talk about it.”
I know she’s ri
ght. So I do.
BEFORE
The night happened almost a year to the day after I’d first gone to Flick’s house, which is some bullshit symmetry. It started badly, and got worse.
The plan had been that I’d go to Flick’s earlier to hang out, but I’d had to cancel that bit because I had an essay to write for English that I hadn’t been able to finish on time. She was annoyed and didn’t try to hide it, complaining that I wasn’t there when she needed me, that she had “stuff” she wanted to talk about with me. I knew that “stuff” meant “Eric,” but not in a way that meant anything would ever change, and she just wanted me to nod and make sympathetic noises. Shockingly, I have a life outside of you, I messaged.
Flick:
Bitch.
Flick:
Please come over :(
Me:
I’ll be over later, OK? Promise. Let me work.
She didn’t. Over the next few hours, she messaged me constantly, whining about Eric spending too much time with the boys, how she was lonely on her own, how her friends didn’t care about her, that her hair was too straight, her bum too flat—she knew because Eric complained about it—how he expected more head than she gave, how much did I do it, did I hate it?
Replying or not replying didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the frequency of these messages. Even when I turned my phone around so I wouldn’t see the screen light up, I couldn’t stop myself flipping it over to check.
These are not real problems, I told her, when I’d only written about four paragraphs in two hours and her messages were making my teeth grind with irritation.
Her reply was a four-word sulk: You’re a real problem.
When I got to her house later, bringing with me an appeasing three bottles of wine that would otherwise have been drunk by my parents, she was excited to see me, apologetic about “overloading” me with her “neediness.” For about ten minutes. Until Eric arrived. Then, I was all but forgotten.