by Ciara Smyth
“That’s lovely,” I said. “What time is he coming?”
“Soon. I think. How are you? What would you like to talk about?”
How are you? What would you like to talk about? Mum’s script. Phrases form on her lips, things she’s said a thousand times before. I imagine her saying the same things to her clients. Sometimes when I arrive at her door she seems to think I’m one of them. Sometimes I go along with that too.
I spilled. I had so much swirling around my head, and it wasn’t like I had anyone else to tell. I’d thought about calling Izzy. Not seriously thought about it, just felt annoyed with her that I couldn’t tell her everything about Ruby and find out what she thought. If she hadn’t messed up our friendship with her lies and betrayal, I could be dissecting it all with her right now. I didn’t choose the dramatic loner life, it chose me.
Still, I had Mum, and it was easier to tell her things now that I would have never told her before. Every cloud and all that guff. I’d much rather she was well and trying to pry information about my life out of me like everyone else’s mother, of course. It had taken me weeks to admit to her that Hannah and I had started seeing each other. I remember her sitting me down very seriously to ask if something was going on with us. When I told her that we were going out now, she cried. Happy tears. She said she’d always hoped we’d finally see how perfect we were for each other and she said something silly about our future wedding. I had rolled my eyes and said we weren’t getting married, for God’s sake. I was pleased, really, but I was fourteen and I couldn’t say that out loud.
“I met a girl.” I blew on my tea to cool it down and Mum copied me. “I think she likes me.”
Mum put her hand on mine and squeezed. “That’s great,” she said.
“The thing is, liking her is kind of the problem.”
Mum looked like she was not quite following my train of thought. But who would? That statement was objectively nonsensical. Still, I don’t like to let awareness of my own absurdity get in the way of expressing it. Mum frowned, like she was trying to concentrate. You don’t lose your intelligence when you have dementia, but it can be harder to express it in the way you’re used to. At least that’s what the doctor said. I continued anyway.
“She thinks that if we both know when it’s ending, no one can get hurt.” I ran my finger around the rim of the teacup, not really expecting a response. “That was the worst thing about Hannah dumping me, Mum. I never saw it coming. Do you think this could work or is it a terrible idea?”
I wasn’t really expecting a response, but Mum stroked my cheek with her hand.
“You have to do what makes you happy, Claire,” she said. “You always look so sad.”
Tears sprang into my eyes and I blinked fast. My aunt Claire isn’t my mum’s biological sister. No worries for her about inheriting the dementia. She doesn’t visit much and I hate her for it, but in a way, I’m glad that Mum thinks I’m her. At least she doesn’t know how many people have left her behind. She can’t miss me; she doesn’t know who I am. But she might miss Claire if she didn’t come around.
This way at least I can make her happy.
9.
So, the breakup. Obviously, you want to know. The way you want to gawk at any terrible accident to see where the blood and guts are spilling out of. After visiting Mum I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I thought about it the whole walk home, so when I looked up and found myself back in my bedroom, I didn’t really remember getting there. I do my best not to dwell on it anymore. See, for months after it happened I played it over and over in my head so many times, like I was a camera operator looking down on the whole sorry cliché, cringing for the girl in the café who had no idea what was coming. Let’s look at it again, shall we?
There I am, sitting across the table from Hannah. It’s a cute café with gingham tablecloths and twee pictures on the wall that say things like Baking: where the fondant stop. All I’m thinking about is how pretty she is. I don’t realize she’s about to ruin my life. I’m noticing the adorable way her glasses sit on her round cheeks so that when she talks they kind of bounce up and down. I totally miss the tone of the conversation. I’m also really into the caramel cake I’ve just stuck a fork into.
“You’re my favorite person, Saoirse. You’re so generous and funny and sweet and I love those things about you, but . . . ,” Hannah says, and I smile. How did I miss it? This is the start of every breakup scene in history.
“I love you too.” I stand up and lean across the table to kiss her. In a coffee shop. This is not something I would have done two years ago when I was a baby gay who thought everyone was looking at me.
She turns her head so my lips graze her cheek, leaving a smear of peppermint lip balm on her skin. That’s when the word but travels to me from ten seconds ago and registers in my brain.
I sit back down. At least there’s that—that the rest of the breakup doesn’t happen with me in a half-hovering position, my butt sticking out in the air. My face freezes, blank, empty. But as the camera zooms in, you can see a hint of fear.
Our eyes meet. When you’re with someone there’s a secret kind of look that passes between you that you take for granted. Something in their eyes that tells you that they are home for you.
It wasn’t there anymore.
Later I’d wonder if it had been gone for weeks or months and I hadn’t noticed.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
I’d never been broken up with before, but the scene was so familiar that I knew my lines. Do scenes like this happen so often in real life that they end up in the movies, or are the movies giving us a convenient script for inconvenient conversations?
“I’m sorry.” Her chin trembles. “I don’t want to be in a relationship with you anymore.”
The fact that she’s close to crying freaks me out more than anything. You might think that’s totally normal behavior, but Hannah is levelheaded and logical to the point of coming across kind of cold if you don’t know her. She isn’t often overcome by emotion. Or at least she doesn’t express it the same way as most people.
If you look close now you will see a minute shift in my expression from blankness to utter devastation. It’s all in the eyes. That’s the moment when everything I’d planned went up in smoke. Back then I really, truly bought into the dream that we would be the one in a million first love that lasts forever.
“But why?”
This question makes me cringe. But at the time I had to ask. I loved her so much and I was so happy I couldn’t understand what she meant. Even now when I think about it I have to shield myself from the answer.
“I love you. But I’m not in love with you.”
It’s such a cliché I didn’t even really know what it meant. How was in love different from love?
“I want us to still be friends, but I understand it might take some time.”
This was my big chance to play it cool and salvage some dignity.
“But I love you,” I whined instead. “I think you’re the best person I’ve literally ever met and I’m going to die if you leave me.”
Don’t say a word. I already know.
“Saoirse,” she said, and she squeezed my hand on the table. It felt familiar and alien at the same time. “You’ll be OK. I promise.”
“Why now? What changed?”
This was a mistake. Hannah is unflinchingly honest. This is when I learned not to ask a question you might not really want the answer to.
“I don’t know what changed. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I was hoping that a time might come where things in your life would be calmer. I didn’t want to hurt you when things were already so bad, but it’s starting to feel like I’m lying to you and I don’t want to do that.”
The things in my life she’s talking about are my mum having to go into a home, my dad having an affair, and the icing on the cake of shit: Surprise! You might end up with dementia too. A thought enters my mind, and once it does, it stays lodged there.
This is exactly why she’s breaking up with me. There is no future with me. If my dad had known my mum might end up like she has, I’m certain he would have bolted early too. It must mean she never really loved me, like Dad must never have really loved Mum. It’s the end of the world. It’s a pain I can physically feel.
Little old ladies at the next table lean conspicuously in our direction. Hannah stands and takes a tenner out of her purse, then puts it on the table. I am confused for a moment until I realize she is paying for the cake.
“You’re my best friend,” she says, looking at her feet. “I think we can still have that. If you want to.”
I look at her. She’s biting her lip. I don’t know what to say. Whatever she says about wanting to be friends, it’s still something she’s willing to risk giving up to get out of our relationship.
She leaves the coffee shop. My eyes follow her involuntarily. I let my head fall into my hands, but my elbow slips and I accidentally flip the plate with the cake on it over the table, where it clatters against the floor, rattling the way a penny does when you spin it and it slowly stops. The cake slides across the café, leaving a long streak of caramel frosting on the tiles like a skidmark.
One of the little old ladies reaches out and pats me on the knee.
“It gets better, dear.”
Later I found out Izzy had known for ages. Naturally, because life is just one humiliation after another, she didn’t tell me that until I’d spent a month talking about it nonstop. Dissecting every tiny moment. Wondering out loud if there was some way Hannah would change her mind. Love didn’t just disappear, did it? Mine didn’t. It wasn’t some light I could switch on and off. It was something that had grown inside me, its roots tangled around all the organs of my body. I needed it to live. For a long time, I hoped. Eventually, I stopped. Hoping, I mean. I didn’t like to think about whether or not I could ever stop loving Hannah. I learned not to examine those feelings. Which is why I didn’t ever want to see her again. I had to pretend she didn’t exist. Izzy too. They were too inextricably linked.
People say you can’t change the past, but it isn’t true.
Dad had put Mum in a home. He promised he would never do that. He promised he would always take care of her. But he didn’t, and that changed everything that had gone before, making old memories bitter instead of sweet. It was the same for me and Hannah. Everything we once had was tainted. It was all rotten.
Lying back on my bed, staring at the roof, unable to stop beating myself up for being so naive and stupid, I realized what I needed were new rules. I may have gently exploited the loophole in my relationship rule—oh, and the bit about not kissing actual lesbians or bi girls because it leads to loopholes, obviously—but that’s why I needed a safety net. A way of protecting myself from getting my heart splattered again. If any of these things happened it would be time to pull the plug on this little experiment with Ruby. I took out my phone and made a note of the five horsemen of the apocalypse: the deal breakers, the harbingers of doom.
No acting like a sap. So if I catch myself gazing longingly and thinking things like she’s the most beautiful girl in the world, I’m in trouble.
No we-ing. As in we love this, we are cat people, we are going to live happily ever after.
No daydreaming. Fantasies about a future we’re not going to have is a major red flag.
Absolutely no serious conversations. That means conversations about Mum or not wanting to go to Oxford or my complicated feeeelings about things like Dad or the wedding.
No fighting and especially no making up. Fighting about stuff implies you have some kind of investment. Making up after a fight is protecting that investment.
I vowed to myself that I would not break any of these sacred edicts. No excuses, no exceptions.
I know, I know, I might as well be in a horror movie saying “I’ll be right back.”
10.
The Ferris wheel on the promenade loomed overhead, and trilling bells merged with the pop songs playing on each ride. I shifted from one foot to the other, waiting on Ruby, wondering if I should buy us both tickets or if we were meant to split it. Hannah and I tended to just work off who had the best cash flow in the moment. How did dating work when you hadn’t known the person practically your whole life? No one prepared me for this. I bought the tickets just so I could stop wondering about who was supposed to buy the tickets.
I spotted Ruby long before she saw me. She was wearing a pair of cropped colorful harem pants with a blue cropped tank top that had embroidery around the neckline, and she’d paired this ensemble with tan ankle boots. An inch of squishy stomach peeked out and she looked cute and bohemian and I wanted to run up and kiss her. I didn’t. I ducked out of sight before she could see me, to avoid the awkward walk where you see each other but you’re too far apart to wave or say hello. I waited until she approached the kiosk, then snuck up and tapped her on the shoulder. She started but smiled when she saw me.
“Hi.” She waved even though she was a foot away from me.
“Hi.” I waved back. “Is this weird?”
“A little.” She nodded. “But we’ll get over it.”
I snuck a glance at her a couple of times as we made our way through the throng at the entrance, which made me bump into the same middle-aged man twice. For the first time in my life, I had no idea what to say. We queued for drinks and I racked my brain for conversation starters but came up empty. I bought a half liter of Coke, because it was boiling out, and I gulped most of it down in one go. The heat wave hadn’t abated, even though historically, it usually ended as soon as the exam season was over.
Sipping on the rest of the Coke felt like a shield from having nothing to say. I’d never needed to make first-date conversation before. Hannah and I had been best friends for ten years before we went on a “date.” Our friendship and our relationship were so blurry and melted together. Another reason why we could never have been friends after. How would us going to the cinema as friends have felt any different than going as girlfriends?
Then, like she was an evil spirit in a horror film, thinking about Hannah summoned her into existence. Her glossy black hair next to Izzy’s blonde curls bobbed toward us, through a sea of people, like if Jaws was your ex-girlfriend.
I felt my heart thud against my chest. It was trying to escape. I looked frantically around at where we could go that I wouldn’t bump into her. To the left of us, a queue for candy floss. Behind us was the exit and ahead was the ghost train—and to the right, the Ferris wheel.
Hannah was getting closer and even though there were a ton of people between us there was no way she wouldn’t spot me. I swear there’s something in your body that just changes when you know someone that well. They can’t sneak up on you. Somehow out of the corner of your eye you’ll see a familiar gesture, catch a word over the noise, and you’ll know before you even see them that they’re there.
I tapped Ruby’s shoulder. “Ferris wheel?”
“Definitely,” she said, and rubbed her hands together. “I’ve never actually been on one before.”
Ferris wheels are interminably boring. Hannah would never go on one. She was terrified because you weren’t strapped in by anything. She always said there was nothing to stop you from just opening the little door and walking right out. I never bothered to point out that, barring evil spirit possession, her body wasn’t simply going to betray her by deciding to leave of its own accord. I actually would have preferred the ghost train, but it was riskier. Hannah and Izzy might go on it too, and getting stuck with them in the carriage behind us would be horrendous. In fact, a whole ex-girlfriend-themed ghost train sounded genuinely terrifying. You’d get in and instead of a mummy mannequin covered in toilet roll popping out, it’s her, and you look down and you’re wearing a baggy old jumper with a stain on the front. You turn the corner and you find yourself being forced to scroll through her Instagram and there are replies from a girl with tattoos and she looks like the celebrity your ex fancies most
. Right at the end, they play a video on a loop that’s just screenshots of all the pathetic texts you sent when you were too heartbroken to have any dignity.
Of course, the question is why you’d pay money for that kind of trauma when life will serve it up to you free of charge.
“How have you never been on a Ferris wheel?” I asked, distracted and glancing over my shoulder. Not six feet away, Izzy and Hannah were queuing at the candy floss stand. Definitely Izzy’s choice; she was the one with a sweet tooth. If I turned back now there was no way they wouldn’t see me. I whipped my head round again and pretended I’d heard everything Ruby had said.
“—didn’t really go to places like funfairs and the beach when I was growing up.”
I imagined they went on more exciting trips to Monaco or Aspen or wherever it was that rich people took their kids on holidays.
“Well, you’re just going to have to slum it for today,” I joked.
“That’s not what I meant—”
“I’m only messing with you,” I said, nudging her.
I felt the faint call of the half liter fizzy drink I’d downed telling me I’d need to find a bathroom as soon as we got off this ride. I wrinkled my nose at the thought of a carnival bathroom in the middle of the baking afternoon. It could wait until the coast was clear.
We squeezed into one side of the cart beside each other and somehow, in spite of the fact that we’d previously achieved groping level two, I felt a silly thrill at having my leg touching hers. Our hands rested on our respective thighs, but they grazed each other in a way that made me super aware of having arms. What had I done with them my whole life up to now? Were my arms weird when I was with Hannah too? I couldn’t remember.
The Ferris wheel cranked along, letting other couples embark. Ruby breathed in the popcorn-scented air and smiled at me.
“This was a good idea. Definitely the kind of thing you’d find in a falling in love montage. We’ll have to do the roller coaster too, and get our pictures. And possibly win each other a stuffed toy.”