The Happiest Girl in the World by Alena Dillon

Author:Alena Dillon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Published: 2021-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

January 2017

Can we meet? Coffee or something?

My phone buzzed with Lucy’s text an entire year after we’d last spoken. I was sure it was a mistake. She must have sent it to the wrong person, or the message had gotten clogged in cyberspace back when we were friends and was just now spat out. I stared at it, debating whether to respond and open myself up to more rejection or to accept that it was a technological error, that she didn’t really want to see me.

Hope, once again, won out.

That’d be great, I typed. And then added, Unless this went to the wrong person? That’d make for an awkward Starbucks moment, and stuck a winky face as a sloppy mask over my discomfort.

There’s only one you, she wrote back. Her comment might have been hostile, but my mind responded with the same words, and they were instilled with longing.

IF LUCY’S GAZE hadn’t connected with mine, I might not have recognized her. It was as if a Snapchat filter—one of the realistic, foreboding kinds—projected a universe in which Lucy had never joined Elite Gymnastics. I too had gained weight in my time off, but hers was a more striking transformation. Her cheeks swallowed her eyes in the way they used to only when she grinned and her arms were idle battle ropes. She’d probably gained only twenty or thirty pounds, so maybe it was just the immediate juxtaposition, because I hadn’t seen an image of her since last year. Or maybe my perspective was the skewed filter, imposing gymnast bodies onto the perfectly healthy.

Her blended coffee drink was crowned with whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate. That amount of calories would have sustained the old Lucy for an entire day.

By the time I returned with a green tea, she was already more recognizable. Her blaze of hair, the smattering of her freckles. Her face didn’t seem quite as puffy as when I’d first arrived. This was Lucy, whose even breathing I’d listened to on nights I couldn’t sleep, who didn’t require names in a story to understand exactly who I was talking about, who’d drained my blisters when I was too tired and sore to hunch over my own feet. But as I settled into the seat opposite her, my familiarity was once again knocked off-balance by black script tattooed across her forearm. It said, “Still I rise.”

I didn’t know if it was that sentiment or the buzz of being in proximity to my friend again, but all at once I felt unsettled, like I was picking myself up from the dirt.

“So good to see you,” I said.

“I saw on Instagram that you have a boyfriend,” Lucy said. She smiled through what looked to be a great deal of pain.

I wished the tea had been cool enough to drink so I could occupy myself with sipping. Instead I blew through the slit in the plastic top, causing it to whistle.

“We broke up.”

“Did you have sex?”

A flush worked up from my chest.

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