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"Do you think we're friends in every universe?"
The question caught Lily off guard. She didn't turn from her book, but she did look at Zari from the corner of her eye. The bubbly girl was standing over her shoulder, disrupting what should have been a quiet study hall. The late afternoon sun cast delicate beams of light through the window, illuminating motes lazily floating through the air. The light seemed to coalesce around Zari's signature pink scarf, giving her a glowing halo. Her eyes shone with her usual optimism. How annoying. How stupidly, naively beautiful. Lily sighed.
How to even begin to answer a question like that? Did Zari understand what she was asking? To consider the fullness of time, the breadth of space, the infinite possibilities of existence... What if there was a world where they were both fish? What if, in another universe, they were rocks? Could rocks even be friends? Why was she like this?
Lily thought back to the day they'd met. In preschool, Lily had been called "shy." By middle school, the wording became "antisocial." When high school inevitably arrived, it was "misanthropic." Lily didn't like people, and people didn't like her. And that was how she liked it. Other people had such stupid, small-minded conversations about stupid, small-minded things. People thought Lily just didn’t like talking, but in reality, she only found small talk to be pointless and banal. She wanted to talk about things that mattered. She wanted to have conversations that meant something.
And then, one day, a new girl enrolled in their school. Despite the scarf wrapped around her hair marking her as being different from everyone around her, Zari was almost instantly popular. Her smile was infectious, her laugh contagious. Before long, the whole school had Zari fever. It made Lily sick.
She didn’t understand how someone could be friends with everyone. Did she not have standards? Lily wrote her off as an airhead, a people pleaser. She avoided contact for as long as possible. Somehow, though, Zari found her.
It was late one afternoon, on a day much like today. Lily had been sitting by herself on the curb next to the school’s rear parking lot. During her free period, Lily would come out here to be alone. To think. To breathe. The last thing she expected was to be interrupted, when she heard a voice:
“Do you ever wonder how many times you’ve seen the same bird?”
Lily looked up. Sure enough, there was Zari, wearing her signature pink scarf and her signature smile.
“I can’t tell them apart,” she continued, “but they definitely live around here. Do you think they can tell us apart?”
“Well… birds have really good eyesight,” Lily said before she could stop herself. Why was she talking? It was almost as if she was compelled. “And some of them have really good memory. Crows can recognize a person even years later.”
“Wow!” Zari replied. “I’m sorry, I’ve never heard you talk before. You have a really pretty voice!”
Lily looked away, blushing. How was this happening? Overhead, in a nearby tree, a bird chirped, tucking the stalk of a blooming flower into its nest.
“I’ve heard that bats have names for each other,” the pink-scarfed girl continued, oblivious. “Do you think they have names for other things, too? Do you think they name their favorite trees? Or people’s pets that they see?”
“That’s… a good question,” Lily replied thoughtfully. “I didn’t know that about bats.”
The conversation carried on until both of them had lost track of time. Lily, who hated conversations, who should have been irritated at having her space disturbed, instead found herself drawn in by Zari’s charm. Was it psychological manipulation? Did she have some trick to capture people’s attention? Or was it really just her sincerity that drew people in?
Ever since then, Lily had looked forward to the moments they shared. Zari had always had many friends, but Lily only had one, and that was enough for her. Zari was more than enough for her.
Would they be friends in every universe? Lily smiled. Even if she didn’t want to admit it, she would never want to live in a universe where they weren’t. “Maybe,” she replied.